Part 7
Postscript: ‘Things I wish I’d known before I started doing clinical legal education’
Words of wisdom from experienced clinicians on what they wish they’d known at the start of their clinical careers
Part 7.1
Professor John Fitzpatrick
I hope that a reflection on my experience of the law clinic at Kent will convey the enthusiasm I feel about clinical legal education and my warm encouragement to anyone thinking of getting involved.
I cherish the fortunate circumstance that a public university is able to combine a free legal service to those who need but cannot afford one, with an extraordinarily rich educational opportunity for its students. Staff and students working together can help people obtain, for example, due entitlement to welfare benefits, secure and safe housing, refugee status, compensation for unfair dismissal, the minimum wage, resolution of family disputes, advice for those in prison, access to public rights of way and greens, and can bring immigrant families together. They can spread the benefits to client groups by lessons disseminated and legal precedents gained, and all in the course of learning and teaching at relatively little extra cost – a law clinic invariably attracts students and enhances the reputation of a university.
A thrilling learning curve awaits students who choose to participate under supervision in a clinical legal practice. They are required to engage with the law and its unfolding application in real time, and also with the people who are immediately and intimately affected by it. Vocational skills are acquired, and a sense of public service. But in its educational dimension the practical activity is primarily a means to an academic end, namely a better knowledge of law, and an improved ability to reflect critically on law and its application in practice. Thus students are required to report upon their casework, to research matters arising and to submit substantial written work on relevant law, doctrine, procedure, theory and policy – and the lives of others.
Respect is due to the agency of the client, and the conduct of the case is driven by their instructions. If a first class service is delivered, and casework and study become a joint enterprise, then law clinic students can truly deepen and broaden their knowledge of law and society, and refine their ability to think about it.
In a clinical legal practice a strong camaraderie usually arises among students and staff, and an independent spirit in a collective endeavour. There is enjoyment, and also shared gratification when it occurs that staff and students have been able, using the law that they are learning, to make a difference for the better.
Professor John Fitzpatrick
Emeritus Professor of Law
University of Kent
In 1984 Anthony Amsterdam wrote, with more than a touch of prophesy and irony, his seminal article on legal education in the 21st century. The basic stance he takes is that now we all do ‘clinic’: what was all the fuss about?1
My own involvement in experiential learning began in the early 1990s after making the switch from being a partner in a provincial legal practice to a ‘lecturing’ post in academia. I had not heard of clinical legal education (CLE) but intuitively used case studies and role play in my teaching. The words ‘simulation clinic’ were unknown to me.
It was one of my students who mentioned what we now call live client law clinics and suggested that we visit something called the Student Law Office at Northumbria. That trip, coupled with the willingness of my then Dean to fund an extensive trip to the USA to look at clinical legal education provision, set me on a mission to understand and develop this pedagogy at my law school. The rest, as they say, is history!
I have been asked to write here about things I wish I’d known before I started doing CLE. I find this hard to do, as in all ‘learning by doing’ the lessons are more a result of application and reflection than prior knowledge. What I can say in the space available here is that for anyone establishing a clinic or expanding provision there are some fundamental principles that, if adopted, are likely to promote sustainability, maintain requisite quality, enhance the students’ education and to serve a wider community purpose, including addressing aspects of unmet legal need.
These can be briefly summarised as follows:
• Be clear on the purpose of any clinic: learning outcomes, extent of any public service, where it sits within the overall curriculum.
• Be realistic in terms of available resources: the more ‘hard’ (law school/university) funding can be relied upon the better (‘soft’ money, from outside of the educational institution, as attractive as it is can make the clinic vulnerable).
• Be well-structured: having clear operational rules (for example, in a clinic handbook) and lines of responsibility means that the clinic should function smoothly and expectations can be more easily managed.
• Capture the ‘teachable moment’: most of what happens in a clinic has learning value. The use of templates to record what the student does and thinks about what they do can help, as will regular and frequent meetings (referred to as ‘rounds’ in the literature) to discuss what has happened, what could happen and what now needs to happen. This will all aid the reflective process and necessary case management.
• Subject to the requirement for confidentiality, record and publicise the work of the clinic, for example in newsletters and reports.
• Use an advisory board with representatives from relevant stakeholders, including legal practice and the not-for-profit advice sector: they can become your champions.
