Core Competencies for Entry-Level Lawyers? Send Us Yours

Increasingly, law firms, corporate employers, public interest organizations, government entities, and other organizations that employ lawyers are relying on core competencies when hiring, assessing, and promoting new lawyers.

We want to better understand how the legal profession defines entry-level core competencies, so we are compiling a matrix of measurement rubrics and tools that employers use to hire, assess, and promote new lawyers. By collecting, assimilating, and reporting on the competencies used by a broad sample of employers, we believe we can advance the goal of training new lawyers to the highest standards of competence and professionalism.

Do you and your organization use core competencies for entry-level lawyers? Are you willing to share them? Please send me an email: agerkman@du.edu.

Any report or dissemination of the results will be confidential with respect to the identity of the employer and organization. And, of course, we will provide you with the report once completed.

Speaking of core competencies, Neil Hamilton, Director of the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, just posted an interesting working paper: Law-Firm Competency Models and Student Professional Success: Building on a Foundation of Professional Formation/Professionalism.