Best Practices for Legal Education

The Clinical Law Review will hold its next Clinical Writers’ Workshop on Saturday, September 28, 2013, at NYU Law School.

The Workshop will provide an opportunity for clinical teachers who are writing about any subject (clinical pedagogy, substantive law, interdisciplinary analysis, empirical work, etc.) to meet with other clinicians writing on related topics to discuss their works-in-progress and brainstorm ideas for further development of their articles. Attendees will meet in small groups organized, to the extent possible, by the subject matter in which they are writing. Each group will “workshop” the draft of each member of the group.

Participation in the Workshop requires the submission of a paper because the workshop takes the form of small group sessions in which all members of the group comment on each other’s manuscripts. By June 30, all applicants will need to submit a mini-draft or prospectus, 3-5 pages in length, of the article they intend to present at the workshop. Full drafts of the articles will be due by September 1, 2013.

As in the previous Clinical Law Review Workshops, participants will not have to pay an admission or registration fee but participants will have to arrange and pay for their own travel and lodging. To assist those who wish to participate but who need assistance for travel and lodging, NYU Law School has committed to provide 10 scholarships of up to $750 per person to help pay for travel and lodging. The scholarships are designed for those clinical faculty who receive little or no travel support from their law schools and who otherwise would not be able to attend this conference without scholarship support. Applicants for scholarships will be asked to submit, with their 3-5 page prospectus, by June 30, a proposed budget for travel and lodging and a brief statement of why the scholarship would be helpful in supporting their attendance at this conference. The Board will review all scholarship applications and issue decisions about scholarships in early July. The scholarships are conditioned upon recipients’ meeting all requirements for workshop participation, including timely submission of drafts.

Information about the Workshop – including the Registration form, scholarship application form, and information for reserving hotel rooms – is available on-line at:

http://www.law.nyu.edu/journals/clinicallawreview/CLRWorkshop2013/index.htm

If you have any comments or suggestions you would like to send us, we would be very happy to hear from you. Comments and suggestions should be sent to Randy Hertz at randy.hertz@nyu.edu.

— The Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review

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The following post comes to us from Professor Benjamin Madison:

Many have read about the recent DLA Piper billing scandal; see http://storify.com/Edward_Stephen/dla-piper-billing-scandal-review (citing articles on the scandal, DLA Piper’s responses, and criticism of Piper’s responses). Unfortunately, the scandal will likely smear the legal profession more than it should. The results of the dispute between DL Piper and the client with whom it disputes the allegations it questions in this matter remains to be resolved. Assuming that DL Piper is exonerated completely, however, the damage to lawyers from the negative press has already occurred.

The practice of overbilling a client alleged in the Piper Scandal is most likely to occur in large firms with billable hour quotas. When lawyers face the demand to bill anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 hours per year, they are certainly more vulnerable to the temptation to do unnecessary work, at the least, or to pad their bills with time not actually spent on the client, at worst. However, most lawyers do not work for large law firms. The ABA’s most recent study of lawyer demographics shows that a relatively small percentage of lawyers work in large law firms. See http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/marketresearch/PublicDocuments/lawyer_demographics_2011.authcheckdam.pdf. Lawyers in smaller firms, without the crushing hour quotas, are less likely to charge unfairly. Moreover, I know large firm lawyers who are scrupulous about the time that they bill. These lawyers resist the temptations resulting from billable hour quotas and manage to succeed anyway. How can we encourage law students to recognize the significance of careful time recording and ethical billing?

Legal education is moving toward educating lawyers to be “practice ready” and to have a sense of ethical responsibility. In this vein, we would do well to offer law students the opportunity to learn about billing. In my civil procedure and pretrial practice classes, I have students break into groups to work on projects—e.g., a plan for discovery in a simulated case, or jointly preparing a pleading, a motion, or some other document in the simulated case. When I have the groups do these projects, I now plan to assign them an hourly rate (say, $200 per hour) and tell the student “lawyers” that they must—independent of one another—keep track of the time they spend on the matter. I’ll explain that billable hours are often broken down into increments, such as most commonly a tenth of an hour (or six minutes). I will then have them multiply the time they record by their hourly rate. If the student spends fifteen minutes on the project, I’ll ask whether they will round up to three-tenths of an hour (i.e., 18 minutes) even though they did not spend that much time working for the client. If the student decides that’s fair, then she or he would bill $60.

