Clinic Opportunities Deepen:
By Frances Presma/Photos: Don Hamerman
Expanding Opportunities to Solve Real World Problems
Like many organizations seeking to revitalize inner-city communities, Goler-Depot Street Renaissance Community Development Corporation (Goler CDS) started out with a straightforward mission: to provide housing for low-income families and help small, minority-owned businesses get started in a largely derelict urban neighborhood. Once a vibrant African-American residential and commercial district in east Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Goler district fell victim to suburban flight after segregation ended and it was bisected by an interstate highway. One of the few institutions to remain was the 125-year-old Goler Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church, whose members spearheaded the formation of Goler CDC in the late 1990s.
Goler CDC’s plans became considerably more ambitious after urban planners solicited church and public input on revitalization plans. “People didn’t want to create a community of all low-wealth citizens, but one that would be diverse in age, ethnicity, and financial make-up. In that way it would be sustainable,” said Evon Smith, Goler CDC’s executive director. Plans that once focused on small, single-family residences for low-income families now include duplexes, an independent living residence for seniors, and the renovation of an old Hanes textile factory, owned by the church, into market-rate loft condominiums, intended to attract middle-class professionals. “The Gallery Lofts” would be developed as a joint venture between a Goler CDC subsidiary and a private Maryland developer.
In late summer, Smith asked Duke Law School’s Community Enterprise Clinic to review the draft operating agreement Goler CDC had negotiated with the developer. After doing so, Clinic student Virginia Frasure ’06 offered her opinion: The terms too heavily favored the developer.
“Tax law requires non-profits to have a certain amount of control in order to retain their exempt status. This agreement was unsafe for our client,” said Frasure. Her advice, backed by Clinic Director and Clinical Professor Andrew Foster, was that it had to be renegotiated.
The kind of expertise the Community Enterprise Clinic brings to our [community development] project is the kind that we wouldn't be able to afford.
- Goler CDC Chairman Michael Suggs
Goler CDC balked at doing so, as did the developer. But after several weeks of heated conference calls, both parties agreed to “serious changes,” said Frasure. “We finally got to the point where we were comfortable with the agreement.” Frasure also worked with Smith to rewrite Goler CDC’s articles of incorporation to give it proper authority to enter into the contract. “Goler was going to be a co-developer, but didn’t have corporate authority up to that point to be a developer,” she said. On a November evening in Goler CDC’s boardroom in the soon-to be renovated factory, Frasure is helping members of its board and staff understand these developments briefing them generally on tax laws pertaining to non-profits, and explaining how to distinguish activities that are related to the charitable purposes outlined in their articles from those that are not, and when and why they might consider setting up subsidiary corporations to accomplish their changing, and increasingly ambitious, community development goals. Both her presentation and the quality of Duke’s legal representation get high marks from her audience. “The kind of expertise the Community Enterprise Clinic brings to our project is the kind that we wouldn’t be able to afford,” said Goler CDC chair Michael Suggs. “They’re on the cutting-edge in terms of these types of collaborations. It’s important that we have someone on our side who can interpret the law and advise us what the implications are for us as we forge ahead.”
Expanding Opportunities to Solve Real World Problems
Frasure is quick to point out that she got something lasting from her work with Goler CDC: experience. “Drafting the articles of incorporation helped me to understand what corporations are about. Thinking about whether a corporation has authority to engage in certain activities, or how best to negotiate a joint venture that would be fair to the client are not issues of relevance only to non-profits.”
Having also worked in Duke’s AIDS Legal Project as a 2L, Frasure is emphatic in her endorsement of the Law School’s clinical programs.
“The range of skills you develop in clinics–interacting with clients, defining the legal issues, asking questions, and developing good, trusting relationships so that clients are forthcoming–are skills that are invaluable no matter what practice you go into.”
