The Real Lawyer: Josh Fershee (Part 3)

Episode Summary - Part 3: A Day in the Life of a Law School Dean

In this final episode, Dean Josh Fershee pulls back the curtain on his daily life leading Creighton University School of Law. He shares his disciplined morning routine (a 14-year running habit), his open-door policy for students, and how he balances administrative duties with teaching environmental law. Josh discusses innovative initiatives like expanding clinical programs and his pragmatic approach to AI in legal education—using it as a teaching tool while emphasizing verification. He offers sage advice for aspiring lawyers: focus on learning over grades, avoid "golden handcuffs," and stay open to unexpected career paths. The conversation closes with Josh's heartfelt reflections on finding fulfillment beyond financial success.

Stay tuned for more inspiring conversations with legal leaders on The Real Lawyer Podcast!

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:04.526)
Welcome back to the Real Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Joyce Sophia Hsu, and you're joining us for part three of my conversation with Josh Frashe, the extraordinary Dean and Professor of Law at Creighton University School of Law. In this part of our conversation, Josh takes us through his weekly routine and shares his insights on running a law school, engaging with his students.

and the impact of AI on legal education. Josh, we talked about a lot of big concepts, a lot of important stuff like authenticity and showing grace to others and to ourselves. So now I'd like to zoom in a little bit and be a little bit more granular. I'm curious, what's your day to day like and how you go about your day as you try to bring authenticity and grace.

to your life.

Well, know, my day, most of my days start with the 5k. I run or walk most mornings and it's something that I do. Yep. And I, and I've been doing it for.

Speaker 1 (01:18.846)
probably working 13, 14 years now. I was never a runner. I was a soccer player, but I was a goalie, so I didn't run that much. I would play ball sports, so I would chase a ball somewhere. But once my kids were born, I realized that if I wanted to keep working out, I needed something that was accessible and short. And I realized that if I ran from my house every morning, all I was doing was adding the workout time, because I was going to shower in the morning anyway. And so I get up.

And, and go, and that, uh, has been really good for me and kind of clearing my head and, and get, and, and that's kind of personal time. I, I use that to think through. And sometimes I listen to podcasts. like listen to a lot of music. And, so that's kind of how I start my day. And then it really depends from there. It's hard to say, like my Mondays and Tuesdays are often spent in meetings, either in person or on zoom. Getting, you know, I meet with the different.

people so our career development office and our admissions person and our Dean of Students and our academic dean and you know have regular meetings with those folks early in the week to kind of figure out where we are and what's going on and then have administrative meetings at the university level with the provost and other deans and with different people on campus. And for whatever reason Mondays and Tuesdays tend to be big on meetings there and then

Depending on the week, you know, there could be things, you know, I might do a town hall with our students. I might do a meet with, with some different student groups. And then I have a lot of meetings with, with alumni, potential donors, people to try and get engaged outside vendors, people we work with to help us with bar exam preparation and things like that. And so, you know, there's a, I spend a lot of time talking to people.

That's a big part of it. I'll go to lunch tomorrow. I'm going to drive down to Lincoln, where my colleague at the University of Nebraska and I are going to have lunch with some managing partners, a big law firm, so that they know what's happening at the law schools and we can know how they're viewing the world. so it's really a mix of meetings and engagement in various ways. We've done, I'm really proud of.

Speaker 1 (03:42.75)
Some of the work we've done expanding our clinical programs here. We added a juvenile justice legal clinic and a low income bankruptcy clinic and are in the process of adding an entrepreneurship clinic, all of which are grant funded. So I spent a fair amount of time writing grants and looking for foundations and state money and other places that we can, we could do that. So that's a big, you know, part of it. And then, and then there's the kind of big HR and budgetary process, I mean, with our financial, you know,

project manager or financial administrator every week, where we are on the budget, what are we trying to do? Are we allocating things right? What does this mean for next year? Those kinds of things. And then our development office is a big part of what we do of trying to raise money both on the big scale for clinics and things like that, but also scholarships and other programs to support our students. it's a lot of...

Meeting with people or preparing to meet with people and putting together some plans for how we go forward. This is the time of year where we're preparing for some accreditation reporting for the American Bar Association that's due every year. So we're gearing up for that and working and meeting with folks to make sure we're getting that done. So I keep pretty busy. My schedule is pretty full and I try to keep an open door. meet with, you know, I met with a student this Friday who's working on.

her law review article in environmental law. So we talked about what she's doing there. But I try to keep a very open door policy. like right now, my door is closed. So nobody comes in. Exactly. if my door is closed, it means I'm in a meeting of some sort. I tend not to work with my door closed.

which is unusual.

