In July 2026, the Southwestern Law School American Inn of Court has earned its third national program award in four years, continuing an exceptional record of recognition for creative, engaging, and professionally meaningful programming. 

The Inn won second place nationally for its 2026 program, “Be a Client Whisperer: Effective Tools for Persuading Clients.” The honor marks the second consecutive year that groups led by Southwestern’s President and Dean, Darby Dickerson, have taken second place in the national competition. In 2025, her pupillage group was recognized for “The Carnival of Conversations: Mastering Civil Discourse in Law and Life.” 

This year’s program grew out of the Southwestern Inn’s 2025–2026 annual theme, “The Art of Persuasion.” While lawyers receive extensive training in persuading judges, juries, and opposing counsel, the program focused on clients. 

“Helping clients make informed decisions is one of the most important things lawyers do, but we don’t often think of client counseling as an exercise in persuasion,” said Dickerson. “We wanted to explore how lawyers can listen carefully, build trust, communicate candidly, and help clients make sound, lawful, and ethical decisions—particularly when the stakes are high and emotions are involved.” 

The group built the program around the familiar “See One, Do One, Teach One” learning model. Participants first saw five client-persuasion tools—including motivational interviewing, anchoring expectations, and ethical boundary-setting—demonstrated through a humorous mockumentary, followed by a sophisticated client-counseling scenario (“do one”), and a Forum Theatre exercise (“teach one”). In the Forum Theatre exercise, the group presented a deliberately ineffective client interaction and invited audience members to step into the lawyer’s role and “do it better,” applying the techniques they had just learned while the group member playing the client improvised in real time. The result was a program in which creativity was not simply entertainment—it was part of the instructional design. 

To bring the program to life, the group transformed the evening into a corporate retreat for the fictional law firm “Whisper & Heard LLP.” Members received special nametags identifying their “firm” roles, from managing partner to associate and law clerk. The evening included poster sessions, office-themed table décor, a creative “office potluck” buffet, and even refrigerator magnets reinforcing the program’s five client-persuasion tools. Each detail was designed to sustain the theme, engage the audience, and make the substantive lessons easier to remember. 

“The joy of creating an Inn program is thinking through how all of those pieces can work together seamlessly,” Dickerson said. “The small details matter because they keep people engaged and reinforce what you want them to learn. We are always asking how we can take the program one step further without allowing the creativity to overshadow the substance.” 

Dickerson credited the national recognition to the collaborative work of the entire pupillage group. “This was one of the best collaborative efforts I have ever been part of,” she said. “Every member contributed significant time and ideas, and people brought talents to the project that the rest of us didn’t necessarily know they had. By the end, it truly belonged to the entire group.” 

The American Inns of Court Program Awards recognize exceptional programs created and presented by local Inns throughout the country. Programs are evaluated on criteria including their connection to the American Inns of Court mission, educational value, creativity, ability to engage participants, treatment of ethics and challenging issues, quality of supporting research, and replicability by other Inns. 

The 2026 award continues an exceptional run for the Southwestern Law School American Inn of Court. In addition to the Inn’s second-place national awards in both 2025 and 2026, the Inn earned fourth place nationally in 2023 for another program addressing difficult supervising-supervised attorney relationships. 

For Dickerson, the recognition reflects something larger than the awards themselves. “The Inns bring together judges, experienced lawyers, newer lawyers, and law students in a community where everyone has something to teach and something to learn,” she said. “Creating programs allows us to combine education, mentoring, creativity, and collaboration in the service of professionalism. If someone leaves one of our programs and handles the next difficult client conversation a little better because of something they learned that evening, that is ultimately what matters.”