This year, Drake University Law School welcomed Professor Kristi Harshbarger as an assistant professor of law and director of the Entrepreneurial and Transactional Legal Clinic. With experience spanning government, contract, corporate and administrative law, as well as public policy and clinical legal education, she brings a practical, student-focused approach to the classroom. In this Q&A, she discusses what stands out about Drake, how her professional background informs her teaching, and what she hopes students gain from their time in her courses.
How does your prior work experience in the legal field influence the way you teach?
The work I did prior to this varied significantly – I went from working at BrownWinick, a larger Des Moines law firm, with a primary focus on transactional law (a fairly traditional path) to working at the Iowa State Association of Counties (ISAC), a relatively small non-profit organization as General Counsel (which is a type of job I’m not even sure I understood existed when I graduated law school). I joke that I had no idea what a secured transaction was when I started at BrownWinick and that while I knew what a county was when I started at ISAC, I didn’t have a clue about the breadth of work that counties conduct. Which is to say I try to teach students to have the courage and skills to learn new things. I try to model that for students by taking on clients for ETC that allow us all to learn and grow in our knowledge of legal practice. Much of the work we do doesn’t have one right answer, and my hope is that by empowering students through traditional clinical pedagogy of non-directive learning, that in the future they will be brave enough to say “I don’t know” but also know they have the skills to figure it out.
What do you enjoy about working with students?
The students are one of the true delights of this work. Each of them are excited to be a part of the transactional clinic and to get a chance to work directly with clients and their enthusiasm is definitely contagious. In a clinic setting, I have the opportunity to really get to know each student and it’s so fun to learn about them and what led them to this point – they each bring unique experiences and skills to the table. They all work hard and our dedicated to the work and mission of the clinic and it is a joy to watch them learn, develop, grow and build confidence in their skills through the semester. I am very excited to see what great things they accomplish in the world after law school.
What makes Drake special to you?
I’m an alum of Drake Law School (2006) so getting to come back as a faculty member has felt like coming home. Some things have changed (I still wrote my final exams in law school) and others have not (the supportive learning environment) and it’s been fun to witness both sides of the coin. My clinic experience remains one of my most cherished law school experiences and it’s such an honor to get to be a part of that experience for other students. Additionally, Iowa is home is home to me and I’m thrilled to get the chance to help many of our future practitioners in the state.
What do you hope students will take away from your teaching?
At a micro level, that contracts are everywhere and each word in a contract matters. On a broader level, I hope I can play some small part in helping them build their transactional skills and also help them consider and begin to develop their professional identity. I would love it if my students walked away appreciating that there are lots of ways to be a transactional attorney and also recognize that service and pro bono work are important parts of any legal career.