The exercise should reveal some interesting results. If students keep time separately (as I will insist), my guess is that there will be discrepancies in the amount of time recorded. That will provide an opportunity to discuss the necessity to be careful in contemporaneous recording and developing the habit of recording precisely when one starts and finishes a project or task. Moreover, we can discuss the common practice of rounding up to the next tenth of an hour (the 18 minutes noted above). Although the practice is common, the professor can ask students whether they believe such a practice out to be spelled out in the engagement letter if they plan on doing it. Students then ought to realize that clients are less likely to be surprised or object if they make the practice of rounding up time clear from the outset.

Regardless of how each group’s time(s) and bill(s) works out, the exercise should be a valuable opportunity to teach even more facets of lawyer-client relations. After such a session, the professor could bring into class respected practitioners and ask them how they are able to keep accurate time. Most will say they developed the habit of keeping contemporaneous time records throughout the day. Perhaps these lawyers will also offer tips such as the author learned in practice about how important it is not only to keep accurate time, but also to describe one’s work thoroughly. If the client’s bill shows two-tenths of an hour and, for the description, “telephone conversation,” they likely will wonder what the telephone conversation was about. With a little more effort, the lawyer can amplify the description, e.g. “telephone conversation with opposing counsel negotiating protocol for reducing the cost on my client of producing electronic documents.” Perhaps the bill should also include some entries where the lawyer does a task of one-tenth of an hour and puts “no charge to client.” Students need to know that clients will remain happier if they can see that the time spent was meaningful and have a sense of the significance to their case. If clients see their lawyer exercising the judgment to give the client a break and not charge for every little thing, that ought to create goodwill between the lawyer and client. Happy clients tend to be ones who return when they need legal help in the future.

In short, the Piper billing scandal may hurt the credibility of more lawyers than it should. However, for those of us adapting legal education to better prepare law students and to make them more attentive to ethical concerns, the scandal may be the prompting we need to begin teaching the importance of careful time-keeping and of billing practices that may actually strengthen the lawyer-client relationship.

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Almost a week ago, the New York Times featured an article on programs by some law schools to start “firms” to help with graduate placement . http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/education/law-schools-look-to-medical-education-model.html?pagewanted=all The NYT article triggered a chain of very thoughtful and informative e-mail comments and discussion on the clinic listserv (and I hope that some of the commentators share their thoughts again by commenting on  this post below).   Commentators carefully tried to untangle and analyze the hodge-podge of goals, concerns and ideas that were unfortunately conflated in the breezy article.

One of the issues which is often subsumed in the article and in the discussion of these projects is the potential to address inequity in access to justice in America. According to the World Justice Project’s most recent report, the United States continues to fare poorly in Rule of Law indicators when it comes to access to counsel and the difference in behavior between high and low income individuals:

“ <i>in the United States, among the low income litigants, 81% did not seek legal assistance because they felt that they could not afford the lawyer’s fees, compared to 48% of the high income litigants.”</i>

And as Gillian K. Hadfield observes in commenting on plummeting law school admissions , “We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply.” “http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/law-school-applications-are-collapsing-as-they-should-be/272729/

Is there promise in these “law school law firm” initiatives to address this country’s truly awful reputation on lack of access to justice?  Cathryn Miller-Wilson believes there is: “Harmonizing Current Threats: Using the Outcry for Legal Education Reforms to Take Another Look at Civil Gideon and What it Means to be an American Lawyer” http://ssrn.com/author=1896974

Others are bemused that the entire conversation appears to ignore the law firms that already exist within law schools – in-house clinics.  Is it a secret that law schools already have been focused on teaching through law firm practice since the early part of the last century?
Is the emphasis on clinics as teaching labs and the focus on the development of a student from neophyte to emerging lawyer an inconvenient fact?

