When a law school’s clinical program is taught well, students have the opportunity to complete substantive legal work for clients with guidance from experienced attorneys who serve as mentors, law school professors say.
Clinics often focus on a specific area of law, such as environmental law or appellate law, making them ideal for students who have a strong interest in a specific legal discipline and who want to become marketable for jobs in that niche field.
“In a law clinic, you’re doing everything that a real lawyer does under supervision, along with getting classes and trainings,” says Aliza Kaplan, a professor and director of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School.
Kaplan says a well-run legal clinic will give students ample opportunity to communicate directly with clients and may even afford them the chance to argue in a courtroom. These work experiences help law students gain confidence in their advocacy abilities, she says.
In addition, a law school clinic will often perform significant public service projects, such as representing indigent legal clients who cannot afford to pay for legal representation, Kaplan says. This pro bono legal work helps to inspire students who wonder how they can apply their legal training in a way that has a positive influence on society.
“So many students come to law school to make a difference in the world,” Kaplan says.
Many students sign up to participate in clinics because they are eager to use their legal training in an influential and philanthropic way, she explains. The best way to judge a clinic is to find out what work it has done for clients in the past and to assess whether it has had a significant, positive and lasting impact on its community, she adds.
When comparing law school clinics, experts suggest weighing the following factors:
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Who Benefits From Clinics?
Law school applicants with an interest in politics, social justice or constitutional law often appreciate the public service mission of many law school clinics.
Aspiring prosecutors, public defenders and private sector litigators can greatly benefit from attending a school with a strong clinical program that emphasizes trial law and honing the rhetorical skills required to be an effective trial attorney, experts say.
However, a trial law clinic may not be well-suited for aspiring corporate attorneys who intend to focus on a transactional legal specialty, such as mergers and acquisitions, says Thomas Simeone, the managing partner at Simeone & Miller, a personal injury law firm in the District of Columbia. Though law school clinics often focus on trial law, there are some law schools which offer transactional law clinics, including prestigious institutions like Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School.
Simeone, an adjunct law professor at the George Washington University Law School who teaches trial advocacy, says prospective students should consider the type of lawyer they want to become when evaluating the quality of a school’s clinical program.
He says a strong clinical program is crucial for applicants who have an interest in criminal law or who plan to work for a small law firm where trial work is expected. For aspiring trial attorneys, Simeone says a law school clinic in a trial-heavy law discipline like landlord-tenant law is beneficial, because it forces them to become comfortable in a courtroom.
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How to Identify a High-Quality Clinic
Regardless of the legal specialty a law school clinic focuses on, a key measure of quality is whether it involves rendering a variety of legal services to clients in legal distress, as opposed to providing a limited scope of services, experts say.
“Many clinics have no real clients,” said Paul Mitassov, a Toronto-based lawyer and the owner of Paul Mitassov Law, via email. “These are more accurately called seminars and workshops. Seminars and workshops can be useful. But you are looking for a clinic. Make sure to get one.”
Mitassov, who received his J.D. from the University of Toronto in 2013, said the best law school clinics afford students the opportunity to work on multiple legal cases so they understand what a typical case looks like. “This air of reality is invaluable in keeping a student grounded,” Mitassov said, adding that one way to assess whether a clinic provides meaningful, hands-on experience is to ask how many clients the clinic has served over the past three years.
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Another question to ask is whether the clinic provides clients with comprehensive legal representation or just an initial legal consultation. “It is vital for a student to see how a case develops and how early decisions affect the case’s trajectory,” Mitassov said. “Only full representation through all steps of a case can achieve this.”
According to Mitassov, it’s also important to ask how many spots are available in various law school clinics, because if the clinic programs are small, that could signal a red flag. In addition, a high-quality clinic will typically grant course credit, and it will also involve a high number of practice hours, he said. “A clinic that only gives you a couple hours of work per semester is of limited value.”
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How to Gauge the Strength of Law School Clinics originally appeared on usnews.com
