Tackling Thorny and Common Supervision Issues

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Plaza A

Floor: Lobby Level

As lawyers are called to radically imagine new systems to serve their clients and respond to rapidly shifting policies and interpretations of laws, they are increasingly motivated to collaborate with others in and outside their organizations and fields. In order to facilitate collaboration, lawyers often produce and exchange sample briefs and motions to save time and serve as many people as possible. Although it can be difficult to respond to pressing needs of legal practice when operating in traditional clinical pedagogical structures, clinical programs do their best to participate and respond. With that comes some tough supervision challenges. The goal of this session is to discuss two of those challenges and propose some pedagogical strategies. The challenges include: (1) Addressing students’ requests/expectations for sample documents. Although we aim to teach students how to develop strategy and novel legal arguments, in practice, templates are increasingly available and widely used by attorneys, especially in situations of crisis lawyering, such as responding to residential evictions during the pandemic. As supervisors, we hope to teach students the benefits and limitations of templates to prepare them for practice while still building critical research and writing skills; and (2) Dealing with an expanded universe of who provides feedback and supervision to students. In collaborating on projects with people or groups outside of the clinic, students will likely receive guidance and feedback from non-clinic supervisors. As such, there is the potential for feedback or guidance from a non-clinic supervisor that is contrary to a clinic supervisor’s pedagogical goals. We will provide participants with a bibliography of materials that may be helpful to them in improving and changing how they supervise students on these issues.