• Enjoy your learning and teaching: whoever said that legal education should not be fun as well as instructive – just feel the buzz when you go into a clinic.
As Amsterdam clearly infers, through CLE everyone is a winner – the student, the client, the law school, the university and wider society – providing the clinic meets the applicable educational and legal practice standards.
Richard Grimes
Visiting Professor
Charles University, Prague
Is clinical legal education a choice? CLOCK, in times of crisis
There was a time (as I remember from a Law School meeting), when the concept of clinical legal education was considered by some to be a distinct choice. It was presented in terms of either prioritising time that enable academics to engage in critical social and legal research, compared to the time required to supervise and train students to give free legal advice to enhance and widen access to professional experience, as an addition to legal advice by the publicly funded legal aid sector.
My research on rights in times of crisis was based in India, where the majority of the public does not have access to funded legal advice or representation, and active research is considered to be not a choice but a duty of public universities to understand local needs as a method to transform local communities and national policy.1
The Law in Action module developed with Professor Rosie Harding at Keele University created a bridge between research and education, while marking the distinction between law in books and law in action. It was only through listening to our local communities that the impact of the significant withdrawal of legal aid in 2013 became realised, when Sharon from ‘Voices of Experience’ recited her story that when faced with leaving a ‘torturous island of abuse’ or entering the ‘shark-infested legal waters’, without a bridge, there is no choice.2 Legal professionals had started to pull up the drawbridge from seemingly unnavigable and desiccated waters. Legal aid practices were no longer able to sustain legal aid contracts, or offer opportunities for training contracts in family, housing and welfare law. This diminished the resources for research and development in these specialist areas, which in turn would restrict the collation of robust evidence to inform social and legal policy reforms.
A transformative methodology, based upon the voices of those in need, informed how to reach out beyond the university, to build bridges with the local community – with law firms, Citizens Advice Bureaux, domestic and sexual violence services, and housing associations – and to develop an innovation: the Community Legal Outreach Collaboration (CLOCK). CLOCK is an interlocking network of legal actors, in which law students are the key.3 Trained as Community Legal Companions, the students have assisted more than 4,000 people by signposting to legal aid and charitable services or, where not available, assist directly in court in the McKenzie role, to assist/monitor fair proceedings. Many of these students have since graduated to secure training contracts in local family legal aid law firms, and CLOCK has now been cascaded across law schools around the country. The clock.uk.net portal has collated robust research data to inform the post implementation review of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, on, for example, the means test for domestic violence cases and specifically to reinstate legal aid where children are at significant risk of harm.
Arendt’s ‘On humanity in dark times’,4 illustrates ‘when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world’. Moving forward from a point of crisis cannot be an individual choice, but is interdependent upon each actor as an agent of change. In today’s times of crisis, each litigant in person, the profession, the judiciary and academia is a cog – an integral part of a critical mechanism for CLOCK – within the wider clinical legal education movement to transform access to justice.
Dr Jane Krishnadas
Keele University
Part 7.4
Professor Donald Nicolson
The key to a clinic’s success is its people: Take your time selecting students and work colleagues. Ensure that both are committed to the ideas of social justice and client service, and that they are collegial. As regards staff, look for optimists and people with a sense of humour. Both are going to be necessary when you face challenges. Things will always go wrong. People make mistakes. There are always crises. The ability to see things in perspective and the funny side of mistakes will help in riding the inevitable bumps of law clinic work.
Never underestimate students. Over the years, I have never ceased to be amazed at the confidence and abilities of students: students as young as 17 arguing (and winning) in court and tribunals, appearing on radio, chairing clinic meetings, developing case management systems and websites … the list is endless. At the same time, don’t believe all you are told by students wanting to join a clinic. I have also come across – and unfortunately increasingly so – students who speak eloquently about their motivation to help others but end up being only interested in putting something on their CVs and are not even bothered to reply to emails, turn up for appointments, conduct their research, etc.
Look after yourself. If you are not employed as a dedicated clinician, ensure that you are given sufficient time to manage your clinic responsibilities as well as your teaching, administration and research responsibilities. Otherwise, you (and indeed all clinicians) may end up working pro bono yourself. This is a great role model for students and is not necessarily a bad thing if you have the time, but it comes at a cost of your wellbeing and your work-life balance, while just being taken for granted by your institution. Do not put your life and soul into your clinic and lose precious time with your children that cannot be regained, only for university priorities to change. No matter how much we know that clinics contribute to the community and to an excellent legal education, university management (and even some law school heads) tend to see clinical legal education as an optional extra when compared with research, increasing student numbers, and whatever latest neo-liberal Damoclean sword is being dangled over academic heads.
