A Serious Game for Enhancing Fundamental Lawyering Skills for Thai Law Students

Abstract

Even though all the lawyers are demanded both higher and more capacities to solve the legal conflicts in the globalization where all people and business transactions are easily connected, but the core competency for lawyers: legal knowledge; legal attitude; and lawyering skills are still be the fundamental aspects of competent novice lawyers. Particular, lawyering skill competency is the tacit knowledge which time-consuming to learn and transfer to each other. Any lawyer who lacks of lawyering skill knowledge and capacity may cause to ineffectiveness of legal implementation, legal enforcement, and legal services which definitely impact to people and society interest. Meanwhile the legal education in Thailand has been popular among new generation for many reasons; honourable social engineering career; satisfied-higher income of judges and public prosecutors. However, the increasing number of new law students enrolled each year does not reflect the achievement of Thai law schools. But the number of competent graduated law students are the real key points instead. According to the problem justification in the research found that lawyering skill learning opportunity under Thai legal education is inappropriate situation. There are aspects considered unclear; unsystematic in term of learning promotion. For instance, the national legal education institutes; Thai Bar Association; had no any suggestions, or guidelines on what and level of fundamental lawyering skills should be trained for law students or novice lawyers before entering to the legal practicing arena. Therefore, it seemed the law schools has not been urged by any suggestions of such the national legal education institute to policy deployment for lawyering skill learning promotion. Interestingly, the undergraduate law curriculum among all level of Thai legal education is only the compulsory program for all lawyers, therefore it supposed to be the primary source where all law students must be learned and trained the core competency in particular lawyering skill knowledge as proper as their age and life experiences before graduation. Because there are some law career paths which graduate law students can practice law without any further legal education. But it is perceived to be legal-content oriented and lack of lawyering skill learning promotion. Although there are some lawyering skills; legal reasoning, legal analysis, legal writing, has highlighted during lecturing of compulsory legal courses, but they were not be taught and feedback systematically toward each students’ performance after grading announcement. Adding more lawyering skill courses may cause to curriculum revision because the total courses credits has already reached the proper maximum. Such the obstacles as mentioned are time-consuming and possible to inconsistent outcome if any law school try to solve each factor by factor. For instance, law curriculum revision may cause to hard talk discussion among all legal educators in the law school since the philosophy of curriculum, what existing courses shall be eliminated, combined, or changed for providing additional lawyering skill courses, what types and number of lawyering skill courses should be registered into the curriculum. Encouraging by policy the law lecturers to responsible unfamiliar new lawyering skill courses may cause to defensive routine crisis. Based on the Double Loop Learning Theory, the research alternatively proposed a knowledge management model by using serious game as the self-lawyering skill knowledge transferring tool for the undergraduate law students. The model were associated with the gap analysis results and designed by the integration of experts’ knowledge, learning theory, and serious game concept. By this approach, the law school can possible to promote lawyering skill knowledge learning for law students by their own management without involving to any time-consuming obstacles, such as law curriculum revision, defensive routine of law lecturers, lower learning impact of lecture base approach, etc. Within the KM model as proposed, the research methodology were all about; 1. Knowledge area identification because Thai legal education have no any idea about what fundamental lawyering skills should be learned by the undergraduate law students, 2. Research area identification to scope and allow the research demonstrate and prove effectiveness of the KM model solution within the research period, 3. Hard-to-reach qualified skilful legal expert identification for knowledge capturing stage. Due to Thailand has no any institute certified how skilful of each lawyer but in fact they are well known among community of practice. 4. Designing and verifying the effectiveness of the standalone KM model which integrated by the lawyering skill knowledge, learning theories, and serious game concept to effectively transfer cognitive lawyering skill knowledge and stimulate learning engagement to undergraduate law students. According to the research methodology, the research proposed the two KM models for cognitive knowledge transferring of the factual investigation skill and the mediation skill. Due to the research found that apart from they were two core skills from the eight as identified by the major law career paths, the law students of CMU had significantly dissatisfied self-confidence level at both skills according the self-confidence evaluation analysis. Moreover, the two core skills are also very important for lawyering works. The fact finding skill helps lawyers effectively gather and verify the trustworthiness of facts related the conflict prior any legal decision shall be made. The mediation is also now the alternative legal justice paradigm in Thailand which lawyer must be trained otherwise the lawyers may not help their legal clients discover amicable solution in the mediation process. The two KM models’ effectiveness verification stage shown that the voluntary sampling law students of CMU had significant higher cognitive knowledge level when compared the pre and post-test results analysis. And the samples demonstrated learning engagement with fun in various aspects as shown in the video records and interviewing respondents after learning through the KM models by using serious game. Finally, the KM models also helped the sampling law students recognized their self-awareness on lawyering skill capacity gap after learning through the KM models. To conclude, the KM models as proposed and designed in according with the research methodology had proved to be the self-learning tools for transferring the cognitive lawyering skill knowledge from the external legal experts outside the law schools to mass young new generation undergraduate law students. Moreover, this two KM models are not only perceived to be the first time ever new learning method applicable in Thai law school instead of lecture based teaching, but they are expected to be the alternative way to minimize the lawyering skills capacity gap between the undergraduate law students in law school and legal professions in community of practice. Lastly, the research ideas can also guide for developing the remaining six fundamental lawyering skills KM models or another types of skill learning in other fields.