By Andrew Cohen
It’s no secret among law school clinics that great collaboration increases the odds of great results. The more closely students work with clinical supervisors, the more connected clinic leaders are with communities they serve, the stronger relationships clinics forge with outside partners — it all empowers their mission and maximizes their impact.
That’s why Mridula Raman wanted to renew an annual gathering of Northern California law school clinic leaders that had been dormant for several years.
Deputy director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic, Raman was raving about the annual national clinical conference last spring with Co-Director Ty Alper. When she noted that she knew many more clinicians from far-off parts of the country than from her own area, Alper said there used to be a yearly meeting for local school law school clinics — the Northern California Clinical Conference — and suggested reviving it.
“I took that suggestion and tried to run with it,” Raman says.
Earlier this month, after months of coordination, UC Berkeley Law hosted a packed gathering where its clinic leaders joined colleagues from the law schools at Pacific (McGeorge), Santa Clara, Stanford, UC Law San Francisco, and the University of San Francisco. In all, nearly 70 clinicians attended the conference, which will be held at the University of San Francisco next year.
Panels addressed a wide swath of topics, including the history of clinical legal education, ways to partner well with nonprofit legal services organizations, approaches for incorporating students with disabilities and learning challenges into clinical work, effective teaching strategies, California’s criminal legal system reform and retrenchment, and the growth of generative AI in legal work.
“The conference reignited a sense of connection and really underscored for me what a vibrant and supportive community this is,” Raman says. “It validated why these types of gatherings are important, and I’m hoping we can maintain some cross-school collaborations throughout the year. We learn so much from other clinicians, and we can get new ideas and support from each other on seminar teaching, student supervision, client work, and scholarship.”
Personal and professional rewards
Clinics give law students the chance to do hands-on, high-stakes, rewarding work alongside and under the close supervision of experienced practitioners. Students at UC Berkeley Law and other schools have increasingly pursued this type of direct experience, capitalizing on opportunities to help disadvantaged clients in need and gain valuable training that legal employers value highly.
UC Berkeley Law’s surging Clinical Program has nearly 300 students this year participating in six in-house clinics and eight clinics at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC). The program is adding three clinics over the next three years, fueling its push to advance racial, economic, and social justice with students trained by faculty with deep subject matter expertise.
Conference planning committee member and UC Berkeley Law alum Gail Silverstein ’99 called it “imperative” to revive the event to create community within the area’s clinical faculty, share knowledge and resources, and reflect on important regional social justice and legal education issues that transcend each individual law school.
As UC Law San Francisco’s Associate Dean for Experiential Learning and the faculty co-director of its Center for Social Justice, she noted that law students are better served when their clinical professors take time to reflect about their teaching and legal practice and learn new strategies, knowledge, and mindsets.
“We’re in a very challenging time for the social justice mission of clinical programs,” Silverstein says. “Clinical faculty need to sustain hope and be reminded of the strength in community in order to remain strong social justice legal leaders, teachers, and mentors to our students. This conference proved yet again how intentional community can provide a structure for individuals to learn and prosper even in challenging moments.”
Brainstorming best practices
Clinical legal educators are seeing an evolving student body, transitions to hybrid and remote work, the rise of AI in legal education and practice, growing student demands for pragmatic offerings, and increased exposure to traumatic events with local, national, and international impact. The conference examined the traditional principles of clinical legal education and brainstormed innovations for modifying them to best serve their students and clients in an evolving era.
A presentation led by EBCLC Clinical Program Director Rebecca Oyama and EBCLC Social Work Practice Director Whitney Rubenstein ’14 aimed to expose clinicians to the power of holistic legal services models and interdisciplinary collaboration. This includes social workers embedded in legal teams and clients receiving assistance on multiple legal issues within the same clinic.
“At EBCLC we see giving students experiences in these emerging practice models as critical,” says Oyama, who also served on the conference planning committee. “It not only results in better outcomes for the client, but also provides a robust and relevant educational experience for students in how to work in a collaborative environment wherever their careers take them.”
EBCLC students, Oyama explains, learn that a client-centered approach requires seeing people as multifaceted beings whose legal and non-legal interests intersect and diverge at different junctures. She says the goal is for students to better understand the connective lines between their clients’ lives, the legal systems they interact with, and larger social issues being worked out in the public sphere — and that the conference accelerated this effort.
“We’re so fortunate to be situated in a region of the country where clinical legal education is right at the edge of innovation and clinics are constantly shifting the wider legal landscape,” Oyama says. “By coming together, we gain invaluable lessons from those in our clinical community who are grappling with similar legal issues and pedagogical questions. Seeing each other in person also paves the way for regular communication throughout the year and reminds us we do this work in community with each other.”