Leveraging Successes to Build Our Future Together Across All Law Schools

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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The word “collaboration” in the clinical community typically brings to mind shared work within a law school. This concurrent session examines how, together, as an entire community, we have and can continue to collaborate among all law schools to raise all oars and further clinical education. Since 2007, the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) has worked with the national clinical community every three years in a triennial survey to gather an accurate and detailed picture of, among other things, clinical program design, pedagogy, and staffing. Strung together, these pictures tell a statistically reliable and detailed picture of clinical education over time. People make use of CSALE’s data in a number of ways. In this context most importantly by leveraging program improvements and gains at other schools to advocate and win gains at their own. This session will explore brand new data from CSALE’s 2019-20 Survey of Applied Legal Education, and tie it back to data going back as far as 1987. We will compile comparisons over time of law clinics, field placements, and clinical faculty along numerous metrics, including: major challenges to clinical programs; clinical faculty size, composition, and funding sources; hiring, retention and promotion practices; substantive focus of clinics; classroom content and grading practices; academic credits and student work; terms of enrollment; student teacher ratios; clinic capacity as related to student body size; student demand; and enrollment levels. We will then explore how participants can use this data, both current and trends over time, to help leverage improvements at their home institutions. This session will be interactive and visual. It will also challenge the audience to situate themselves within the spectrum of other clinical programs, courses, and faculties and consider how they might move themselves and their programs forward to better address the needs of their students, clients, and communities.