Conclusion
In a time when many decry the need for a bridge between the ivory tower of academia and the practicing lawyer, the experiences of the founders of the Law School Consortium Project demonstrate how that bridge may be built. If law schools across the nation provided similar support to solo and small-firm practitioners, both the legal profession and legal education could be transformed. Perhaps, most important, law schools would play a significant role in increasing access to legal services for low and moderate-income individuals and communities.
How to Join the Law School Consortium Project
Based on the exciting successes of the founding law schools, the Open Society Institute’s Program on Law & Society (L&S) has committed to continue to support the Law School Consortium Project by funding the Central Consortium to provide technical and other assistance to new members.
As described in more detail above, joining the Law School Consortium Project can provide benefits to law schools, students, graduates, the legal profession, and low and moderate-income individuals and communities. By joining the Project, law schools can:
- provide solo and small-firm practitioners with guidance and services to enhance their practices and contribute to their professional development;
- expand access to quality affordable legal services for low and moderate-income individuals and communities;
- respond to the needs of their public service-minded law students by providing them with role models and expanded employment options;
- strengthen their ties to their alumni by involving them as network members, mentors, or sources of financial and other support; and
- enrich their curricula, faculty scholarship, and clinical programs.
Institutions that join the Law School Consortium Project will receive technical and other assistance from the Central Consortium. The Central Consortium facilitates communication among the Project’s member schools and provides forums to share learning about best practices. It serves as a centralized clearinghouse of information about the activities of member schools and maintains a Project web site. In addition, it disseminates information about the member school projects to the public to increase awareness of the work of the Project and encourage replication of programs at new schools.
Deborah Howard, the Director of the Central Consortium, has worked closely with the founding member schools as they built their models, and has documented the learning gained from their experiences. Ms. Howard, who is an attorney with a master’s degree in organization development, will provide law schools selected to participate in the Project with consulting in the strategic planning, development, design, and assessment of practitioner support programs. In addition, as members of the Project, new schools will be able to consult with, and receive mentoring from, the founding member schools.
It is important, of course, that law schools interested in participating in the Project and receiving technical assistance share a commitment to the Project’s overall goal. The goal is to extend the educational and professionalism missions of law schools to support solo and small-firm lawyers to develop economically viable and professionally satisfying practices that also increase access to justice for underserved individuals and communities.
It is understood that each school will design its own program, consistent with that school’s mission, resources, and constituencies. Based on the experience of the founding schools, however, there seem to be two clear prerequisites to success: (1) well-developed plans for the financial sustainability of the program; and (2) a broad-based commitment from the institutional leadership and others to integrate the program into the law school.
If you are interested in applying for Project membership, please contact:
Lovely Dhillon
Executive Director
Law School Consortium Project
415-561-6699
email: ldhillon@lawschoolconsortium.net
Contact Information for the Original Models
CUNY Law School
Fred Rooney, Project Director
CUNY Law School
65-21 Main Street
Flushing, NY 11367
(718) 340-4451
rooney@mail.law.cuny.edu
Sue Bryant, Dean of Academic Affairs
CUNY Law School
65-21 Main Street
Flushing, NY 11367
(718) 340-4313
Bryant@mail.law.cuny.edu
Maryland University School of Law
Denis Murphy
Project Director
Civil Justice, Inc.
321 East 25th Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
(410) 235-0480
dmurphy@law.umaryland.edu
Northeastern University School of Law
Jim Rowan, Professor and Director of Clinical Education
Northeastern University School of Law
716 Columbus Avenue #212
Roxbury, MA 02120
(617) 373-3347
j.rowan@Nunet.neu.edu
Large portions of this guidebook appear in The Law School Consortium Project: Law Schools Supporting Graduates to Increase Access to Justice for Low and Moderate-Income Individuals and Communities, Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. XXIX, Book III (2002). St. Mary’s withdrew as a member of the Law School Consortium Project in July of 2000.
The CUNY Model also organized the Employment Discrimination Practice Group. This group, which had seven participants and lasted approximately one semester, functioned as a graduate seminar for alumni who work in the employment law field.
The project provides members with access to discounts for such services as online legal research, continuing legal education programs, time-keeping software, and malpractice insurance.
