Resource Highlight: New Book Related to Professional Identify

Edwin Scott Fruehwald recently self-published a new book related to professional identity titled, “Developing Your Personal Identity: Creating Your Inner Lawyer.”  Here is the description from Amazon.com about the book:

Who will I be as a lawyer? This is the most important question any law student can ask. Yet, in traditional legal education, this question rarely comes up. The purpose of this book is to change this. Professional identity is a lawyer’s personal legal morality, values, decision-making process, and self-consciousness in relation to the practices of the legal profession (legal culture). It provides the framework that a lawyer uses to make all a lawyer’s decisions. 

This book takes a variety of approaches to help you develop your professional identity. Chapter One asks you to take a close look at yourself by asking questions about your childhood, your college years, and who you are today. It is important to know who you are before you can fit into a profession. Chapters Two (Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner), Six (Overcoming Cognitive Biases), and Seven (Attorney Well-Being) give you the tools you will need to develop your professional identity. Chapter Two introduces you to “practical wisdom,” an important approach to understanding and solving ethical problems. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with professional identity within certain topics–the attorney-client relationship, the lawyer and society, and attorney advertising and solicitation of clients. Chapter Eight presents the legal profession’s and society’s views on lawyers and the legal profession. Chapter Nine focuses on your role as a lawyer. It asks you what area of law you want to practice, how you will deal with clients, your place in the legal profession, standards of civility in the legal profession, and working with subordinates. Finally, Chapter Ten contains a variety of extended problems to help you further develop your professional identity.

Chapter 3 of the book (available on SSRN) is titled, “The Attorney-Client Relationship,” a topic that Regent Law Associate Dean Ben Madison addressed in his blog post, “Hindsight is 20/20: Don't Accidentally Create an Attorney-Client Relationship.”

More by Associate Dean Ben Madison and Center Director L.O. Natt Gantt:

• Teaching Knowledge, Skills, and Values of Professional Identity Formation
• The Emperor Has No Clothes, But Does Anyone Really Care? How Law Schools are Failing to Develop Students' Professional Identity and Practical Judgment