LawClinic.TV

Reflecting on the Clinic Midway through the Semester

Here are Doug Cutherbertson and Philip Wells talking about their experiences in Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic at the midway point of the semester. Their comments capture both the predictable sequence of the casework and the unpredictable, indeed unique qualities of each individual we represent. Philip's comment captures the recurring pattern of predictable legal procedures involving always different people and facts.

That aspect of law practice informs one of my central teaching goals in clinical education. I hope to give my students a firm conceptual grounding in legal problem solving so they can focus less on their lawyering and more on the person in front of them. In my experience, technical expertise in a given area of law can be a scaffold upon which creative lawyering and close attention to the unique individual in front of us can stand. I fear that technical expertise is an end in itself for too many of us, rather than the gateway to careful, individualized professional practices.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student

Participating in the Criminal Defense Clinic, Whether or Not You Become a Criminal Defense Lawyer

In this clip, Doug Cuthebertson talks about his work in the clinic and closes with the observation that the Criminal Defense Clinic will be a valuable experience, regardless of whether he chooses to practice criminal law.  This is another insightful point from Doug.  Although there is more specialization in law school than there used to be, clinical legal education and legal education overall still aims to graduate lawyers who can go in any number of directions after law school, rather than lawyers with very specific kinds of expertise.  As a clinical teacher, my goal is to offer an experience that will teach my students broadly applicable lessons about the law and lawyering, through the criminal defense clinic. 

Here Doug Cuthbertson also talks about how we come to represent our clients.  As he notes, we work with New York County Defender Services, one of the two trial level public defender groups in Manhattan.  As Doug notes, our clients don't get the initial say in whether we, or a lawyer from County Defender, first interviews them, but of course if a client does not consent to student representation, he or she would be represented by a lawyer from the County Defender or another licensed attorney, rather than a student permitted to practice under supervision.  I have been involved in clinical legal education for more than twenty years and I can count the clients who have refused student representation on one hand.  I think most people are impressed by how prepared the students are and appreciate that my students and I are going to work hard on their behalf.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student

Learning to Mediate

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I am particularly pleased to share this clip in which W. Dyer Halpern talks about preparing for, and mediating, his first case. I am so pleased to share this clip because it introduces you to our Mediation Clinic, one of the longest standing clinics at Fordham.  Run by my colleague, Professor Jackie Nolan-Haley,   a noted expert and pioneer in ADR, the mediation clinic gives students the opportunity to act as mediators and explore a non-representational role. 

I need not tell anyone how important mediation has become. I think it is an important skill and every lawyer should have some mediation training (I am covered by marriage - my lawyer-wife is now a mediator and we reframe, caucus and listen actively a lot in our house).

I am also pleased to share this clip because Dyer is so expressive and comes across so well in the video. I think you will feel the range of emotions he felt in this experience, from his surprise at his nervousness, to his pleasure at accomplishing something worthwhile for the parties and for himself. It is a delightful clip.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Mediations

Getting Ready for the First Time

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Each time we start with a new group of students, law clinic teachers have to face the problem of what to do with them before they actually interact with a client for the first time. This is the problem of how to get into the water - do we jump in first and show them it is not that cold (who believes the words - "it's not that cold, really"?), do we jump in with them and share the experience or do we stand on the edge and shove them in? Each approach has its advantages and adherents. 

In this clip, two of my colleagues, Mike Martin and Marcella Silverman, talk about two different ways of preparing students for that first client interaction. Mike's clip offers the more orthodox approach, planning and simulation followed by student performance and reflection (by the way, I am rereading Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner - it is a great book and really quite radical - I had either forgotten or never realized, that he, along with William Simon, was an early exponent of the far out idea that expertise involves intuition or some other faculty that cannot be reduced to formal, deductive logic). 

As I read the clinical literature, Mike captures the classic approach, urged by the many persuasive advocates of maximizing student responsibility and autonomy. I contrast the orthodox approach with the much used, and sometimes explicitly defended, school of modeling and progressive responsibility. Marcella's description captures that approach perfectly, as she describes modeling a first interview, sharing a second interview and then turning over the third interview to the student. 

The debate over these two approaches sometimes has somewhat of an inside baseball feel to it - often the difference between the two approaches is very subtle and the theoretical justifications for each school of thought have their pluses and minuses and are untested and likely untestable. The classic approach highlights the value of students taking ownership of their cases and developing their own lawyering styles.

There is some truth in the notion that what we learn from others we may forget, but what we teach ourselves we have forever. Advocates of modeling and progressive responsibility observe that many students simply have no idea how to go about interviewing a client and many people learn a skill much more powerfully by example than they do from theory.

They also note that our fear that students will be so impressed by what we do that they will just imitate us and never develop their own style is simply self-aggrandizing and does not capture the complex reality of developing expertise. It takes fair skill for a non-expert to imitate an expert and that can be a useful way station on the way to one's own expert performance.