Members are able to include marketing information on the project’s web site, as well as links to personal web sites, when applicable. Members were given free access to the Law School’s summer mediation course that led to mediator certification in the State of Maryland.
Network members gradually began to narrow their practices and to focus on one or more areas of law rather than attempt to be jacks-of-all trades. The network, thus, became like a virtual law firm with members specializing in different areas and able to refer casework back and forth. In fact, one network member stated: “In essence, it’s like being part of a large firm, but still maintaining your independence”. The Project Director began to recruit members with an eye toward those practitioners who would be able either to bring in a new practice area or geographic diversity to better serve the community and to enhance the marketing of network members’ services.
The project offered participants the opportunity to participate in a mental health seminar. The seminar was designed to help students and practitioners learn about mental health issues experienced by survivors and children of survivors of domestic violence, as well as the impact of the psychological stresses and pressures involved in domestic violence practice. Project staff wanted to make the students and junior practitioners aware of the pressures that are associated with this type of work while providing the senior practitioners with a forum to give them the support they need to continue working in this area. Their experience with this seminar confirmed the sense of project staff members that there is a potential for burnout for practitioners working in the domestic violence area and that providing a sense of community and a vehicle for self-care through networking is valuable.
All practitioners were provided with written coursework materials and a Community Resource Book. The book was designed to help them expand their knowledge about services available and encourage them to enlist non-legal resources to support their domestic violence practice. Three network members are no longer participating in the project. Two of them resigned because they felt they were over-committed and unable to participate fully. One member was asked to leave because of a lack of active participation.
Network members are provided with access to a database of small businesses in the nearby Boston Empowerment Zone to help them in their marketing activities.
In addition to developing the network of attorneys, the Project Director has worked to ensure that the practitioners are able to take advantage of the connections the Urban Law & Public Policy Institute has with small businesses, and with nonprofit and community organizations that focus on economic development.
Network members are provided assistance in developing relationships and connections with community organizations, community developers, and others. Through its own connections with the community, project staff attempt to have network members included at community meetings with local developers and organizations that do small business development work with nonprofit and community organizations that focus on economic development.
Students in the Urban Law & Public Policy Institute created valuable resources to provide network members with information about conducting legal audits for nonprofit corporations and small businesses. The ED model makes efforts to help network members develop clients. These include seeking to have members included on a short list of available lawyers to provide real estate closing assistance to community members who purchase housing units at a local housing development project currently under construction on the outskirts of the University’s campus as well as pursuing a relationship with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship so that network members can provide legal services to students who develop their own businesses.
CUNY project staff introduced members to the Harris Group, an organization that provides business consulting and billing services (underwritten by the project) to some of the members. This service proved immensely valuable in helping practitioners learn law office management skills.
As an example, Maryland’s network members have the option of buying unlimited Lexis research access to Maryland statutory and case law through the network at an almost 50% discount. New networks might consider pursuing the possibility of providing some sort of shared secretarial and/or paralegal support, perhaps utilizing law students. The Law School’s Domestic Violence Institute convenes an annual conference/training event that includes not only the practitioners who participated in the DV Model’s seminar, but other domestic violence practitioners and organizations, both legal and non-legal, that provide service to domestic violence survivors.
Faculty involvement with the project can provide them with valuable data for case studies and network members can serve as guest lecturers or perhaps adjunct professors.
In fact, as mentioned above, the CUNY model‘s practitioner network has proven to be a valuable admissions tools; some applicants to CUNY cite in their admissions applications their desire to join CUNY’s practitioner network as a reason for their wanting to attend CUNY.
Even Harvard Law School is finding itself confronting challenges in this area. See Jonathan D. Glater, Harvard Law is Trying to be More Appealing, New York Times, April 16, 2001.
Each of the founding law schools provided various types of in-kind support including: (1) release time for faculty and administrators; (2) office space; (3) telephones; (4) computers; (5) assistance from technology and library staff; etc.
Many small family foundations turn over the responsibility for finding appropriate funding projects to larger organizations, such as financial services organizations or banks. These larger organizations then serve as scouts to discover projects and organizations worthy of funding. It is vital, therefore, to find out which organizations in local communities handle requests for proposals for such small foundations.
