Developing Lawyers: the East Bay Community Law Center’s Impact on Law Students’ Professional Identity Formation

I was recently at a conference of lawyers where we were asked to reflect on how we developed our professional identity. Not easily defined, professional identity is “a way of being” that encompasses the skills, values, roles, and behavior patterns of the profession. For most of the lawyers in the room, the answer lay outside their law school experience. For many of these lawyers, their professional…