Legal News

Saint Louis Law School To Students: Mind Your Manners!

By Nathan Koppel

Aspiring lawyers take note: It’s not enough to be a gifted speaker or crack researcher, you also need to mind your P’s and Q’s.

Saint Louis University School of Law realizes as much. Starting today, it is offering students a three-part class on course etiquette.

Anne Hensley, a career counselor at the school who teaches the course, gives today’s law students a B-/C+ on manners. “I’m in my 60s, and I learned so much [about manners] my freshman year in college in Idaho,” she says.

Today’s course, just completed, was on “professional business communication.” Pointers, according to Hensley, included: Avoiding distracting nonverbal communications, e.g. playing with your hair or mustache, and avoiding such verbal tics as “like” and “you know.”

Next week will cover proper etiquette at networking events: Put your name-tag on your right shoulder, so that when you shake hands there is a clear line of sight to your name (who knew?), and if someone is toasting you, don’t take a drink. “Everyone else gets to drink, but you don’t,” Hensley says.

Anne Hensley (right) shakes hands with one of her etiquette students.

Finally, the dreaded subject of table manners. Over a catered meal of Chicken Cordon Bleu, wild rice pilaf, and St. Louis Style Italian salad, students will learn to pass salt and pepper together, to always rest the blade of a knife towards you, and to cut up food as you go, not in advance.

Graduates of this course should feel right at home at Mintz Levin, which we profiled last year launched a table-manners master class for summer associates. Lest any readers be tempted to roll their eyes, Hensley notes that about 80% of second interviews are conducted over lunch.

Perhaps it’s ill-mannered of us to change subjects, but we simply can’t end this post without addressing an issue that has long puzzled us: What exactly is a Billiken, the mascot of Saint Louis University? “A good-luck figure who represents ‘things as they ought to be,” the school notes in this exegesis on the Billiken.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 22, 2008 (boomark / email).