As clinicians, we strive to teach our students to become practice-ready lawyers through real-world client engagement. In teaching our students how to represent individuals in pro bono or public-interest practice, we must necessarily explore the attorney-client relationship and, particularly, the unique role of a lawyer in working with clients in a community setting.
Yet in many law school courses, students are only exposed to a conventional model of the attorney-client relationship. This model often serves as the underpinning for their lessons about professionalism, ethics, and the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. This standard conception of legal ethics, for example, emphasizes that a lawyer should be a zealous advocate for their client—without worrying about impacts to third parties outside of the lawyer-client relationship. The legal profession’s licensing and self-governance arms set standards that only serve to perpetuate this status quo. Lawyers are trained to think of themselves as experts who are charged with helping clients navigate a byzantine and jargon-dense legal process.
To state the obvious, this conventional model of legal ethics is not a perfect fit when working with clients in the environmental justice context when working as in-house counsel, or otherwise engaging in community lawyering activities. It fails to appreciate that in an attorney-client relationship, our community-based clients are the principals; they are the experts in understanding their communities. Where do certain values that we consider essential, like patience and humility, fit into the Model Rules? Our goal for this session is to explore ways in which clinical teaching offers an opportunity to reconsider the conventional model of the attorney-client relationship and to rethink what certain ethical rules mean in the context of the work we do.