The Complete Advocate: A Practice File for Representing Clients from Beginning to End

The Complete Advocate: A Practice File for Representing Clients from Beginning to End can be thought of as a start-to-finish approach to representing a client―a realistic way for a student to be oriented into the administration of a case from the preliminary stages until the very end. The book is applicable to many contexts and provides professors with a variety of options in designing their curricula.

The book is ideal for skills courses―first-year writing and research and advocacy, trial and appellate advocacy, drafting, interviewing, negotiation and settlement―as well as for trial and appellate advocacy competitions―as all of the necessary materials and answers are provided.

The subject matter of The Complete Advocate also makes it useful as a supplementary text for doctrinal courses, such as civil rights/discrimination, employment law, elder law, professional responsibility, administrative law, etc., insofar as a professor of those courses would like to add a practical component to the syllabus―using the text as an example of how a case might unfold in the doctrinal area being taught.

Finally, the text lends itself to being taught by a group of colleagues in several classes, so different professors teaching trial advocacy, legal drafting, and settlement/negotiation might all co-teach the text as to their dimensions, and provide useful exchanges of information for the purposes of developing the individual classes. That is, the events of an attempted settlement in one section could affect the subsequent trial efforts in another, which could affect any ultimate settlement achieved in a third. This allows for a lively dynamic across the curriculum.

A "Course Adoption Grid" illustrating which assignments can be used for which courses is included in the Teacher's Manual. The Teacher's Manual also helps guide the professor in how to teach as much of the process as desired, focusing on several skills or merely one.

A. G. Harmon is Associate Dean of Bench and Bar Programs and Clinical Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.