Some of the project directors expressed frustration that the very thing that practitioners in their networks emphatically stressed was missing from their law school experience – courses designed to provide them with preparation for the actual practice of law and for running a law office – many law school faculty members do not seem to consider important.
See Victoria Rivkin, Are Law Firms Sweatshops?,” N.Y.L.J., November 17, 2000, in which Harvard Law Professor David B. Wilkins stated that law schools are failing new lawyers both pedagogically and ethically by not teaching them how to think like lawyers. They do not, he said “teach students how to be lawyers or about the profession.” See also John Caher, Call for Bridge From Academic to Practice, N.Y. L.J., November 15, 2000, in which a recent Convocation on the Face of the Profession was discussed. Participants in this convocation, which was the inaugural event of Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye’s Judicial Institute on the Profession, advocated two-way communication between academia and the practicing bar and discussed the disconnect in which academics measure merit in terms of law review articles they write which practitioners rarely read.
When asked about future sustainability, one faculty member at a member project commented: “to continue, others will need to see [the project] as a partnership. There will need to be a partnership with the bar association and others in the community. There will need to be reciprocal commitment – the law school cannot do it all. Others see the law school do it and therefore expect us to do it. In the end, it may take time but if it is valuable to others, they will need to contribute resources. The idea that it is so valuable to the law school that they will fund 80% [of the project] is unrealistic”.
See Tanya Neiman, Creating Community by Implementing Holistic Approaches to Solving Clients’ Problems, Journal of Poverty Law, May-June 1999. According to Tanya Neiman, Director of the Bar Association of San Francisco’s Volunteer Legal Services Program, a holistic approach to advocacy is defined as one that: “focuses upon, analyzes, and addresses the needs and situations of the client as a whole person with complex interrelated issues and problems [in contrast] with the atomistic-specialist approach (“one client-one issue”) favored by many in legal services … Holistic methods by definition (1) comprehensively examine the many legal issues which may be relevant to a client’s circumstance and (2) take a multidisciplinary approach to examining both the client’s problems and possible solutions, going beyond a legal analysis to look at other relevant issues.”
The East Bay Community Law Center engages in a great deal of work that involves playing a leadership and partner role in multi-agency collaborative efforts that serve clients from a holistic perspective. For example, in conjunction with other organizations, the Center is taking steps to ensure that Oakland residents receive assistance with childcare and other needs that will enable them to enter the well-paying construction industry and take advantage of public works contracts. Similarly, the Center not only represents clients in wrongful eviction cases, but engages in education initiatives to teach clients about tenant’s rights as well. See Louise Trubek and Jennifer J. Farnham, How to Create and Sustain a Successful Social Justice Collaborative: Innovative Practices to Empower People of Low and Moderate Income. A Guidebook for Lawyers and Nonlawyers, Center for Public Representation, Inc., 2001
See id. at p. 3. Trubek and Farnham point out that lawyers who are able to develop a collaborative perspective are able to “keep going despite the frustrations they encounter.”
Legal Services of North Carolina (LSNC) found that collaborating with other nonprofit entities with social missions compatible with its institutional goals provided a valuable source of funding. These other entities would seek to fund their primary activity but would allocate money for LSNC to conduct legal and/or policy work for the project. This approach opened doors to foundations that were (and are) reluctant to fund legal work directly but that recognize the intrinsic and necessary value of that work to many of their grantees’ projects. See LeRoy Cardova and Heather Way, Expanding Your Program’s Reach Through Community Economic Development, Equal Justice Conference, March 29-31, 2001.
Some project staff and network members feel it would be impossible to run the network on a part-time basis in any scenario. They feel it is essential for the project director to be able to devote their whole attention and full-time commitment to the network. Other project staff and network members, however, feel full-time attention is not necessary as long as one person could provide the necessary infrastructure – i.e., serve as a central point of information and maintain a listserv, etc. Still others maintain that for the first year of such a project which is more time-intensive, there needs to be one person working at least half time on developing the project. It seems that until we are able to develop a second round of this learning experiment, we will not be able to resolve these unanswered questions.
See Caher, supra note 6.
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