Testimonial: Eric DeChant
Testimonial: Eric DeChant
Design Your Delta No. 15T
For the third video in our testimonial series, we talked to Eric DeChant, a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Master of Science in Law degree program, a one-year degree program designed for individuals with a background in the STEM field. Today, Eric works as a legal engineer, one of the many new career opportunities for legal professionals.
In a previous post, we discussed the harm in too narrowly defining success as a law student. We said:
“We should present the myriad of career paths available to law students, whether that is across sectors such as corporate, non-profit, or government; or roles such as litigators, clerks, transactional attorneys; and yes, those roles that are sometimes called ‘alternative’ careers or ‘allied’ professions such as legal operations, knowledge management, and dispute resolution.”
Enter Eric. Eric is a legal engineer and is an advocate for these new career paths—he even founded the American Society of Legal Engineers. He believes a lot of the problems facing legal professionals are created by too narrowly understanding your options. Eric was familiar with the Delta Model and appreciated that it not only represents the holistic set of skills needed to be a successful lawyer, but a legal professional more generally, including what he refers to as “a multi-spacial skillset.”
But it isn’t just the model that is helpful. Eric notes that it is important to ask the questions posed by the Design Your Delta approach such as “What has really impacted your career goals and choices?” He believes that these kinds of probing questions will help students develop deeper self-awareness and be more intentional about the skills to develop while in law school and when deciding their career goals so that they don’t so easily burn out once they enter practice.
Hear what else Eric has to say by watching the video below.
October 11, 2021