Still others are angered that this emphasis on law schools running firms, especially when client fees are involved, unfairly competes with our struggling new graduates.

What do you think?

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The following post comes to us from Professor Lisa Bliss:

CLEA’s Best Practices Implementation Committee, co-chaired by Lisa Bliss and Carrie Kaas, is currently focused on developing a second volume, tentatively titled “Building on Best Practices: The Walls are Coming Down.”

Published in 2007, Best Practices in Legal Education: A Vision and A Roadmap, by Roy Stuckey and Others, was released the same year as Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (the Carnegie Report). Both publications offered important ideas for legal education. Some viewed the Carnegie Report as the critique, and Best Practices as the answer. Both publications likewise have been often cited in conversations about legal education reform.

Following the release of Best Practices, it became a resource for law teachers. It was helpful for curriculum planning on a micro as well as a macro level. The book can be summarized as containing three major questions that legal educators should ask:

1. What is your mission?
2. What is your method?
3. What is your measure?

After a few years, it became clear that there were important topics in legal education that received little or no treatment in the original Best Practices book and that there were new developments that merited examination. The Best Practices Implementation Committee embarked on a project to identify those topics and authors to contribute to writing a follow-up book. The Co-Editors of the new book project are Deborah Maranville and Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez. The new book will differ from the original in its format and approach.

Among the topics to be addressed in the new book are the following:

Mission:
• Setting goals for the program of instruction – mission statements

Method:
• Professional Identity
• Interdisciplinary
• International
• Integration and Problem-solving
• Pro Bono
• Intercultural Competence
• Experiential
• Externships
• Technology
• Delivery of instruction

Measure:
• Assessing student learning
• Assessing institutional effectiveness

The chapters are currently being written. The authors are organized in topical committees, made up in part by volunteers who responded to a call for proposals for the new book that was issued in 2011. The co-editors are pursuing publishers for the second volume and hope to see the book published in late 2013 or 2014. If you have questions about the project, please contact Deborah Maranville at maran@uw.edu or Antoinette Sedillo Lopez at lopez@law.unm.edu. Watch for more information about this project in an upcoming CLEA newsletter.

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The following post comes to us from Professor Nancy Cook:

Recently there was an inquiry on the law clinic listserve seeking recommendations for good, short readings for students on the topic of community lawyering. There were some great responses, which were collected and later posted en masse by the chain’s originator, Stephen Miler. I was interested in this, not only because it’s a topic that relates to work I’ve been doing for twenty-some years, but because for the last year I have been exploring the possibilities for a law school/ community partnership here in my adopted city of Minneapolis, and this time, I’ve been documenting the process as I go along. Along the way, I’ve been educated by my own experience and by the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of others, many of whose writings appear on the list compiled via the clinic listserve. I have also discovered, however, as I’ve engaged in this ongoing documentation, that I’m equally likely to find experience, knowledge and wisdom in unexpected places. So here I share some of these less-than-obvious sources of guidance, with an invitation to you to share your own gems with me.

I should preface this with two things. First, I do not include here the actual history or events that relate to the development of our law school/ community partnership. That’s for another time. What I do want to share, however, is the definition of community lawyering that I subscribe to, since there are, without doubt, a good many variations on the theme. I quote here from a co-authored article, Conversations on “Community Lawyering”: The Newest (Oldest) Wave in Clinical Legal Education, 28 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y. 359, 363-365 (2008) (with Karen Tokarz, Susan Brooks, and Brenda Bratton Blom).