Speaker 1 (05:36.546)
But students know they can come by if I'm not available. They can come by and make an appointment and they can meet with me. There's not a filtering mechanism. I want them to be able to come see me.

And what happens at these student town halls?

So that's a place for me to give updates, answer questions. You know, most recently we had one, you know, we just got our bar results back and we had pretty good results for Nebraska. were 80 % first time bar pass rate, which isn't where we want to be, but it's strong. And so I was happy to report that, but also to talk to them about what that process is, what we're trying to do, what we're trying to do to support them in that.

really strong. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:19.046)
I was fortunate to be able to talk to them about one of our alumni, Lestos, a $9.7 million gift that's going to go to support the law school. So I to be able to, I love to share that kind of news. And really just to answer questions and to see what's going on and kind of give an update of who's here and what's happening. We hired three new faculty last year and so they've created a really neat environment. But that's also a pathway of...

helping our students get to know who they are if they don't have them, right? If we have somebody who doesn't teach in the first year, they won't see them for at least a year or two and making sure that they know who's here and that we're all here to be supportive and helpful to them. And so that's a great part of it. I think one of the hardest parts about my job is actually spending that time with students more directly because of the other obligations and things that I'm doing. And I teach every spring.

I've been teaching environmental law in the spring and it's such a different relationship with students than it is as an administrator than when you're a teacher. And I really value that opportunity. I had to learn a lot of new things there. I hadn't taught environmental law, so that was a new prep for me. I historically taught energy law. But also, when I was just a teacher, would spend at least, you know, I'd do my prep for class and then the hour before that class, I would just kind of.

shut it down and that would be my focus to kind of get back there. Now as an administrator, I've been known to walk out of a meeting, get into the classroom. And that was an adjustment of having to, fortunately I've been teaching long enough that I can manage it and you can do the prep, it really wasn't a learning opportunity and challenge to turn your brain off from whatever financial meeting or whatever it was that I was in.

to now we're going to teach and bring the energy the students deserve and focus that they deserve in that class. And that's not always easy. And I love being in the classroom, but that's been one of the hard things that I've had to overcome.

Speaker 2 (08:29.262)
What's your teaching style? Do all the students have to attend in person now?

So all of our, we have a couple of courses that are designed to be online, but the vast majority of our courses, I think all but two or three are in person. We don't have Zoom options. Some faculty members record their classes and will allow students to watch them. I teach, the course that I'm teaching now is really a seminar style. So each student's picking an environmental law topic and they're gonna write their own paper and it'll be unique to them.

so we have a very dialogue heavy class. do it more as a survey of kind of giving them the landscape of environmental law and hopefully that it helps get them a sense of what, of what the area is like, but also gives them some pathways or ways to think about whatever topic they've chosen to write about. try to create a lot of dialogue in my class. I'm teaching upper level students, so it's not, you know, or, or doctrine heavy. When I taught business associations, it was a more traditional.

mild Socratic conversation. whereas this is much more free flowing, have the students, segment of the students write a blog post before every class on whatever environmental topic they want. And then they talk about it in the class of that. Cause I want them talking and teaching about something that maybe I don't know and that their colleagues haven't seen. And so it's really trying to push them into a new.

space of saying, okay, here's an area of the law that you were interested in, right? You get to choose it. Tell us what's about. Why is it interesting? What's unique about it? What did you find? And it gets them talking in a space where I can ask them questions more than I, you know, depending on what area they're writing in. Sometimes I can say, here's maybe the context that you're missing or where it's going, but sometimes it's just being able to ask them questions. Here's, you know, for your next time.

Speaker 1 (10:26.102)
If you want continue down this path, here's some other things you can think about and look at. And it gives other students the opportunity to do that and ask questions about what they're doing. And so try to create a different kind of dialogue than they're having in maybe their other classes, because now they're upper level students. have some ability with the law. How do they deal with it in a new space? And I really enjoy that.

part of what I do and being able to be part of it. I will say one of the biggest challenges upper level students, the hardest question that I ask when we go through a case or we go through something is some version of how do you think they got that information? Or if you wanted to get that information, where would you look? Because that's not in most of the cases, right? It's not in this process. so, right, you're going to need this information. Where are you going to find it? Who are you going to ask?

And I really enjoy those conversations because it's helping them understand, the practice of law is not just the doctrine, but it's gathering facts. It's finding information. It's figuring out what is the scope of this problem, not being handed a problem.

Yeah, I love that. I love that approach because then you're really teaching them how to look at a subject matter in a more holistic way, right? Like you said, you're not just reading the textbook or reading the case law, but actually thinking about it from different angles. So then it really deepens the understanding of it.

