Students and guests of the Joseph F. Rice School of Law were recently treated to a fireside chat and Q&A with the legendary Dawn Staley, coach of the University of South Carolina women’s basketball team.

The Lawyers as Leaders class welcomed the coach of the 2021 Olympic gold-winning women’s basketball team and three-time Olympic gold winner herself to share moments from her storied career and how her leadership style has evolved.

“My older, former players, they call me ‘Charmin,” she relates to an amused crowd, explaining they think she’s gotten ‘soft.’ Staley’s perceived leniency isn’t the only thing Staley thinks has changed. She also developed her skills in delegation, communication, and relying on the complementary skills of her fellow coaches.

How one’s leadership style adapts over time is a common question for guest speakers of the Lawyers as Leaders elective course.

The 2- and 3Ls in the class meet once a week throughout the semester to hear from a variety of featured speakers. Afterward, they discuss the speaker’s remarks in the context of that week’s reading. The class also participates in crisis management exercises, develops its public speaking skills, and reviews topics such as establishing a shared vision and developing emotional intelligence.

“We wanted to be able to give more students the opportunity to study leadership as a subject in law school,” says professor Jan Baker (‘94), who co-teaches the class with Dean William C. Hubbard (‘77). “Our mission statement says we prepare lawyer leaders, and we want to honor that. It’s important for us to make space in the curriculum to train students to lead in law school, in their communities, in their practices – wherever they go from here.”

 The class is broken into small groups, and each week a different student group is responsible for researching, introducing, and interviewing the speaker and facilitating the Q&A session. Afterward, they present the week's assigned reading and lead an interactive activity to help their classmates engage with and apply the leadership principles being studied.

“It’s a really rich classroom experience with students because this is one where I'm learning in class, too,” Baker says. “We're keeping the train on the tracks, but Dean Hubbard and I do the same exercises that the students do — we engage, just like everybody else. It's fun for me to have that kind of classroom experience with students and it gets me involved with students that I maybe didn't teach in the first year.”

Community building is an essential component of the Lawyers as Leaders class. Staley says she relies on a similar approach as a leader.

“When your success is predicated on somebody else’s part of the equation, then you’ve got to learn to operate together,” Staley says. “I’m really so fortunate that our players actually speak up.” Reflecting on her 25 years as a coach, she touches on a theme familiar to law students: the importance of advocacy.

“It’s not a knee-jerk reaction to things, I have to sit with it,” Staley says. “And if it’s as powerful as it was the day before, I’ve got to do something.”

Although scheduled for just an hour, Staley fielded questions for an additional 15 minutes during the busiest part of her year. Unsurprisingly, she exited to a standing ovation.