January 29, 2009
School of Law looks back on 30 years of clinical training
When Alan Kirtley graduated from Indiana University’s law school in 1972, he had had no clinical training. That’s because his law school — and nearly all others at the time — didn’t offer clinics that gave students experience working on real cases. While medical schools have long considered clinical education essential, law schools have been slower to catch on.
It was 1979 before the UW got its first clinic — a criminal law clinic called the University District Defenders. This year, its 30th anniversary, the clinical program has gone from that one clinic to 11, and from working with a few law students to working with 60 percent of each graduating class.
Kirtley, an associate professor of law, has been here almost from the beginning — creating most of the clinics and directing the clinical program for many years. In fact, when he arrived in 1984, there were no clinics. The University District Defenders had lost its grant funding and ceased to exist in 1982, so Kirtley — who had directed clinics at the University of Michigan and what was then the University of Puget Sound Law School (now at Seattle University) — applied for a grant to start a criminal law clinic.
“We started with criminal law because I’d done some work in the public defender’s office and I knew Bob Boruchowitz, the director at the time, would provide some help — give us cases to work on, some space, some staff support,” Kirtley said. “And John Junker, a criminal law professor here at the UW, was also very supportive.”
The clinic was started with a grant from the federal Department of Education and was successful enough that the law school eventually took over the funding for it. But those early days were tough. “We started with eight students in a little teeny corner in the Smith Tower,” Kirtley said. “We were so underfunded that we had one phone line for the entire clinic.”
These days, the clinical program has prime digs taking up half of the second floor of the new William H. Gates Hall. But its methods haven’t changed much. Each clinic has a student-to-teacher ratio of no more than 10 to one. Typically, students start with some formal training in the particular area of law they’ll be working in. That’s followed by role playing each step of the real case they’ll be working on before seeing their first clients.
Deborah Maranville, a 20-year veteran of the clinics and their current director, explained how it works in her unemployment compensation clinic. “I’m just getting ready to do a couple of lectures on the law of unemployment compensation. Then the students will take on cases, but as they’re preparing their cases we’ll have classroom work that will involve some simulations of each of the steps — doing an interview, doing a direct examination — all the pieces. Then for the cases they take on, they’ll do some written preparation and I’ll comment on it. Then we’ll do mock pieces of the hearing, and I’ll accompany them to the actual hearing and provide feedback.”
The feedback can sometimes be painful. Maranville recalled one student who was cross-examining an employer’s witness very aggressively, and the judge told him he needed to back off. But the student paid no attention and went on. After the hearing, Maranville echoed the judge’s opinion in her comments, but the student again seemed unwilling to listen. So she obtained a recording of the proceedings and asked the student to listen to it.
“He came to me and said, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even hear the judge say that.’ He was just so wired. That’s the sort of thing that if he had been on his own, he wouldn’t have even realized what he was doing.”
The goal, Maranville said, is to teach the student not only what to do, but also to reflect on it afterward. “The law is always changing and lawyers have to learn to keep improving,” she said. “Having some experience, reflecting on the experience and receiving feedback will help get them to that goal.”
It may seem obvious today that such experiences in law school would be valuable, but the push to add clinics to law schools didn’t really gain traction until 1969, when the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility was funded by the Ford Foundation and championed clinical legal education. Later, an Iowa congressman was instrumental in getting the Department of Education involved in offering grants for such programs.
Nearly all of the UW’s clinics were started with grant funding, but the law school has supported them when they become established.
Recent data demonstrates the importance of legal clinics. A study, called “After the JD,” surveyed a nationally representative sample of about 3,000 people who became eligible to practice law for the first time in 2000. When asked what aspects of law school best prepared them for practice, these graduates ranked clinics the highest of any aspect of the formal law school curriculum. Beyond that, the clinics provide a valuable service in that their clients are people who couldn’t otherwise afford a lawyer.
One of the first graduates of the UW criminal law clinic back in 1984-85 was Dan Satterberg, the current King County prosecutor.
“Acting as a defense attorney made me a better prosecutor,” he said of his experience. “I could see the impact that the justice system had on real people’s lives and it gave me a better appreciation for the role of ‘counselor’ that goes with the job of attorney. I still remember most of the cases I handled.”
More recent graduate Kim Gunning is equally enthusiastic, calling the unemployment law clinic she attended in 2004 “the most useful thing in law school.” She compared it to traditional legal education, in which students read and analyze cases.
“When you’re reading cases, the facts have already been elicited and packaged for you,” she said. “As a student you tend to not think about how the facts came to be packaged as they are.”
In the clinic, Gunning said, she learned to ask the right questions to get the facts and to listen carefully. She also learned that clients don’t always follow their lawyers’ advice.
Now a solo practitioner specializing in employment law, Gunning serves on the board of the Unemployment Law Project, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance and information to people who have been denied unemployment benefits in Washington.
Kirtley and Maranville draw a lot of satisfaction from watching students become lawyers as they work in the clinics.
“When I think about my work I see this whole parade of students who come to a clinic wanting to have a chance to learn to be a lawyer before they leave law school,” Kirtley said.
“Many of them are very insecure about taking that role on. Those that seem to suggest that they’re not scared are perhaps the most scared. The process we take them through in giving them the legal theory and knowledge they need, then having them role play and practice what they’re going to do raises their confidence level to help them get ready to do the real thing. Then they do the real thing and they do it successfully and they help a client. It’s a milestone for these folks.
“It’s their first case. I know this sounds hokey, but it sometimes brings tears to my eyes to watch them and see how much they have grown as a professional.”
Maranville expressed similar sentiments. “My eyes light up when I start talking cases with students,” she said. “I love working with them, especially one on one, one on two. I love watching the students grow. I love feeling like I’m having a little bit of influence in transforming legal education.”
For more information about the clinical law program, go to http://www.law.washington.edu/Clinics/.
