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Professor Donald H. Beskind entered law school unsure of his choice. Not knowing what to do after college, he’d taken both the GRE and the LSAT, and his LSAT score was considerably higher. 

“That test was nature's way of telling me that if there was anything that involved a lot of math, that should not be my career,” Beskind said. “So that's what set me off to law school.”

But he found his calling. Fortuitously, the University of Connecticut School of Law was one of two sites — Harvard Law was the other — hosting a pilot criminal defense clinical program for U.S. law students. 

“It was like a lightbulb went on,” Beskind recalls. “I had been a perfectly fine student, but I didn't necessarily think I was going to love a career as a lawyer. But in actually getting a chance to represent clients and try cases while I was in law school, I found what I was good at and what I cared about.” 

Now in his fiftieth year of teaching at Duke Law, Beskind has blended courtroom and classroom seamlessly, moving from professor to practitioner while training countless students in trial advocacy skills, Evidence, and Torts, honed over decades as one of North Carolina’s top litigators. In 2025 he was honored with the Duke Law Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

“There is no better trial lawyer, teacher, or colleague than Don Beskind. He is a master of his craft and of the entirely separate art of teaching it to others,” said Natalie Hirt Adams JD ’08, now a United States magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

Adams said Beskind had helped her develop a love for and command of trial practice and has continued to mentor her throughout her career. She also noted that his impact extends far beyond Duke Law’s campus. 

"When I was sworn in in Tampa, Don attended the investiture. The chief district judge who presides in Jacksonville immediately recognized him, because he too had been Don’s student, and because Don had made an impression on him that had endured over the intervening decades.”

Beskind practiced in Denver before coming to Duke Law School as a John S. Bradway fellow, also earning his LLM in 1977. He joined the governing faculty for several years and became director of Duke Law’s nascent clinical program. 

With an entrepreneurial bent, Beskind returned to private practice in 1981, co-founding a civil litigation and criminal defense firm with David Rudolf, his clinical counterpart at University of North Carolina School of Law who became widely known through the 2018 Netflix true crime docuseries The Staircase. For the next 30 years Beskind built his reputation in private practice as one of North Carolina’s top trial attorneys, handling cases involving personal injury, medical malpractice, wrongful death, and professional negligence — nearly every kind of civil litigation in state courts — as well as occasional criminal defense cases.  

He maintained his relationship with Duke Law throughout as a senior lecturer and director of its Trial Advocacy Program. In 2010, two years after his daughter Emilia I. Beskind, also a trial lawyer, graduated from Duke Law, Beskind returned to the faculty full time. 

“The art of a trial lawyer is to take complex information and complex factual situations and make them understandable and accessible to jurors,” Beskind said. “In many respects, the role of law professor is much the same. It is to adhere to the law and adhere to the facts, but also to find ways of communicating that information that makes it accessible to students.” 

He has written widely on trial practice, including co-authoring two casebooks, and taught litigation skills to attorneys in the U.S. and UK, along with serving in leadership positions at numerous advocacy organizations. Still active in practice, Beskind takes a limited number of cases each year — they currently include a medical malpractice case and a death row appeal — and is a certified mediator handling complex cases.

Beskind calls tallying the number of students he’s taught “an impossible task.” They range from young people just returned from the Vietnam War to those coming straight from college. Students who have already spent time in the workforce are often easier to teach, he said, because they have more developed judgment and a better understanding of people. 

“So much of this is about learning, about people and experiences,” Beskind said. “Early in your career, if you do litigation, you will understand that the facts are really, really important. But after you get some years of experience and judgment, you'll realize that in the end it's largely about people. If you don’t understand the people involved, they may not accept your advice or won't be persuaded.”

That’s why he doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence will replace lawyers anytime soon.

“A good lawyer is not a machine. What makes a good lawyer is a lawyer's thinking — using judgment, having ethical standards, attention to detail,” Beskind said. “People don’t come to a lawyer for an answer, because oftentimes there is no one right answer. They come to a lawyer for advice about how to approach a problem that will result in the best possible outcome. AI, in its current state, basically processes information. It’s a very good paralegal. But I haven't seen evidence that it makes good choices.”

Beskind says despite opportunities to practice in larger cities, he and his wife, a Duke University alumna, have never regretted their choice to stay in North Carolina. He often helps place former students looking to back to the state for its high quality of practice and greater quality of life.

“There are lots of very positive things about being here,” he said. “We just decided one day that this would be a wonderful place to live, and a wonderful place to have children. It has turned out to be all that and more, and Duke has been a big part of that.

“Some of my closest friends in the world are on this faculty — people who I have the most respect for — and I can't imagine the level of care and concern for the education students receive is higher anywhere else than it is here. I’m very thankful.”