Take risks. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you have a good idea for helping those most in need, don’t get hung up about excluding every potential risk no matter how small. If you have insurance and good quality assurance systems, do not let the desire to ensure a perfect service get in the way of enhancing access to justice for those most in need. Rather than Rolls-Royces for the few, provide economy cars for the many.
Professor Donald Nicolson
University of Essex
Once upon a time, there was no clinical legal education or real client work at Cardiff University’s Law School. Then, a keen but naïve former high-street solicitor and Legal Practice Course tutor was given a blank sheet to ‘come up with something relevant to Cardiff’. A spectacular absence of due diligence and an abundance of (now spent) energy later, and there is a whole suite of clinical activity at Cardiff. A fairy tale journey? Of course not. Magical? Sometimes. Happy ending? Definitely!
What tips would I give my young(er) eager self?
• Make sure that the department, and central university, understands – really understands – that any clinical activity takes significant extra resources, especially people’s time. With real clients and casework, you are not only teaching and managing students, but you have a professional responsibility to clients, which at least doubles the workload. Have difficult conversations with decision-makers to agree a meaningful commitment before you expend too much time creating some fantastic clinical proposal that might go nowhere as soon as the cheque book is requested. At the outset, I wish I had appreciated how much universities operate as businesses, even with their community engagement agenda hats on.
• Keep an accurate time record of the various aspects of your activities. Just because something isn’t conventionally recorded on a template workload allocation model doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be. Evidence is essential for informed investment decisions where business cases have to be made.
• Be bold about calculating the indirect financial value of your work to the department/university. Students pay our salaries. Students like (want, need) clinical experience. We all know that a clinic is a teaching/learning innovation with bells on. But we should also embrace calling upon it to substantiate our scholarship and engagement activities, or whatever other benchmarking/criteria our universities use in promotion/review procedures and the like. A clinic is many different things in different packages, so don’t be shy about selling yourself and your clinical achievements flexibly and creatively. We are worth it!
• Try more partnership activity, and fewer labour-intensive schemes. Traditional clinics that replicate law offices are fantastic, but relentless. Aim for term-time only activity to avoid problems with vacation clinic cover.
• If you want to start an Innocence Project-type clinic, do full due diligence first, and then do it again. This is the most challenging of all clinical work, with many pitfalls. Having said that, the marvel of having two convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal – and extensive media interest in the very real problems with the criminal justice system
– is unbeatable. Decades on, those many emails, calls and visits from past students, now friends, who gave so much of their time to fighting injustice, and learning bucketloads along the way, are invaluable. They are guaranteed to put a smile on my face every time.
• Don’t forget how wonderful many of our students are, and how clinical experiences can genuinely shape their lives as well as their careers. You may feel unappreciated at times, but you will find that the clinical legal education world of friends (old and new) is hugely supportive. If you want to scream, just reach out and someone will have survived your particular unique-to-you crisis before – guaranteed!
• Finally, make sure that the department, and central university, understands … Oops – done that one already. But it’s so important that I’m indulging myself by saying it again!
Professor Julie Price
Head of Pro Bono and Clinical Legal Education
Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics
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1 Anthony Amsterdam, ‘Clinical legal education – a 21st century perspective’ (1984) Journal of Legal Education 34, 612.
1 Jane Krishnadas, ‘Rights as the intersections: Rebuilding cultural, material and spatial spheres – A transformative methodology’ in Rohee Dasgupta (ed), Cultural practices and political possibilities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
2 Maria Whatton, Beaten down, rising up, standing tall (Voices of Experience, 2010).
3 Jane Krishnadas, ‘CLOCK: “The community legal companion” as an agent of change: A transformative methodology’ in Linden Thomas, Steven Vaughan, Bharat Malkani and Theresa Lynch (eds), Reimagining clinical legal education (Hart Publishing 2018).
4 Hannah Arendt, ‘On humanity in dark times’, in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harcourt, Brace & World 1968 [1955]), p. 13.