Angela Drake & Stacey Nicks, “Perspectives on the Veterans Clinic Model at Law Schools: Lessons Learned by an Instructor and a Student”

This article examines the Veterans Clinic at the University of Missouri School of Law from the perspective of the supervisor. The clinic operates using weekly debriefing sessions. Students are paired and “encouraged to reach out to experts in the field” (946).

The article discusses the value that discussions with existing clinic directors provided with respect to successes and failures can have for new supervisors.

“When I accepted the challenge to start the Veterans Clinic, my first task was to talk to someone who has done it before. Professor Tammy Kudialis, who is the Director of Project SALUTE and Clinical Program Administrator at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, was both gracious and generous with her time. She shared forms. She instructed me of successes and failures. She told me what she would do differently, now that she has the benefit of hindsight. She gave me courage”(950).

Since then, a robust information system was developed through a listserv which includes supervising lawyers for forty or more law school clinics and programs. This system is used to help supervisors learn or have their questions answered, i.e., “[very] few days go by in which I do not learn something new from the listserv, or post a question which is later meaningfully answered” (950).

The supervisor indicated that:

“[having] supervised many associates as a law firm partner, my initial plan was to supervise the students as a senior partner in a law firm would supervise her staff: issuing edicts through task lists on each file in the Clinic and then calling for reports at our weekly debriefing conference. For some students, this worked well. For other students, this curbed their enthusiasm to the point of bitterness, especially when they did not complete the task in a timely manner” (955-56).

They found file discussions with the larger group were more effective than calling out an individual’s progress. In light of the value modelling can have for student learning, the supervisor “[assigned herself] to several files as the second person, [billed] time like the student, and [tried] to model the work [they] expect to see” (956).

Angela Drake & Stacey Nicks, “Perspectives on the Veterans Clinic Model at Law Schools: Lessons Learned by an Instructor and a Student” (2015) 45:4 U Mem L Rev 943.