I think that's right. it's the right progression. I think what we're doing in the first year of giving them the cases and helping them understand, they need that baseline to be able to be kind of that lawyer literacy of what it means. And so I don't think you could teach the way I'm teaching that course in the first year very effectively because they don't have the baseline. They don't have the touchstones that they need. If you do that with first semester 1Ls,

Speaker 1 (12:31.948)
That's really more like a political science class and they've already done that. Now that they've been trained up some going back to those kinds of conversations, I think has value, but they do need that process, right? And you can't jump to it. And so I never would want anyone to think that I'm saying, and this is why I'm doing it better. I hope it's because I'm building on what foundation has been laid. And that's where I do think that law schools though can continue to evolve. And a bunch of number of my colleagues who are really adept at that.

of we do a great job with the foundation, but if the class, most of your classes in your third year look like what they were in the first year, I'm not sure you're growing the way you need to toward practice. And that's what I love about our clinical programs and externships and other things that put students in a position to, deal with the whole problem or deal with a live client in a way that, you know, that's when light bulbs come on for a lot of our students. Right. now I get contracts.

Exactly. Yeah. I think it's so cool that you're yet again picking up a new subject matter, right? Environmental law to teach. And I'm curious as far as the different subject matters and developments that

are having an impact on our profession and on the practice of law. For example, AI, do you have any thoughts on these developments and where things are headed? I'd love to hear what your take on these latest developments are.

Well, mean, to start with AI, it's a huge development in one sense, and it's going to impact, I think, both the practice of law and legal education.

Speaker 2 (14:20.95)
Yeah. And I'm curious, in terms of legal education, are you already seeing a big impact?

Well, mean, it certainly makes it harder to know if students are doing their own work from the start. But it's also going to have to evolve. I a lot of people are worried about the kind of academic integrity, which is on the one hand a concern. By the same token, anybody practicing law is going to have some role for AI down the road. There's going to become a time when it's malpractice to not do you.

you know, check your work, right? We saw that in New York with people filing, you know, false cases that didn't exist. By the same token, there will be opportunities for us to learn and, you know, maybe you would miss a cause of action or something that should have been considered if you didn't use AI or something to say, that fact pattern reminds me of something. And we have all sorts of ethical concerns, right? You can't put client information into a publicly accessible database and

protect client confidentiality. And so that's a huge concern. And so I think it's going to evolve practice. don't think it's going to have maybe as, I don't know that we can see as clearly what those impacts are going to be. I say that you think about if you told somebody 25 years ago that you'd be carrying around a mini computer that could answer virtually any factual question that you have.

who won the World Series in 1923, who produced such and such an album in the 1970s or whatever. And look up any case anywhere, anytime. You would think that that fundamentally changes the practice of law. You don't need lawyers anymore. You'll run it through your iPhone or your, you And of course, that's not true at all. If anything, that technology has made it so that we can work from anywhere.

Speaker 1 (16:23.362)
all the time, which is not necessarily a great outcome. So it's going to have an impact, but I think it's going to be a really, it's going to be more nuanced and it may be fundamental, but in a way that we haven't quite figured out. Because one of the things in my environmental law class, I have my students, you know, we look through and use AI. We've used it live in class and ask questions and figure out one of the things we used it to figure out was it gave really good answers about a case that we'd been reading.

up through 2021 and it says as of 2021, there's nothing there. Well, the AI database we were using was through 2021. I happened to know, because I looked it up beforehand, that there had been a development in early 2024 that you couldn't find by using AI. You could if you used a search engine, but you couldn't do it through just an AI or at least that AI. And so of learning that and being able to, I think,

What I've seen from AI at least right now is it can make some things better, but it's really most impactful when you have a draft or an idea of what you're doing and it can help make it better because you have to know an awful lot to know it gave you nonsense. Right. Right. If you don't really know your subject matter strong enough to say that can't possibly be right or how do I verify this, you're going to have to go back and verify all of it. And so it's

I think it has the ability to help a lot of folks, maybe at the very beginning and the very end. But, you you think about legal zoom and some of the other document creators that have been out there and said it's going to end legal practice. And that's not what I'm seeing. And when I talked to the judiciary, we have access to justice problems all over the place. So people who are pro se litigants, people who are underrepresented or underrepresented. And so it's my hope that AI can start filling some of those gaps.

of trying to create access to justice and people who don't have that. But I don't know how it does that yet. But I think that's the real opportunity for us in practice, even if it means freeing up some time for some current attorneys to do more pro bono work in some way. Maybe you can do it that way. So I'm hopeful that it will be a net positive, but I'm not sure it's... I don't think we've seen what the real impact or how it's going to impact the profession yet.

Speaker 1 (18:47.83)
Yeah. I think it's going to be evolving.