When I started teaching, I talked like a classic student autonomy clinician, but acted a lot more like a modeler.Then I began to defend modeling and saw myself as a little heterodox (it was a thrilling feeling in my little world). These days I am back to talking like a classic autonomy clinician and more often acting like one, with a healthy dollop of modeling, as the situation warrants. Some settings and tasks are very challenging or require very particular technical skills. Those occasions often call for modeling. Often, however, I can prepare my students as Mike suggests and let them go in and have their first time at some lawyering task without me, followed by reflection and conversation. Not every situation permits it, but when I can shove the students into that ice cold water and then go have a cool drink and await their return, I think I have done a good day's work.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student

Investing In Relationships - The Core of Clinical Legal Education

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Those of us who teach in legal clinics have the privilege of spending a lot of time with our students and building relationships with them. For many students, those are their first professional relationships and we are among the first lawyers they get to observe up close, over an extended period of time.

So much of what the students take away from their clinical experience comes not from the conscious moments of teaching, when we execute a thought out plan for presenting ideas, but from the many moments of doing, when our conscious thoughts are on our clients and the tasks at hand. That was certainly my experience as a clinic student.

In this clip, my colleague Cheryl Bader, who co-teaches the Criminal Defense Clinic at Fordham with me, beautifully captures the joy of watching the students grow. I really like this clip. Watch the way Cheryl warms to the topic and the little smile that begins to play across her face as she talks about, and experiences in memory, her students' professional growth and development.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Clinical Legal Education, Law Clinic, Pro Bono Work, Legal Education, Legal Pedagogy, Teaching Law, Student Lawyers, Law Student, Blawg

Forensic Psychology Shapes Fordham Criminal Defense Clinic Students’ Sense of Legal Culture

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Fordham's Criminal Defense Clinic has an interdisciplinary component. We work with a graduate student in Forensic Psychology. In this clip my colleague, Professor Cheryl Bader, with whom I have had the great pleasure of teaching for the past several years, talks about the role those grad students play. In addition to working with our students on particular cases, the forensic psych students attend our weekly seminar and often are involved in team supervision meetings and casual conversations. I have come to greatly value their insights and observations about the legal system, our class discussion and a wide variety of matters.

So much of law school is about developing a professional identity and learning to think like a lawyer. That work requires immersion in the legal culture and I think there is a great deal of good that comes from the powerful shaping of identity that takes place over the course of a legal education (I know many disagree, but I still adhere to the old idea that the private bar's commitment to the rule of law is a very important safeguard of liberty and an important limit on official power). But I have also come to see that the immersion in legal culture should be leavened by significant exposure to other professional cultures and modes of thought. Like travel abroad, working with other professionals in law school should make us better members of our own culture - more appreciative of its strengths and more honest about its limits.

-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham University, Law School, Interdisciplinary Education, Legal Culture

The Alchemy of Building Trust

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I have met many people on one of the worst days of their lives. That is the lot of the criminal defense lawyer, particularly those of us who represent indigent clients. We meet our clients after they have been arrested, interrogated, processed and, sometimes, fed a mystery meat sandwich. We greet them in an interview booth, separated by mesh or thick glass and often as not, the huge gulfs of language, culture and background.

Even with the benefits of more than twenty years experience and graying hair, I still find the first meeting with my clients daunting. I think it is one of the hardest moments a lawyer can face and I know my students find initial interviews, and all their client interactions, very challenging.

In this clip, my colleague and pal, Cheryl Bader, captures the difficulties students face and what we do to help them prepare. As Cheryl notes, our key tools for preparation are simulation, or mock interviewing, and reflection, which is just clinical legal education speak for critique and analysis that is designed to help our students become self aware. The three central questions in these initial interview simulations are deceptively simple:

1) Can the student accurately describe how they are introducing themselves and beginning the interview;

2) Can he or she consciously adjust that introduction; and

3) Can he or she hear and understand what the client is saying?

Most of us take it as a matter of course that we know what we are saying and hear what other say to us. But gaining insight into what we are really communicating and the degree to which we can all do a better job in listening to others is a huge step toward developing into a skillful professional.

Gaining a client's trust is quite simple in the way many profound things are simple - we all listen and speak, but to listen well and have another person hear what we really wanted to say is a very difficult thing. If we can do that, we can gain the trust of our clients.

Reflections on Relationships with Clients

In these three clips Ashok Mathai, Suzanne Volpe and Tamara Conway talk about their experiences with gaining the trust of their clients. Ashok shares the challenges he faced in the criminal defense setting. In his typically perceptive way, he frames the issue from the client's point of view. So often we, the lawyers, are so focused on how nervous, busy or tired we are that we forget to think about the other person in the interaction. Ashok begins from the client's point of view. He also reminds us to be conscious of both difference and similarity between us and our clients and to account for both. In the end, however, the quality of the interaction will be determined by how genuinely we listen and care.