What are the core principles that self-identified community lawyers and community lawyering clinics have in common? First, community lawyering involves formal or informal collaborations with communities and community groups to identify and address community issues. Second, community lawyering is focused on empowering communities, promoting economic and social justice, and fostering systemic change. Implicitly, then, if not explicitly, community lawyers are invested in long-term community commitments to advance these goals. Third, the work of community lawyering clinics involves collaborative, and frequently interdisciplinary, practice. In sum, community lawyering is an approach to the practice of law and to clinical legal education that centers on building and sustaining relationships with clients, over time, in context, as part of and in conjunction with communities. It incorporates a respect for clients that empowers them and assists them in the larger economic, political, and social context of their lives, beyond their immediate legal problems. This approach contemplates a significantly different role of lawyers and clients than that in traditional law practice (and, perhaps, in traditional clinical law practice)—one in which the client community or community groups are the protagonists in framing and resolving their concerns, and lawyers act as team members, working both for and with clients.

And now, the random sources of guidance:

A Lecture on “Deafness in the Age of Cochlear Implants”
I am listening to a talk in conjunction with a university program on interdisciplinary studies. The speaker, a medical researcher, grew up hearing in a largely deaf community. She says in that community she came to understand deafness as a physical condition, not as a medical problem. Now she asks, how is it that society – including parents of the deaf — came to understand deafness as a medical problem?
She reports that in the 1990s the FDA approved the use of cochlear implants for children. Cochlear implants are surgically installed electronic devices that convert electrical sound signals into electric impulses.These stimulate nerves, which transmit the impulses to the brain and are received as sounds. The devices had already been available to adults in the United States since 1984. Once the FDA gave the go-ahead, many hearing parents signed up their deaf children for the implants. The deaf community’s protests against the FDA’s action, on grounds of ethics, identity loss, and cultural impairment, were ignored. Into the language came the word “audism,” referring to a view or belief that hearing is always to be preferred over deafness, and, relatedly, that auditory language is better than sign language.
One consequence of the shift in the treatment of deaf children is that deafness has been reframed as a processing problem, rather than a sensory difference. In other words, deafness is not a condition of not being able to hear; rather, a deaf person’s physiology is defective in its mechanical ability to take external sound and transfer it to an internal sound receptor. The problem-solving focus thus turned to auditory processing, not to processing language or to developing different channels for communicating. The shift was driven by companies that stood to profit financially from the use of implants.

Buddha Speaks
In the drawer of the table at my bedside in the hotel is a copy of book on Buddhism. Every now and then, I take a look; it’s like snacking on fortune cookies.

Awake. Be the witness of your thoughts.
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
In every trial let understanding fight for you.
See the false as false, the true as true.
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that only exists as an idea.
A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker.
Do what you have to do resolutely, with all your heart. The traveler who hesitates only raises dust on the road.
Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.

The Choice
Huffington Post
Posted by Ray Errol Fox
11/03/2012 11:31 am

[O]nly four years ago at the Republican Convention, …then Democratic candidate Barack Obama was callously mocked before a national viewing audience by a mincing Rudolph Giuliani, an infantile Arnold Schwarzenegger and a vapid Sarah Palin for having been a community organizer. Was it because a college graduate devoted fifteen-hour days to the less fortunate in a Chicago public housing project for the sucker’s salary of $10,000 annually?

… In 1985, Barack Obama moved from New York City, where he was employed as a financial consultant, to Chicago to work with local churches organizing job training and other programs for 5,300 poor and working-class residents who lived “amid shuttered steel mills, a nearby landfill, a putrid sewage treatment plant.” Michelle Obama pronounced it “a defining moment in his life, not just his career.” Announcing his presidential bid in 2007, candidate Obama said, “It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever had.” [It] “taught me a lot about listening to people as opposed to coming in with a predetermined agenda.” He insisted on “staying in the background while he empowered us,” says a woman who worked with him.

….Obama acknowledges he had few big victories to celebrate and only small, hard-won successes to cite. “But whether it was getting the city to fill potholes, provide summer jobs, or remove asbestos from the apartments or persuading the apartment managers to repair toilets, pipes, and ceilings, Obama encouraged residents to come up with their own priorities with the gentle admonition: “It’s your community.”

….What I learned from Obama’s considerable writings is: community organizers encourage people to be better individuals by coming together; their goal is to motivate others to work for the communal good; they let others think for themselves and form the conclusions that impact their lives.