I agree with you. hadn't up to this point thought about how we could best use AI, but yeah, it actually would be great if we could utilize the technology to combat some of the bureaucracy and let AI do some of the grunt work.

But I would think overall, to me, it's not at all likely to be replacing lawyers. If anything, it's going to create more complex issues for the legal profession. And it would require really sophisticated, thoughtful lawyers to solve these issues. And some of the ethical issues that you just talked about are definitely fascinating, but very relevant.

And even at these early stages, and I could just see the issues becoming more complex as we go on and as these technologies evolve. Does Crayton offer any courses right now on AI?

So we don't have any AI specific courses, although we had two faculty members this past summer who looked at all of our policies and have made some recommendations for new courses or things that could be plugged into existing courses. So we're working through that right now through our curriculum committee and as a faculty. And so there are faculty members who have done individual things and they're great. Like I mentioned, I bring AI into the classroom. There are several people who are doing some portions of that.

Speaker 1 (20:18.658)
But in terms of a course that is kind of dedicated to the role of AI, that's something we're in the development phase for right now. And hopefully by next year, we'll have something to offer.

Okay, very cool. It's been a great conversation. I want to close our conversation with this question about the advice you would give to law students and young lawyers about how to best navigate law school and the legal profession to find fulfillment in their work and in life in general.

So, you know, for even prospective law students, the number one thing I tell students before they go to law school is make sure you want to be in law school. Not that you want to be a lawyer, not that you want to have a JD, but that you want to be there. And I don't care if you know what kind of law you want to practice, what kind of lawyer you want to be, just that you want to be there. For students who are there to say whatever you thought you were going to do, you don't have to do.

This is a pathway that can take you in a whole lot of different directions. And if you know you want to be a prosecutor and have always wanted to be awesome, good for you pursue that will help you get there. But if you come in thinking you're going to be a prosecutor and like, wow, this makes does not fulfill me. It's not filling me up. It's beating me down. There's other pathways and other work that you can do that's great for you. And some people want to be prosecutors or public defenders, and they're really going to be better trust in the states lawyers or they're going to run a nonprofit or they're going to.

to work in business somewhere. And so I would say, don't stress about the end game. Try to really focus on learning and being the best you you can be. it's a sports analogy, but leave it all in the field. Be as prepared as you can be. It's one of the things I learned being such a terrible undergraduate and going to law school. I was prepared and all in. And all of a sudden, I was like, this is what learning is like.

Speaker 1 (22:14.476)
And it was amazing for me. Not everybody's going to be in that space, but if you can try to throw yourself in and just get the best things that you can out of it, and you can be frustrated if you don't get the grade that you want. But it really should be, as you mentioned earlier about going, what's the process? Have you done the things that you need to do? Because I will say, there are fantastic lawyers at the top of their class, and there are fantastic lawyers who barely got by because they care about what they do. They learn.

their craft and they do good things. And so that's, think, really important of be honest with yourself about what you're doing and what you're trying to do. Give yourself the space to make mistakes. Don't worry about getting an answer wrong. If somebody makes fun of you, they're the jerk. know, it is, this is the opportunity to explore and learn and to try to have fun with it. And the last thing I would say is,

Don't sign yourself up for the golden handcuffs if you can avoid it. Sometimes people take jobs and certainly my wife and I were fortunate enough to work in big law firms in New York and Washington DC and were compensated very well, which was great because we had a lot of student loan debt to take care of. But if you make decisions that require you to stay at that level, it makes it very hard. I when we left our law firms, our first jobs at Penn State were our household income dropped to

a third of what we were making. And that was a decision that we made that was best for us and it has served us well. But it's certainly one we couldn't, a decision we couldn't have made if we had gotten really involved in how much money specifically we were making as opposed to the jobs that we wanted. And to think that through of what do you need and what do you want? And for some people, some of the material things are what they want and fulfill them. Great.

If you're happy with what you're doing, awesome. But recognize that the ability to shift gears will sometimes be dictated by other decisions outside of your practice and more in your personal life that can dictate some of your happiness. And the path we've taken was not the most financially lucrative path we could have taken, but it's certainly been the most fulfilling personally and professionally that I can think of.

Speaker 2 (24:33.154)
Well, that's really great advice. Thank you so much, Josh.

My pleasure and thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (24:49.848)
Thanks so much for listening. As you could tell from our conversation, Josh is just such an extraordinarily compassionate and yet humble but inspirational educator, scholar, and school leader, and just such a beautiful human being all around. I'm delighted to be able to share our conversation with you.

I hope you will tune in for our next real and personal conversation with yet another real lawyer. Until then, be well and be happy.