Clinical options form an integral part of a well-rounded legal education, says Dean Katharine Bartlett. “Any great law school has to have a terrific blend of conventional academic curriculum that teaches students to think critically, and courses that offer them hands-on opportunities to apply what they have learned academically in a supervised setting, so that when they leave here they can both think critically and have some facility with handling real world problems. Experiential learning is all about piecing the two together–offering students an essential opportunity to develop skills they can bring into any future practice.”
Duke Law students have more opportunities than ever to build that experiential bridge between law school and practice. The current academic year has seen the launch of three new clinics that join the established AIDS Legal Project, Children’s Education Law Clinic and Community Enterprise Clinic. The Low-income Taxpayer Clinic, in which students handle disputes with the Internal Revenue Service, welcomed its first class and clients in January, as did the Animal Law Clinic, which allows students to work on a diverse range of legal issues relating to animal welfare and control on a field placement basis. Students in the Guantanamo Defense Clinic, which began in October, are directly assisting the military lawyers charged with defending detainees in the war on terror before military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.
Still more clinical options will be available in the coming academic year when the Death Penalty Clinic returns to the curriculum. An environmental clinic, a partnership with Duke’s Nicholas School for the Environment and Earth Sciences, which would immerse students in cases involving environmental law and policy, has received faculty approval and could open in early 2007.
A Unified Program
TThe clinic suite that occupies one floor of the Law School’s new wing is symbolic of the commitment to and growing depth of its clinical program. Housing the AIDS Legal Project and Children’s Education Law, Community Enterprise, and Low-income Taxpayer Clinics–bringing the four “live client” clinics together for the first time–the space has well-appointed meeting and reception areas, offices for clinical faculty, client interview rooms, and a spacious work area with computer stations exclusively for clinic students. The clinics operate as a unified program, essentially as a public interest practice.
“You walk through that glass door and it’s truly like a firm,” says Lauren Donner Chait ’06, who was enrolled in the AIDS Legal Project in the fall semester. “Now that all the student work stations are together, it’s a whole sphere of confidentiality,” she adds, explaining that it facilitates collaboration and support among students without compromising the confidentiality that is essential to all lawyer-client interactions. Donner Chait likens the relationship of clinic students and their supervising attorneys to that of associates to partners.
Adds AIDS Legal Project Director and Clinical Professor Carolyn McAllaster, the new space conveys a sense of professionalism to clients as well as students. “Our clients have an enormous sense of pride, coming to a real law office.”
“When we were designing the new wing, the decision was made that if our clinics were brought together, there would be some synergies between them–the clinical faculty could work together and ensure that the whole of what we were offering in terms of the clinics would be greater than the sum of its parts, and that any one clinic would be better as a result of having other models close by,” says Bartlett. In fact, coming together has reenergized the clinical faculty, says McAllaster, whose clinic is now in its eleventh year.
“It’s really stimulating to be working with a whole group of people who have similar goals.”
One of those common goals is to become a national leader in teaching clinical skills. Equipped with state-of-the-art technology, the clinic wing boasts cameras in the conference and interview rooms, and video monitors in all faculty offices. Thanks to a technology fellowship grant from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology, clinical faculty are in the midst of year-long training that will put them at the forefront of using video technology in teaching clinical skills, such as interviewing, in an efficient and effective way.
When we were designing the new wing, the decision was made that if our clinics were brought together, there would be some synergies between them.
- Dean Katharine Bartlett
“The technology allows us to observe students as they learn and practice skills in different ways than do our traditional role-play exercises,” says Clinical Professor Jane Wettach, director of the Children’s Education Law Clinic. She and her colleagues are concentrating on breaking down the interview process into sub-skills, such as building rapport and trust, asking the right opening question, following up effectively to elicit important details, reflecting the client’s feelings, and engaging the client in the resolution of the problem. “With the sub-skills identified, the process of critiquing can become more specific and deliberate,” says Wettach.
“As a faculty, we are reconsidering the way we teach interviewing and the skills we want to impart to students. It is forcing us, as teachers, to overcome any complacency we may have in our teaching, and help students avoid complacency about their own skills.”