Overheard at an Environmental Writers Retreat
– What is the best part of a natural disaster?
– Fear is easier to evoke than hope.
– De Toqueville tells us there are two major principles driving people in the US: the ruthless individual pursuit of private wealth, and an impulse to attend to the common good.
– We are all nine meals away from murder.

Two Truths and a Lie
Tonight a group of about twelve is gathering around a table at a local restaurant to celebrate a departing VISTA volunteer’s many contributions to her host organization, give her grief, and wish her well. I am among those who will miss her. A recent law school graduate, she has been a regular and supportive guide, helping to navigate and interpret as I’ve explored the Northside community.
In the relaxed atmosphere tonight, I listen to stories, get a feel for how people interact with each other, learn some history, measure attitudes. A drink or two into the conversation, a community outreach director, suggests an “activity,” a game. After a short discussion, we settle on “Two Truths and a Lie.” We go around the table and each person in turn makes three assertions about themselves, two of them factually correct and one false. I learn some pretty interesting things about my colleagues. I get some insight into how the outreach director operates.

from the Poets
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture

So much is in bud.
(Denise Levertov, Beginners)

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
(William Stafford, The Way It Is)

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The following post comes to us from Professor Nancy Cook

I am typing this with my left hand, although I am not left handed. A recent fall on the ice which has rendered my writing hand dysfunctional for a few months is the reason.

Many times in the past month, I’ve thought back on a story I heard literary Nobel laureate Toni Morrison tell some years ago. She had experienced a similar fall, and she described how, as she was falling, she very consciously moved to protect her hands, the primary tools of her work. This protective move did save her hands, although it meant serious injury to other limbs. Amazingly, during the few seconds it took to fall, Morrison was also consciously and deliberately formulating the narrative of the event, reaching for language, even as she was hiding her hands behind her back.

I confess I made no attempt to save my writing hand as I fell, nor did I have any conscious thought of the story that was unfolding. But I think about the event now, and often, and about Toni Morrison’s instinctual actions. Writing for me now is difficult, slow, sometimes painful. I am aware of the losses that accompany this injury: loss of expression, loss of connection, loss of reflection, loss of insights taking shape in language. And I’m reminded of a phrase from another great wordsmith, Joni Mitchell: You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

What’s “gone,” temporarily, is the ability to fully indulge in a writing habit I knew I had, but the value of which I didn’t truly appreciate. Yet even as I grow frustrated from the inability to indulge, I grow clearer in the belief that observational and reflective writing is a habit to foster. For lawyers, especially.

One reason I make this point here, in our Best Practices blog, is that I can see how non-analytical, creative, experientially reflective writing serves as a counterweight to our training. It balances the inclination to make a point, to reduce observations, stories and insights to talking points or bullet points or power points, to get to the bottom line, or encase thoughts in a “brief,” a memo, an outline, an argument. As lawyers, we may take pride – and rightfully so –in our ability to cut to the quick or clarify complex material in a pithy way. But the literary path is different. In poetry, for example, an epiphanic poem leads us gradually to meaning; it doesn’t blast us or knock us over the head with someone else’s discovery. An “Aha!” moment is not a “Eureka!” moment, and may not be a moment at all; understandings sneak up, come into consciousness quietly. Similarly, story operates at its own pace. It functions to guide someone, over time and pages, to a new place.

We benefit from this kind of reflection and slow-motion analysis.

Lately I have had the good fortune of getting together regularly with two good friends and supportive colleagues. We read each other’s experiments in writing about law, lawyers, the legal system, and social justice. Our literary explorations might not be regarded as tenure-worthy in most institutions, but the value of our work to the profession and our own professional development would be hard to deny. By going through a process of recovery and discovery, eschewing research in favor of interrogation, we find ourselves opening doors to analysis.

