My incredible first year at Cincinnati Law: Journey, reflections and highlights

Dear UC Law Community

With my first year as Dean of this wonderful institution mostly behind me, and in the midst of a rejuvenating summer season, I thought it was an excellent time to look back and reflect on what we have achieved over the past year, and what remains to be done.

My first reaction in so doing is one of gratitude and humility.  I inherited a collegial and incredibly accomplished faculty, a dedicated staff, and a leadership team that is truly top notch.  I moved into a new building following the strong and effective leadership of Verna Williams, and the stabilizing influence of Dean Whiteman in the interim role following her departure and preceding my assumption of the role.  Given this, I feel as if it was almost inevitable that the year would be successful, as it certainly was, in so many ways.

First, as a community, we undertook a SWOT analysis last August to identify our strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities we could take advantage of and the threats we faced.  The meeting was extraordinarily well attended, with broad engagement and a rich discussion as a result.  Following careful review of the results and reflection on them, I met extensively with stakeholders both here at the College as well as across the city of Cincinnati, in law firms, public interest offices, bar association meetings, and Fortune 500 companies. I also made sure to reach out to and hear from student leaders and general members of the student body, through lunches with groups of 1L’s in the fall and 3L’s in the spring, monthly meetings with our Student Bar Association and Student Legal Education Committee, and “drop-ins with the Dean” several times each semester, where I would meet interested students in our lovely atrium to talk about whatever was on their minds. My aim was to hear from as many internal and external voices as possible as we plotted an ambitious path forward.  Ultimately, out of these meetings and the valuable discussions generated therein, we settled upon five core strategic priorities for our College.

These are:  

• student success,
• experiential learning,
• investing in our discrete centers of excellence,
• deepening our commitment to international and comparative law, and
• broadening our reach beyond the JD program.

We have shared that list broadly, noted its deep resonance with the University’s Next Lives Here strategic direction, and have already this year taken significant steps towards implementation. With the help of a digital marketing firm, we are preparing a microsite that will house key information related to the priorities, and the activities we are undertaking in connection with them in a manner that we believe will prove appealing to prospective and current students, as well as alums and other supporters.  For now, I summarize some of what we have done below, and what we intend to do next.

In the all-important area of student success, our faculty has approved in principle a series of proposals that will ultimately result in innovative and transformational changes to our curriculum, so that, once implemented, our College will sit at the cutting edge of legal pedagogy.  As part of this change, over the coming year, faculty working groups will think creatively about ways to introduce foundation skills training as early as the first year and to introduce more rigor into our writing program. We also hope to find ways to allow students to take some elective courses as early as the first year, to allow them to explore areas of interest earlier in their law school journey. It is our expectation that we will be able to implement some or all of these changes by the 2025-26 academic year. I am deeply grateful to the Ad Hoc Committee for Curricular Change for the countless hours it spent developing these truly incredible proposals, which will prepare our students even better for the practice of law upon their graduation.

This is not the only area in which we have made advancements in student success. Members of our leadership team have created a pre-orientation program for select students who apply to it, to prepare them for law school even before orientation has begun. We have changed our academic rules to focus on advising and support to students who struggle academically after their first semester in law school.  In the area of admissions and financial aid, we have initiated a data driven effort to attract and offer aid to those students most likely to succeed in law school rather than those with the highest standardized test scores.  Finally, to create a better sense of wellness and belonging among our student body, we have hired a part-time embedded counselor, created and staffed the position of Assistant Dean of Inclusive Excellence and Belonging, and initiated a comprehensive wellness program. That our bar passage rates and our employment rates have been overall on the rise over the past several years, including this past year, is a testament both to our commitment and the success of these efforts.

Beyond student success, we have made much progress advancing the strategic priority of deepening our commitment to international and comparative law and legal programming.  Specifically, over the past year we have completed two partnerships with two major universities in Europe and Latin America, respectively, and expect this to result in various forms of collaboration, including faculty visits, study abroad opportunities, and LLM student enrollment.  We have also initiated a campaign to attract students from the Middle East and North Africa region to our law school through an Arabic language information session and visits to various embassies and cultural attaches in Washington, DC. Finally, we have revitalized the International Advisory Council, which advises me on the strategic direction of the College in relation to international and comparative matters.