“Our goal is to help students develop as far as they can in a semester, and also lay the groundwork for an internal mechanism of self-teaching and self-learning,” adds Foster. “We hope that when students get out in practice they don’t get to a place of basic competence and stop, but keep trying to do better — by finding mentors, or challenging themselves to improve their skills as lawyer by learning substantive law, or becoming a better listener, draftsperson, counselor, or whatever is appropriate to their practice.
Serving Society, Shaping Professionals
While they deal with distinct substantive issues, all of Duke’s legal clinics offer the same opportunity to upper-year students: a chance to sharpen practical skills in a way that profoundly helps underserved communities. Duke Law clinics don’t need to look far for clients; each fills a regional void for affordable legal services in its area of specialization, as scores of appreciative clients and community service providers will attest.
“I’ve found the AIDS Legal Project to be an invaluable service for people who need expert advice and advocacy,” says Dr. John Bartlett, who directed Duke Hospital’s Infectious Diseases Clinic for 17 years. “Many of our patients are impoverished, and they may have a history of difficult relationships with authority. The sensitive, caring, and expert support that they receive from the Project has been tremendously helpful.”
“The Children’s Education Law Clinic really serves as a voice for parents and students, who generally don’t understand the educational or disciplinary process at play when a kid violates a rule at school, and don’t know what educational services are available to them,” says Sandra Jenkins*, who has been represented by a law student in disputes involving her son’s special education services and school suspension.
Brenda Berlin, supervising attorney with the Children’s Education Law Clinic, hopes clinical work instills a sense of professionalism in students that encompasses a commitment to ongoing public interest work.
“I want students to think a lot about what it means to be a lawyer and what kind of lawyer they want to be, and I want them to develop the professional skills that will enable them to be that kind of lawyer. I also want their eyes and minds to open up to the need for lawyers at all levels of our society. We don’t expect our students to all go out and become public interest lawyers, but I hope they will always be open to serving those people in society who don’t have advocates and can’t afford to have advocates.”
That’s the primary lesson Lei Mei ’05 says he derived from his semester in the AIDS Legal Project. Although he appreciates the solid legal skills he gained in interviewing and developing cases, which he finds highly useful in his current work as an intellectual property lawyer, it is the importance of pro bono work that has stayed with him.
“I’m pretty sure that most clinical alumni will make a long- term commitment to doing pro bono work in the future. The practical skills are great, but the Law School has an obligation to train future lawyers to be ‘citizen lawyers,’ as well.” Concerned about the growing AIDS epidemic and lack of legal services for people facing the disease in his native China, Mei was instrumental in arranging McAllaster’s 2005 trip to meet with clinical faculty and students at Peking’s University’s law school.
Jesse Smallwood ’04 admits that he signed up for the Children’s Education Law Clinic solely for skill-building purposes; with plans to become a litigator following a federal clerkship–he started practice with Williams and Connolly in Washington, D.C. in January–he wanted to gain some solid experience representing people and trying cases.
“From the legal experience, I gained a great respect for and enjoyment of pro bono work,” he says. “I learned a lot about the responsibility of practicing law and the importance of paying attention to the smallest details in handling a case and representing a client. But it was incredibly gratifying to see theories learned in class translate into practice and reality–to see what good these theories can come to when applied correctly in a real life case.”
Last year Heather Holloway ’05 won a national award for her representation, through the Children’s Education Law Clinic, of a high school senior who faced permanent expulsion from school for an incident that occurred off school property. Having taken the case through an evidentiary hearing, and appeals to the Board of Education and state Superior Court, Holloway, now clerking for the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Fourth Department, says the experience changed her career plans. Having been headed for a transactional practice, she now hopes to pursue a career in civil rights, perhaps as a prosecutor.
“In the end, I really got to see what I could do, and had the benefit of great supervision,” says Holloway who promotes a clinic experience to any law student who will listen. “Why not take the time and opportunity to think about what you really want to do with your law degree–focus in and focus your life before you leave law school and don’t have anyone there to support and mold you?”