Suzanne offers us a different slice, talking about a relationship with a client that, upon reflection, might have been more professional. Many of us, when we start out, try too hard to be friends with our clients - I had this problem as a young lawyer and as a young teacher. It can be very hard to negotiate those early years in the professional role, when many of us are not comfortable with our authority or the distance it can engender in our relationships.

Tamara Conway tells the punch line to a successful case. Although I have had experiences in which some of the impact of a bad outcome was mitigated by a good relationship and other experiences where a good outcome did not repair a bad relationship, more often I have found that success in the case promotes good feelings. I particularly like Tamara's smile at the end of this clip. I think this memory, of both the event and the feeling, will stay with her for a long time.

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-- Ian Weinstein

Fordham, Law School, Lawyering, Criminal Defense, Student Reflection, Mock Interview

Learning to Trust Our Students and Waiting for Magic Moments

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A long time ago, when I was new to clinical teaching, I thought my job was to teach my students to think like me. After all, I was the best lawyer in the room. I knew the answers and I could see that they did not know the answers, or in many cases, the questions. The trick, I thought, was to get my answers to come out of their mouths.

To all my students from those early days, I can only say I think we had fun and you learned a lot, often despite me, because you are smart and able.

As time has gone by I have learned, at least a bit, to trust my students. By the time they get to me, they have been students for a long time and know a lot about learning new things. As I see it now, my job is to create a setting in which they can grow comfortable enough with the complexities of practicing law to make it their own.

Far from wanting my answers to come out of their mouths, I relish the moments when I see or hear them offer responses to professional problems that are authentically their own, rather than answers they think I will validate. I have come to look for the magic moments when I can see that they have integrated the knowledge they have gained with their own experiences and ideas - moments that I recognize more by their emotional content than by the ideas or analysis I may hear.

In this clip I talk about the moments when my students begin to look and act like lawyers, rather than students trying to be lawyers; when they discover, or come to believe, that they can argue to judges or offer real help to a client when he or she faces a tough decision. Those moments tell me that our time together has really made a difference because I know they have developed something that will last - their own way of being a lawyer.

As They Learn to Trust Themselves

In these three clips, Suzanne Volpe, Jeff Margolies and Romelia Leach each talk about memorable moments they experienced in their clinic work.

Suzanne was a student in my clinic and I so enjoyed working with her. I think her energy, engagement and charm really come through in this clip and you will understand why judges responded so positively to her all semester. She is very smart and sharp, but I think her real gift is evident in the clip and in the story she tells about the first time a judge called her counselor. Suzanne handled the experience well - unlike my clinic experience in which a judge first addressed me as counselor to tell me to quiet down in the spectator section and I ignored him because I thought he had to be talking to someone else. He finally addressed me as a law student and I took my conversation with a client's family into the hallway.

Jeff Margolies talks about an experience he had during an appellate argument. Although it did not go as he expected, he was able to overcome his surprise, make a good argument and do his best for his client.

Romelia Leach shares a story that reminds us that magic moments can occur at any time, not just in a courtroom, if we are as thoughtful and reflective as she is. In this clip she talks about what it meant to her when she recognized the enormous trust her client placed in her. That is one reason I so value doing criminal defense work with my students - having another person's liberty at stake is an awesome thing and really motivates us all to think hard about what we are doing. Of course I know all my colleagues take the role seriously, but it a criminal defense lawyer's conceit that others argue over money or other material things, but we defend liberty.

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 Bad Rehearsal Good Performance

Although I genuinely believe that my students do the hard work for themselves and I am privileged to watch and enjoy, I should also acknowledge that clinical teachers, including myself, have something to add to the process. There is a certain amount of doctrine and other information students need to master as well as skills they need to develop. For example, many think that interviewing is a skill you cannot learn, but compare folks who have learned and practiced it reflectively with those who have not and I think you will find impressive evidence for the proposition that it can be both learned and taught.

A perennial problem for clinical teachers is figuring out when our students are ready for the real thing. In this clip, my colleague Marcella Silverman talks about this problem. Marcella, like many clinicians, came to clinical teaching on the strength of her reputation as a thoughtful, smart, effective lawyer (unlike me - I came to clinical teaching the old fashioned way - I had a connection and my former teacher gave me a job). She learned the craft of teaching on the job.

Here, in her typically insightful way, Marcella captures the tremendous effort that goes into preparing students for an appearance on behalf of a client, the great anxiety that often attends the completion of that preparation and the happy outcome that flows from working hard with talented people. In the title to this entry, I offer my mantra for a poor final simulation, as we call rehearsal. Of course a good final simulation doesn't require any mantra.

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-- Ian Weinstein

Clinical Legal Education, Law School, Fordham