Lawrence M. Grosberg

Professor of Law
Director, Lawyering Skills Center
Codirector, Elder Law Clinic

As a clinical professor, Lawrence M. Grosberg spends most of his time working with aspiring lawyers to develop the skills they will need to be effective and humane practitioners in a changing the world.

Professor Grosberg, director of New York Law School’s Lawyering Skills Center, believes law schools need to continue to experiment with new methods of teaching and examining students to “better reflect what they do in practice.” His scholarship has focused on how law schools might improve their clinical instruction and, in turn, how the bar admission process might better evaluate an applicant’s competence to practice law. To that end, he recently completed a three-year term as chair of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar of The New York City Bar Association. 
 

“New York Law School is supportive of innovative clinical methods, where students learn how to interact with clients and lawyers and how to conduct themselves in the courtroom,” he says giving as a prime example, the first-year use of actors to portray clients who then provide written feedback to students on their client interviews. “The Law School’s extensive use of this standardized client teaching method is unique in legal education,” Professor Grosberg explains.
 

Professor Grosberg has taught Civil Procedure and Complex Litigation and most of the Law School’s clinical and skills classes, including the Civil and Human Rights Clinic; Negotiating, Counseling and Interviewing; Trial Advocacy; Alternative Dispute Resolution; the Externship Course; the first-year course, Lawyering; the Mediation Clinic; and the Elder Law Clinic.
 

Before joining New York Law School in 1983, Professor Grosberg taught a Housing Discrimination Clinic at Columbia Law School. Prior to that, he ran a legal services office in Manhattan and was an associate at Spear & Hill. He has litigated individual and class actions in the areas of employment and housing discrimination law in federal and state courts. He received a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor on the Journal of Transnational Law, and a B.A. cume laude with the Order of the Palm from the University of Southern California.
 

He has published articles and given lectures on civil procedure, clinical teaching, and bar examinations. He has been a consultant to the California Committee of Bar Examiners and the National Conference of Bar Examiners and was a member of the Executive Committee of the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. He was a member of the Clinical Skills Committee of the ABA Section on Legal Education and the AALS Committee on Bar Admissions and Lawyering Performance.

His interest in clinical education has prompted him to promote it through lectures and teaching in Poland, Scotland, Nicaragua, Jordan, Qatar, and Russia, where he spent three months as the clinical legal education specialist for the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI). Most recently he conducted a clinical education workshop for the faculty at the University of Barcelona Law School.

Professor Grosberg has reached out to the local community through New York Law School’s Law in TriBeCa Program in a venture that made mediation services available to TriBeCa neighborhood and Lower Manhattan co-ops and condominiums. “It was a way to get connected with our neighbors,” he explains.

Originally from Detroit, Professor Grosberg now lives in Manhattan and considers himself a tried and true New Yorker. “I love this city. I love working here, walking through it, and simply being here,” he says.