Finally, our work in expanding access to legal education outside of the JD has been advancing aggressively as well.  The first students in our online, asynchronous Master of Legal Studies (MLS) program graduated in August of last year, four days after I began my Deanship.  The program has proven wildly successful for its participants, who are generally working professionals seeking access to legal education to advance their professional ambitions within their own law-adjacent fields, such as health care compliance, corporate compliance, and amateur sports.  Our goal has been to increase enrollment by 50% each year. We met that goal last year, and have already met it for next fall, months before classes begin. Our faculty have this year approved four new concentrations in the program, as well as four stand alone certificates that can be taken alongside or in lieu of a full MLS degree.  We believe that these changes will help us reach deeper into segments of the business and nonprofit community that remain relatively unexplored.

And as I often say on LinkedIn, we have only just gotten started!  There is so much more work to do to move all our priorities forward.  We have already begun laying the groundwork for next year in some important ways. Hence, for example, we have recently undertaken a series of very important hires, all related to one or more of our strategic priorities.  Heather Crabbe has joined us to run our Center for Professional Development, following years of experience in academic leadership at the law school and university levels. Under her leadership, I am sure that our school will remain at the top of Ohio law schools in the percentage of graduates with high quality employment.  Neil Taylor (JD ’91) has joined us to serve as the first full-time director of the Corporate Law Center. Neil has spent decades in the business and legal communities, serving in every conceivable position from law firm associate to COO of Infinite Foods, one of South Africa’s largest companies.  I am delighted he will be returning to his alma mater in order to revitalize the Corporate Law Center and reengage it with the community, thereby strengthening our capacities in corporate law and providing our students with vital experiential opportunities in the space that are rare to find within most U.S. law schools.  Finally, Julie Leftwich (JD ’99) is leaving her decades long leadership of the Immigration and Refugee Law Center, which she built from scratch into one of the largest nonprofits in all of Ohio serving the legal needs of immigrants and refugees. She will be building out our capacities in international peace and security, and creating valuable experiential opportunities in the international space to complement the incredible work of our storied Urban Morgan Institute.

Building on international programming, we hope to complete another partnership this year with a non-U.S. law school, and to finalize approval of an SJD program, which will enable aspiring legal academics from abroad to earn their terminal degree here at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.  Over time, this will create further opportunities to develop deeper relationships with law schools across the world.

There are further areas to consider, and I hope to share more initiatives and ideas as we move forward. I did, however, want to point to one area in which I think there is considerable need for investment.   From my meetings with legal professionals at law firms, corporations, and public interest organizations across the city, there is a clear view that law schools in general need to do a much better job developing core professionalism and leadership skills in our students.  We have done wonderful work in teaching students how to read and analyze legal material and frame and evaluate arguments, and we have made significant strides teaching basic experiential skills, from oral advocacy to contract drafting to negotiations and beyond.  A third set of essential skills lies in the area of professionalism.  We have heard from legal employers and seen ourselves that for lawyers to be the leaders we need, attention must be given to matters such as courage, clarity, time management, self-regulation, communications with clients, superiors and direct reports, managing others, inviting and giving feedback, and a host of related skills that will allow UC Law graduates to excel from day one.   This set of skills, alongside the experiential and analytical ones, come together to create the professional identity of attorneys.  Stated candidly and directly, we need to invest further in this space if we are truly committed to the success of our students as a strategic priority.  Indeed, such an investment would directly help us achieve our historic mission of educating and inspiring leaders who pursue justice and advance the role of law in society.  There are of course many possible approaches to make this professionalism and leadership investment, and I look forward to working with my stellar leadership team on ways to move forward.

I thank you all for your commitment to and support of our College.  As I hope these few words demonstrate, we believe we are on the cusp of transformational change.  It will be an exciting journey, and I look forward to being on it alongside you.   

Sincerely,

Haider Ala Hamoudi, Dean and Nippert Professor of Law

Dean Hamoudi photo: Andrew Higley; additional photos: Joseph Fuqua II