Welcome to the Child Advocacy Clinic. You are about to engage in a unique and special learning experience--one that will not only help you develop your skills as a lawyer but that will also challenge you to engage in a journey of self discovery.

What is the Child Advocacy Clinic?

The Child Advocacy Clinic is a working law office in which law students are the lawyers. The Arizona Supreme Court allows law students who have completed three semesters of law school to represent persons in court under appropriate supervision.⁽¹⁾ In the Clinic, students perform all aspects of that representation for our clients.

As our name suggests, our clients are mostly children who are involved in child abuse and neglect (dependency) cases in the Pima County Juvenile Court. Occasionally, we are asked by the Juvenile Court to represent parents as well. We may also be asked by the Superior Court to represent children in private custody disputes when there is an allegation of abuse or neglect.

The Child Advocacy Clinic gets its clients directly on assignment from the Courts. The Clinic has a contract with Pima County to provide legal services to children. In very rare situations we might take a client on referral from another agency but only where there is a unique learning opportunity.

What is the Student's Role in the Clinic?

The Child Advocacy Clinic is a live-client experience.  By that, we mean that you will be working with real people who have real legal problems.  The clients will be your clients and the cases will be your responsibility.  The key lawyering decisions, choices, strategies and implementations are yours to make.   We don’t want you to be the assistant to a more experienced lawyer; we want you to be the lawyer.

Representing clients for the first time can be heady stuff.  For some, it may be exhilarating.   For others, it may be frightening or unsettling.  For some, it may be both at the same time.   We offer no predictions for you.  We do, however, know that one of the best ways to learn professionalism and good lawyer judgment is to practice it in a setting that is designed for and focused on learning.

That does not mean that you will be swimming alone out there.  Quite the contrary.  The Clinic faculty and staff will be there with you to help prepare you, guide you, and offer you constructive feedback.   We are a collaborative law office where all of us work together for the benefit of our clients and for the professional development of our students and ourselves.  The bottom line, however, is that  the final lawyering decisions are yours.

What makes the Clinic different from other courses?

First and foremost, your work is not theoretical or doctrinal.  It is practical and experiential.  That does not mean that doctrine and theory are unimportant.  In fact, the opposite is true.  We expect you to draw on your previous work in law school and apply it in action on behalf of your clients.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Clinic is that it introduces you to the lawyer/client relationship directly.  You will represent clients and they will rely on you to represent them well.  Experiencing this reliance is the best way to really appreciate the implications of the role of the lawyer and the foundations of professional responsibility.  You will need to draw on your previous law school experience, your life experience, and good old common sense to perform your tasks well.

When someone is relying on you, you may face difficult strategic choices.  Sometimes you may face ethical or moral dilemmas.   Your faculty supervisor and your other clinical colleagues will help you make those choices for yourself.

Thus, a second obvious difference between the Clinic and most of the other courses is the relationship you will have with the faculty member who supervises you.  Even if you have worked closely with an attorney in an outside job, you will find that there is a difference when the attorney with whom you are working makes what and how you learn a high priority.  A Clinic course puts you in regular, sometimes daily, contact with a faculty member.  Much of the contact is spontaneous and informal.  You may feel some awkwardness about this relationship.  That is to be expected.  Nevertheless, be assertive and take advantage of the Clinic faculty's presence.  Clinic faculty are expected to be accessible to you, but it is up to you to initiate the informal contact.

Third, in the Clinic, we work collaboratively.   Because we represent real people, we have to put their needs ahead of our egos.  But shouldn’t that be the task of a lawyer in any event?  What that means is that there is no embarrassment.  There are no dumb questions—only the questions we did not ask.  There is a need for a frank and honest exchange of views.  Only then can our clients be guaranteed the best legal services that we can offer.

With all that in mind, the Child Advocacy Clinic has four main goals:

(1) Enhancing Lawyering Skills.    Through practical experience in the field and in classroom simulations, we want you to develop your lawyering skills and learn a little about the law.   You will have a chance to interview clients and witnesses; to investigate facts; to research the law;  to write motions and court reports; to negotiate; and to stand up and advocate in a real courtroom.

(2) Learning how to learn from experience.  In addition to cultivating lawyering skills, we want you to begin to master the lifelong skill of learning from experience—not only about the law, but also about yourselves.   We hope that we can help you help yourselves to become reflective lawyers—not only lawyers who are skilled professionals, but also lawyers who care about the quality of the justice, ethics, and morality of the profession.

(3) Developing good lawyer judgment.    In the process of (1) and (2) and drawing on what you have learned in all your other classes, we hope that your sense of lawyer judgment will develop and mature.   By “lawyer judgment” we mean making the kinds of decisions—both practical and ethical—that lawyers are called upon to make, regardless of their area of practice.

(4) Delivering high quality legal services.  Finally, we expect the Child Advocacy Clinic to provide the highest quality legal services to our clients.  Our clients deserve nothing less.

What does this mean for you?

One result of all this is that you have an opportunity to shape the agenda for your learning.  A clinic is a more individualized learning experience than most other courses.  As with most things, you will get out of this experience what you put into it.  You play the primary role in establishing your working relationships in the Clinic. You have significant control over the content of the learning, within the context of the issues and tasks presented by your cases.  If you take the initiative, you can make this a great experience.

You have heard that law school courses are mostly about teaching you to think like a lawyer.  The Clinics have this as a major goal too.  Here, however, you will discover that there are aspects to thinking like a lawyer that are not extensively taught in other courses or contexts.  We want you to learn to act like a lawyer as well as think like one.

Accomplishing that will require you do things you have never done before, or, at least, require you to do them in a new context.  For example,  you may have negotiated over many things in the past, but now you may have to negotiate as an agent for your client, adding in your special expertise as a lawyer.  You may have explored legal analysis of a problem with many hypotheticals in which the facts change each time, but you may not have had to discover and prove the facts upon which you seek to have the law applied.

We want you to stretch yourself, to take on new experiences, to take a few risks.   We want you to test yourself.   We want you to seek new kinds of experiences in the Clinic.  But we also want you to recognize that it is just as important that you learn to put these individual experiences in a broad context that will make them useful and interesting over a long career.  This will help you better appreciate the lessons of your other law school courses.

Good luck.  Work hard.  Challenge yourself.  Learn a lot.  And remember to have some fun while doing it.
 
 

1. Rule 38, Arizona Rules of the Supreme Court. There are a number of other conditions that apply including    internal law school requirements.