Reflective Practices
Pausing. Reflecting. Learning. A more human legal
What are Reflective Practices?
Reflective practice is the disciplined habit of pausing to examine one’s own experience — what happened, why, what it means, and what to do differently — rather than simply moving from one matter to the next. In law, that habit cuts against the grain of a profession trained to project certainty and move fast. But a growing body of scholarship argues that reflective practice is not a soft skill on the side of legal competence — it is a core professional competency in its own right, one that helps lawyers learn from experience, integrate theory with practice, examine how legal institutions actually function, and make sounder ethical decisions under pressure.
The Integrated Reflective Practitioner
Michele Leering, a Canadian lawyer and legal educator, has done some of the most influential work naming what this actually looks like. Her research (reprinted in Lawyers as Changemakers) proposes an “Integrated Reflective Practitioner” model built on three distinct kinds of reflection: reflecting on practice (the traditional skills-based view — what worked, what didn’t, and why), critical reflection (questioning the larger frameworks a lawyer is operating inside — what is this law or process actually doing, and to whom), and self-reflection (examining one’s own values, assumptions, and motivations as a practitioner).
Reflective Practice in Legal Education
Queen’s University Faculty of Law, in Kingston, Ontario, has become a hub for this work more broadly. Leering and Professor Sharry Aiken organized the first International Symposium Series on Reflective Practice for Legal Professionals, bringing together scholars, educators, and practitioners from multiple countries to explore how disciplined reflection can strengthen legal education and the profession’s response to today’s pressures — from justice gaps to the disruptive arrival of generative AI in legal work.
Ideas Worth Exploring
TREE OF CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES
Reflective practice doesn’t require sitting on a cushion, though it can. Kim’s own writing on contemplative practice points to a well-known image kept by Maia Duerr — a tree, originally developed by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, whose branches sort dozens of practices into families: stillness (sitting meditation, quiet reflection), movement (yoga, tai chi, qi gong), relational (dialogue, deep listening), creative (artistic practice), ritual (Shabbat, altars), activist (volunteering, vigils), and generative (visualization, prayer).
A Simple Practice: Stoplight Mindfulness
One simple example worth reproducing directly on this page is “Stoplight Mindfulness,” a short breathing practice from lawyer Leslie Rawls meant to be used anywhere a person is forced to pause — at a redlight, or gripping the sides of a desk:
Breathing in, know you are breathing in; breathing out, know you are breathing out; breathing in, calm your body and mind; breathing out, smile; breathing in, dwell in the present moment; breathing out, know it is a wonderful moment.
A Growing Resource
This is also the subject of one of Kim’s own ongoing projects: a Reflective Practices Playbook, developed with colleagues including Susanne van der Meer and Kara Perry, that gathers design elements, exercises, and supporting evidence for building reflective practice into legal training — alongside a companion academic article intended for a law review or similar publication. (Coming soon!)
A more reflective legal profession helps create a more just and humane world.