And so I choose to use this forum to remind us of the value of those other habits of writing and reflection, and to share information about just two ways experiential teachers can nurture their writing habits. CLEA has resurrected its Creative Writing Competition, and judges are now in the process of reviewing the approximately 50 entries of poetry and prose submitted that reflect on law and justice. A number of the entries will soon be found on the CLEA website and in the newsletter; there will be an opportunity to hear winners read and share other creative works in San Juan in May. In July, CLEA and the Legal Writing Institute will host the 4th Applied Legal Storytelling Conference in London. More information about this much lauded conference can be found on the CLEA and LWI websites.

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Like many in legal education, I have been obsessed with reading everything I can get my hands on regarding: 1) the restructuring of the demand for legal services in the “new economy” and 2) hmmm, what is a less negative word than “crisis” or  “tsunami?”,  ah yes,  the – “revolution” in legal education formed  by the combination of student debt , fewer JD jobs, and  plummeting admissions.  “Must” readings include, Bill Henderson’s analysis of the restructuring of the market for legal services  (see Henderson’s blog post here and article here ),  the Law School Admission Council’s LSAC Volume Report 2013 (with data as of January 3013), Dean Frank H. Wu’s letter to the ABA Taskforce (see ABA post located here and Dean Wu’s letter here) and Richard Susskind’s newest book “Tomorrow’s Lawyers.” The bottom line trends are: 1) law schools will be fewer, smaller, and, other than the top 14,  less lucrative; and 2) those with law degrees need to possess more than  just the traditional trademark tools of critical reasoning, substantive and procedural knowledge, and understanding of the attorney-client relationship.   In short, in order to survive, law schools need to re-imagine their identity, structure, cost-to -value ratio, and resource allocation to meet the demands of the new economy.  And when doing so, they must equip students and graduates for a broader, more creative, more collaborative and more entrepreneurial use of their law degree.

This combination of reduction in class sizes and the need for law graduates to have more well-rounded skill sets to compete for “new economy” jobs has already and will continue to affect law school curricular offerings, organization and priorities. In particular, legal education’s   traditional understanding of the actual and relative cost of clinic courses is dramatically changing in this cost-value economic model.  What do I mean? Deans (and their admissions and career planning directors) often state how they really want more clinical experiences in which students assume the role of the lawyer under good supervision.   However, the narrative continues, in- house clinics and well supervised and designed externship/field placements courses just “cost too much” compared to the low cost of putting a faculty member in front of a class of 50-100 students and letting them have at it! In other words, the old narrative holds that the actual “cost” of clinic courses is not about express value to the students, alums, and employers, but its relative cost vis– a– vis the traditional Socratic classroom.

Over the past decade and particularly since the global recession, that narrative has broken down, as law schools compete with each other to be the most bold and “innovative” in  re-structuring their curricula or creating an entirely  “experiential” third year .  And economically, that has made much sense.  As admission numbers plunge  so does the faculty student ratio and, thus,  the relative costs of making law schools focus more on the development of its students has radically declined.  In addition, clincal faculty and programs have had to evolve beyond the early days of replicating legal services or public defender offices and have matured into educational programs with expanded subject matter and  skills focus and beyond traditional representation and litigation models.

However, many in legal academia have not advanced their thinking to keep up with the new economic analysis.  In fact, I would recommend that all concerned with the future of legal education and its cost read  Professor Peter Joy’s wonderfully helpful 2012 article THE COST OF CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION (also here) as well as the charts and appendices connected with Professors Liz Ryan Cole and Nancy Maurer’s piece on field placements and externships found at 19 Clinical Law Review 115, 155-161 (2012)   I fear that many in legal education still shake their heads and  regretfully and sincerely but quite  inaccurately echo the outdated analysis that in these troubled times , “clinics cost too much”.  The relative faculty/student ratio is changing everywhere and that is making appropriately designed and updated clinical courses less “expensive” every day under any cost-value ratio and even under the reductive and incomplete “relative cost” analysis.

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The following post comes from Professor Carolyn Grose:

The Clinical Law Review will hold its next Clinical Writers’ Workshop on Saturday, September 28, 2013, at NYU Law School.

