Courtney Brooks

Courtney Q. Brooks has been appointed Associate Dean of Faculty and is Professor and Director of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program (DWS), the nation’s first and only alternative bar licensing program. Launched in partnership with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the New Hampshire Bar in 2005, the award-winning DWS Program has been hailed as a model for the future of legal education. The DWS Program provides students with a combination of practical skills training and assessment over two years. Assigned bar examiners evaluate students’ performance. Successful students are admitted to the New Hampshire Bar the day before graduation, without having to take the traditional two-day bar exam. This allows graduates to launch their careers immediately.

In addition to directing the DWS program, Brooks teaches DWS-specific litigation and practice-related courses and topics, including pretrial advocacy, and client-counseling.

Brooks has been with UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law since 2010. Before taking over as the Director of the DWS Program in 2020, Brooks was the Director of the Legal Residency Program which allows students to apply classroom knowledge in real-world legal settings by working under the supervision of attorneys and other professionals.

Before joining UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law, Brooks worked as a business litigation and products liability attorney at Nixon Peabody LLP in Manchester, NH; Pierce Atwood LLP in Portsmouth, NH; and Reed Smith LLP in Oakland, CA.