A role for clinics - broadening employability options, skills, and awareness of law students: it’s not just about working for a private law firm or being a barrister

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Curran, L. ORCID: 0000-0002-6371-2975, 2024. A role for clinics - broadening employability options, skills, and awareness of law students: it’s not just about working for a private law firm or being a barrister. In: European Network of Clinical legal Education and the International Journal of Clinical Education Conferences, 22-24 July 2024.

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Abstract

This is a paper presented at the European Network of Clinical legal Education and the International Journal of Clinical Education Conferences at the University of Amsterdam Law School on 22 July 2024.

Clinical Legal Education and teaching law firms, such as NLS Legal at Nottingham Law School (a ‎regulated law firm), play a significant role in developing competency, ethics, and legal practice skills. ‎This includes the hard skills such as interpersonal relationships, teamwork, professional obligations ‎and responsibility, file management, as well as the value of pro bono and access to justice. These ‎clinics expose law students to the real world and the contexts of clients from different backgrounds. ‎Law clinics can also stimulate their students’ awareness beyond traditional law pathways. They can ‎expose them to roles within non-government organisations, the civil service, statutory authorities, ‎regulators. Our future lawyers can play an important role in ensuring the public good at a systems ‎level.‎

This paper focuses on the importance and value of developing law students’ awareness of a role in ‎improving laws, policies and decision making and advocating for such improvements. Around the ‎world, policy clinics are emerging. Clients of such policy clinics can include NGOs, and regulators that ‎are trying to provide input of direct service experience into policy frameworks. Many law students ‎end up working in policy and legislative roles without having been trained effectively in the skills ‎they need. Policy Clinics can develop skills for good policy that is joined up with the lived experience ‎of people who need to abide by the laws and policies that they create. ‎

Law clinics are ideally situated for students to attain skills in policy making, advocacy and lawmaking ‎‎- importantly ensuring this is not disconnected from how laws and policies affect members of the ‎community particularly the most disadvantaged. Senior policy entities that hire law students have ‎lamented the fact that they often leave university without skills that prepare them for jobs that exist ‎in the policy realm. ‎

Policy clinics, this paper will argue, are ideal for broadening employability options, awareness, and ‎skills for our students. Competencies for the SQE and desired by regulators such as the LSB and SRA ‎are also covered. The presenter has run policy clinics, has been the Director of a human rights NGO, ‎the Director of a legal centre, policy specialist, a lobbyist, and has had input into an array of public ‎inquiries, reviews, and investigations and has run/s policy clinics. From this vantage point, she ‎argues that equipping our students at law school with critical skills in problem identification, policy ‎research, submission and recommendation, campaign work, written and oral communication skills, ‎identifying influencers, presenting persuasive and evidence-based arguments and advice to relevant ‎decision makers. ‎ References are provided in the paper.

Item Type:

Conference contribution

Creators:

Curran, L.

Date:

July 2024

Identifiers: