Failure Resume

This is one of the most powerful and transformational assignments I’ve ever used. I started doing this exercise in Designing Legal Expert Systems because it was crucial to persuade students to try things out and make mistakes – overcoming their instinct to hide their work until they thought it was perfect (which it never would be) and losing the opportunity to develop and improve it through feedback and missteps.

The idea of a “CV of failures” that honestly sets out all the failures hidden behind an official CV of accomplishments and achievements comes from this article by Melanie Stefan.

A key part of the exercise is that I complete the assignment too, and I’m honest about my own failures, even the ones I don’t like talking about.

Students can go as deep on this as they want to, and they can share as much or as little as they like with the class. It has had an extraordinary effect in building our cohesion as a team, allowing us all to drop some layers of protection, and opening up opportunities to do better, more creative work. It is also very liberating to laugh at our selves and our screw-ups together.

Tort Law Settlement Exercise: Introduction Video