Abstract

With the publication of the Carnegie Foundation’s 2007 report on legal education, law schools are focused again on curriculum reform. The Carnegie report highlighted a number of important issues, one of which is the need to improve the teaching of lawyering skills. This article takes up one subset of the skills package of lawyers – transactional law skills – and suggests that health law courses provide an excellent forum for exploring and teaching such skills.With their reliance on the case method, law schools historically have done little to introduce students to transactional thinking, practice, or skills. Yet today, transactional work is a significant component of most attorneys’ practices. A common misperception is that transactional law only means “doing deals” while at a large law firm.