BLS Office Hours: Professor Elizabeth Chen Teaches First-Year Students How to Become Lawyers
Professor Elizabeth Chen teaches Gateway to Lawyering and Legal Writing.
In the first-year course Gateway to Lawyering, Assistant Professor of Legal Writing Elizabeth Chen challenges a room of about 20 new Brooklyn Law School students to play the role of lawyers representing fictitious clients. It is an eye-opening—and essential—experience for aspiring attorneys.
Students must learn to manage relationships with clients whose viewpoints and life experiences differ from their own. A student asked to represent a client accused of a crime may become incensed about the criminal justice system’s inequities. A pro-business or anti-corporate mindset may influence how a student feels about representing a company. Or a student may not find a client’s case compelling. Chen’s message: Lawyers must get comfortable with discomfort.
"Throughout their careers, they will have to represent people and clients who they either agree with or don't agree with on many different measures," said Chen, who joined Brooklyn Law School in 2023. "Part of what I emphasize is that students should figure out how they can connect with clients, how they can do the work they need to do to represent them well, even while recognizing their own feelings or how their own background differs."
Another important lesson is about fostering professional collegiality. The experience of being graded on a curve can make law school feel like a "zero-sum game," but Chen encourages camaraderie over competition through acts such as sharing notes if someone missed class or passing along information on helpful resources.
"I expect them to be good to each other and say to one another, 'Let me help you out,'" Chen said. "We're all part of a larger BLS community, but my students are in a community with each other. Part of being a good lawyer is being collaborative and recognizing who your people are, who's going to help and support you. You build that from day one."
Legal Writing, Critical Thinking & The Impact of AI
Learning legal writing and comprehending case law are daunting tasks at first. "Will the students walk out of Gateway knowing how to write like lawyers? Yes, but there’s a lot more to it. It’s learning how to think, and that goes back to learning how to read," Chen said. One of her Gateway students last year described feeling as if she were functionally back in kindergarten while trying to absorb case law. "She was able to be very successful in that process because she was willing to say 'I am willing to start from step one, and I may mess up, but I’ll learn from it and it's going to be okay,'" said Chen.
To combat feeling inadequate, one of Chen’s earliest exercises is asking students to share a skill in which they are an expert. "That tells me something about them as a person, and I hope it reminds them that they have already worked very hard and created their own tools to become an expert at something, and so too can they learn what tools they need to become excellent lawyers," Chen said.
At a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly used in legal practice, some professors do not permit AI usage, but Chen is not one of them. "What I try to emphasize to them is that they need to learn how to think about the law so that if they use it, they can critically assess output, as they would with every other tool," she said. Using AI to check writing for spelling or grammatical errors can be helpful, but other uses can be problematic at this stage. "When they are still figuring out how to do legal analysis, it can be hard to know if the output from an AI tool is useful or not, especially when it can sound 'good,'" Chen said.
Focusing on Family Law
Chen’s scholarly research focuses on anti-discrimination law, reproductive justice, and relationships and the law. Her forthcoming paper examines how law applies to nursing homes and care facilities for the disabled, commercial facilities that have family-like home characteristics.
"The law treats those two types of spaces very differently," Chen said. "The law generally does not intrude on people’s private family life, but what happens when people engage in discrimination in spaces that have many of the same characteristics, but are more commercial?"
Professor Cynthia Godsoe invited Chen to serve as a mentor in the Family Law Fellows Program and then to join her as co-director in the 2025-26 academic year. Together, Godsoe and Chen match students in the program with faculty members and practitioner mentors who help them delve into a family law topic that interests them.
"It can be a topic that they covered in class, and it could be an interest area that came up during an internship or a clinic that surprised them that they didn’t have time to investigate further," Chen said. "The fellowship offers an opportunity to do that, to dive a little bit deeper, to show a real interest in family law."
The Joy of Watching Students Succeed
When Gateway classes I and II are over, the reward for professors is seeing the students who take more time to adapt ultimately succeed. "The nice thing is that I see this all the time," Chen said. "Students start from a variety of places and with a range of skillsets. It's how they respond to all the feedback that they get over the course of the semester that helps show where they’ll excel as lawyers."
That learning doesn’t end with the completion of a fellowship or Gateway course. "Students must keep doing that iterative process of improving consistently because the journey of being a lawyer is a series of small improvements," Chen said. "It's work we do every single day."
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