How do lawyers solve problems? Any and every way they can.

What problem do I need creative solutions to? I’m designing a course for the school I’m visiting this year that is intended to bring together for the first year students everything they’ve been learning in all their courses in a way that teaches them to solve problems the way lawyers do. How do lawyers solve problems? The following description, from a course intended to do similar things at Stanford, says it well:

A client comes to a lawyer rather than, say, a psychologist, investment counselor, or business advisor because she perceives her problem to be essentially legal in nature. But most real world problems do not conform to the neat academic boundaries that define and separate different bodies of knowledge, and a well-trained lawyer must be able to counsel clients beyond the confines of his or her technical legal expertise. Indeed, most clients do not expect their lawyers to confine themselves to the law, but rather expect a lawyer to integrate legal considerations with the other components of their problem. Thus, much of a lawyer’s work involves assisting clients in solving non-legal problems. The solution may be constrained, facilitated, or even driven by the law, but they often call for judgments, common sense, and even expertise not particularly of a legal nature. Even when legal questions dominate, their resolution often calls for problem-solving beyond the analysis of appellate decisions that characterizes most law school instruction. This course endeavors to prepare students for their roles as creative problem solvers. It focuses on these issues, among others: understanding a probabilistic factual world, including assessing correlation and causation; making decisions with tradeoffs under conditions of uncertainty; understanding individual and social phenomena that can conduce to or impede effective decision-making.

My problem, of course, is that articulating what I want to do and actually figuring out how to do it for 4 sections of approximately 50 first year law students are two entirely different things.