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Get ready with the LEGO pieces. Builders build a whatchamacallit; communicators describe how it was built; and replicators build a whatchamacallit identical to the first—without looking at the first. Now get set—and go.

And did they ever. By the time the law students were finished, at least one of the whatchamacallit replicates was perfect, and the others were pretty darn close. In other words, all involved had a ball as they aced the challenge to work well in teams.

Designed to provide much more than fun, that exercise was part of the "Lawyer as Problem Solver" conference, a first-time, all-day forum that is mandatory for first-year Northwestern Law students.

The latest manifestation of the Law School's determination to recruit and train students with excellent communication and problem-solving skills, the conference took place on January 25, 2002, at the Westin Hotel in downtown Chicago. The 215 students moved from room to room, through two tracks of classes that stressed communication, creativity and collaboration - skills critical to success in the changing worlds of law and business.

Besides building whatchamacallits, they wrote comic strips, bid against each other for a $20 bill, negotiated over a chocolate bar, dealt with unexpected confrontation, discovered their particular negotiating types and engaged in brain-teasing exercises.

All of the exercises were designed to illustrate that a great lawyer is a creative lawyer," said Lynn Cohn (right), one of the conference's main organizers and director of the Program on Negotiation and Mediation at the Law School.

That point was brought home eloquently by the conference's two main speakers: Judge Ann Claire Williams, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Pamela B. Strobel, chief executive officer of Exelon Energy Delivery and chairman of ComEd.

In her speech, Judge Williams (below) offered a captivating sketch of her career, illustrating how her problem-solving abilities ultimately led to her appointment to the Seventh Circuit. She was the first African American woman appointed to the federal district court in Illinois and in the Seventh Circuit.

Though identifying and analyzing problems is a necessary focus of law school, Strobel said, those skills will take a lawyer only so far.

"There are a number of lawyers who have outstanding analytical and intellectual abilities but who have not yet learned to say these are your options," Strobel said. "I don't need to hear that the contract wasn't written well. I need to hear that while we have issues, this is how we need to move forward."

She urged the first-years to stay plugged into the larger issues of the moment, especially to read daily newspapers, suggesting that the ill-informed would not last long in a job interview with her. Learning how to communicate issues, even the most complex, quickly—but with depth—she said also is critical to success in today's fast-paced business world. Only half teasing, she challenged the students to try to describe Enron's collapse—quickly and with depth—at the reception that followed.

"Such communication skills are at the heart of the law school's strategic plan," said David E. Van Zandt, dean of the Law School. "We start off with an unparalleled interviewing program to recruit students who can collaborate and think on their feet, and the conference is an extension of continuing efforts to train our students to compete in the changing worlds of business and law."

"These wonderful speakers gave our first years a hint of the diverse careers that are open to them and the excellent communication skills that will be expected from them," said Van Zandt.

"All of our graduates will face far different realities in the worlds of business and law than they would have just 10 years ago, and most of them will pursue multi-job careers. Our job is to enhance their abilities to compete no matter what they do."

Van Zandt hopes to make the conference, which was sponsored by Mayer Brown & Platt and Latham & Watkins, an annual event. So do the conference's main organizers. They include Cohn; Theresa Cropper, assistant dean for student affairs; Judith Rosenbaum, Clifford Zimmerman and Cheryl Graves, clinical associate professors; and Cynthia Wilson, senior lecturer and public interest advisor in Career Strategy.

The organizers designed one track of the conference to cover conflict management, team building, negotiation and creative problem solving. The other track covered interviewing, counseling, ethics and written communication skills.

In one of the popular breakout sessions, for example, students sat in a circle, trying to determine whether to represent the fictional Sylvia Lopez, first interviewing "her," going over the legal options and ethical landmines of her case and deciding how to communicate the options with her.

But it was the following games with the bright-colored LEGOs and crayons that signaled serious play. One set of LEGO players filled up a third-floor lobby as others spilled out into a hallway, with the communicators running to and from the original whatchamacallits to the replicates, determined to meet their architectural challenges.

And in a nearby room everyone, crayons in hand, gathered in small groups to plan story lines for comic strips. Each student had to draw one frame of their group's comic strip without talking to each other or looking at the other drawings; and then each designated narrator had to tell his or her group's story as they held up the frames of the comic strips. Oops! The discrepancies in the comic strips, such as when the protagonist was female in one frame and male in another, brought home the importance of planning and listening.

"The interactive sessions were great," said first-year student Tamika Cushenberry. "We got to apply the skills that we talked about earlier - listening, communicating and team building."

She and her classmates will apply those lessons again and again during the course of their education at the Law School- and throughout their careers.

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