Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism Executive Director Erika Harold was selected as a member of the teaching faculty for Harvard Law School’s Winter 2024 Trial Advocacy Workshop (TAW). This is the seventh year that Harold has taught as part of the TAW.
The intensive course in trial analysis, skills, and techniques is taught to Harvard Law students over three weeks each January. This year, Harold will teach during the second week, which focuses on bench trials.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to return to my alma mater, Harvard Law School, as part of the teaching faculty for the Trial Advocacy Workshop,” Harold said. “It is gratifying to help equip these talented students to be vigorous yet civil advocates for their future clients and to share perspectives regarding how they can positively shape the legal profession and society as a whole.
“I appreciate Professor Ronald Sullivan including me in this important workshop and look forward to collaborating with and learning from my fellow faculty, who are some of the most accomplished lawyers and judges in the nation.”
According to Harvard Law, the TAW focuses on a trial lawyer’s mission to create a “precise fact picture” that reflects the lawyer’s version of the case in the “consciousness of fact-finders.”
This includes “simulated exercises on all aspects of in-court trial practice including opening statements, development of witness testimony on direct and cross-examination, use of illustrative aids and exhibits in evidence, impeachment, and summations.”
Importantly, during the TAW, the trial lawyer and judge volunteers provide “on-the-spot evaluation and critique” of simulated mock trials, which are derived from actual courtroom cases.
Harold was appointed as Executive Director of the Commission on Professionalism in 2022. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007, where she won a Boykin C. Wright Memorial Award for appellate advocacy in Harvard Law School’s prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition.
Prior to joining the Commission, Harold was a commercial and civil litigation attorney at Meyer Capel, P.C. in Champaign, Illinois, and a litigation attorney at the Chicago offices of Sidley Austin LLP and Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella, P.C.
About the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism
The Illinois Supreme Court established the Commission on Professionalism under Supreme Court Rule 799 to promote integrity, professionalism, and civility among the lawyers and judges of Illinois, to foster a commitment to the elimination of bias and divisiveness within the legal and judicial systems, and to ensure those systems provide equitable, effective, and efficient resolution of problems for the people of Illinois.
The Commission achieves this mission through professional responsibility CLE, lawyer-to-lawyer mentoring, legal professionalism programming, educational resources, and more. To learn more, visit 2Civility.org and follow us on social media.
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