Attorney John Burwell Garvey, a member of the Sulloway & Hollis law firm for more than 23 years, has been named the first director of the Daniel Webster Scholar Program at the Pierce Law Center.

The program, open to 25 Pierce Law students in January 2006, will prepare law school graduates for admission to the bar based upon rigorous evaluation of their practical legal skills as well as substantive knowledge of the law. Students who successfully complete the program will not be required to take the NH Bar exam.

Garvey, who has taught at Pierce Law off and on for more than 20 years, said "this is a dream job for me. I will have the chance to combine my practical knowledge from many years in private practice with my love of teaching."

Associate Supreme Court Justice Linda S. Dalianis, the chair of the Webster Scholar Committee, said that Garvey, an accomplished trial lawyer, has the depth of experience needed to lead a program that is grounded in substantive legal training and practical skill.

"New lawyers need to have more than academic knowledge if they are going to be competent lawyers from the start and they need to be able to do more than simply pass the traditional bar examination," Dalianis said. She has noted essentials that half of new admittees to the NH Bar go off into the "sink-or-swim" atmosphere of private practice, often as sole practitioners with no one to mentor them.

"Students in the Webster Scholar program will not only have to prove they have learned substantive law, they will have to demonstrate repeatedly to a panel of evaluators that they have acquired the necessary practical skills, and learned the fundamental values essential to good lawyering," Dalianis said. "When the Webster Scholars graduate, they will be ready to practice law, " she added.

The Webster Scholar Program was initiated by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which oversees admissions to the NH Bar, in collaboration with Pierce Law. The court and law school worked in cooperation with the Board of Bar Examiners, which administers and grades the bar exam, and the New Hampshire Bar Association.

Garvey will begin work at Pierce Law in July. Initially, he will be working with the Webster Scholars Committee on issues of curriculum and coordinating the resources that will be needed for the pioneering program. Justice Dalianis and Pierce Law Dean John D. Hutson said they have found no similar example of a program that attempts to replace the bar exam with such an intensive, practically oriented training and evaluation process. In Garvey's view, the Webster Scholar program aims to provide law students with the kind of training and skills that would be gained in the first couple of years of practice.

Garvey said the program, in a sense, replaces the mentoring that used to occur in many firms as they trained new associates. There will be many adjunct faculty involved, Garvey said, who will be training and evaluating students. "In this context," Garvey said, "it will be the students' job to obtain the mentoring they need."

Hutson said the program was "fortunate to have a lawyer of John Garvey's caliber, integrity and reputation to take the Webster Scholar Program from the drawing board to reality."

See www.courts.state.nh.us under Press Releases for more on the program, or check the Jan. 7, 2005 issue of Bar News.

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