The Workshop will provide an opportunity for clinical teachers who are writing about any subject (clinical pedagogy, substantive law, interdisciplinary analysis, empirical work, etc.) to meet with other clinicians writing on related topics to discuss their works-in-progress and brainstorm ideas for further development of their articles. Attendees will meet in small groups organized, to the extent possible, by the subject matter in which they are writing. Each group will “workshop” the draft of each member of the group.

Participation in the Workshop requires the submission of a paper because the workshop takes the form of small group sessions in which all members of the group comment on each other’s manuscripts. By June 30, all applicants will need to submit a mini-draft or prospectus, 3-5 pages in length, of the article they intend to present at the workshop. Full drafts of the articles will be due by September 1, 2013.

As in the previous Clinical Law Review Workshops, participants will not have to pay an admission or registration fee but participants will have to arrange and pay for their own travel and lodging. To assist those who wish to participate but who need assistance for travel and lodging, NYU Law School has committed to provide 10 scholarships of up to $750 per person to help pay for travel and lodging. The scholarships are designed for those clinical faculty who receive little or no travel support from their law schools and who otherwise would not be able to attend this conference without scholarship support. Applicants for scholarships will be asked to submit, with their 3-5 page prospectus, by June 30, a proposed budget for travel and lodging and a brief statement of why the scholarship would be helpful in supporting their attendance at this conference. The Board will review all scholarship applications and issue decisions about scholarships in early July. The scholarships are conditioned upon recipients’ meeting all requirements for workshop participation, including timely submission of drafts.

If you have any comments or suggestions you would like to send us, we would be very happy to hear from you. Comments and suggestions should be sent to Randy Hertz at randy.hertz@nyu.edu.

— The Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review

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Good Morning, Bloggers!!

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but this morning in Albany, New York, it was a warm 2 degrees when I got in my car. What is a better way to stay warm than to take a brief moment to peruse through this Invitation to Comment–Task Force? If that sounds like something that interests you (as it should), why don’t you grab a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and sit down for a moment. We would like your ideas, your comments, and your thoughts in regards to improving legal education to counter the economy, changes in the profession, and shortcomings in the current state of legal education. Please take a moment to look over this, and if you have any ideas, go to the task force web site and let them know what you think!!

You can find a link to the Invitation to comment below!

Invitation to Comment–Task Force

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For those of you who aren’t on the lawclinic listserve, I’d like to share with you a fascinating thread on the list this week demonstrating just how tech-savvy we’re all becoming, and also how the concept of Best Practices in Legal Education is an ever-broadening one.

Kim Diana Connolly [(kimconno@buffalo.edu, Vice Dean for Legal Skills; Director, Clinical Legal Education; Director, Environmental Law Program; Of Counsel, Environmental Law Clinic] was inviting list members to a newly-forming Law Clinic Computing in the Clouds Best Practices Task Force, a result of her experience drafting a cloud-computing protocol for Buffalo’s clinical program. The project for the Task Force is to tackle the issues relating to cloud computing that have been raised on the list, from email and smart phones to file storage and management systems, etc. Kim reported that developing a protocol had been a significantly more complex undertaking than first anticipated. Students, faculty, and now the IT department have become involved in the project. For public law schools, the complexity is enhanced, as they are subject to Freedom of Information requests.

Our experience in the UMass clinics is a similar one; it has been complicated and time-consuming to determine both the professional and practical aspects of joining “the cloud.” Where does encryption come in? With which University-based teams should we coordinate? What’s the cost? How much time is involved? So I was grateful to learn that we can join with a group of other clinicians struggling with precisely the same issues. Its good to know that WE’RE NOT ALONE. Kim has suggested starting a separate discussion group to share research and perhaps develop a “best practices” document for use by the clinical community.

Her post immediately received many responses. Clearly this is an issue of significance to many in the clinical world; the interest, though, is not limited to law schools, as yesterday I received an email from the ABA inviting me to a free session on “ethically moving your law practice to the cloud.”

If you are interested in joining the discussion and ad hoc Task Force, Kim’s invited us to email their Clinical Program Paralegal Elisa Galloway at elisagal@buffalo.edu.

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