The Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning has approved to allocate HK$459,250 for Ms. Queenie Lai’s project proposal “Standardized Clients in Professional Legal Education: Training Law Students to be Effective Corporate Legal Practitioners”. The aim of this project is to introduce Standardized Clients to Postgraduate Certificate in Laws Corporate Finance course and assess its impact on student learning and development.

Standardized clients are lay people who are trained to act as if they are law firm clients for the purposes of teaching and learning. This methodology allows students to have valuable interaction with trained clients in a powerful simulation. Students could work on a range of client-facing skills that would be crucial to their success as future legal practitioners.

Students would start envisaging themselves as legal practitioners and think of commercially practicable solutions and how best to meet client expectations. The aim is to train students to be effective corporate legal practitioners who are not just technically competent, but commercially aware, who can relate to clients and – above all – who can contextualize their advice.