Collaborating with Experts Outside the Law School: The Fight Against Mass Incarceration One Client at a Time

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Yosemite B

Floor: Ballroom Level

This concurrent session will focus on collaborating with non-lawyer experts to strengthen and transform advocacy in client cases. All four presenters work on federal clemency and compassionate release cases that fight for the release of elderly and ill prisoners and individuals serving lengthy and overly harsh sentences. In doing this work, our clinics have collaborated with doctors, mental health professionals, public health experts, social science researchers, prison management consultants, formerly incarcerated individuals, and others outside the legal sphere to gain a deeper understanding of our client’s life, health, experience in prison, and capacity to re-enter society successfully. The knowledge gained through these collaborations has informed and strengthened the individual client case as well as help situate the individual’s case in the broader context of mass incarceration. Consequently, this kind of advocacy in individual cases performs an educational function with ramifications for future similar cases before the same decision-maker. In this session, we will talk about the knowledge and skills gained through these collaborations and the transformative effect it can have on an individual client’s case. After discussing the strengths of such collaboration, the session will move into a nuts-and-bolts way of teaching law students how to select the right expert, collaborate most effectively with the expert to maximize their contribution, preserve the privilege, and transform the experts’ knowledge into an exhibit or expert declaration for a legal filing. Presenters will walk through the process of guiding student-expert conversation and the drafting of an expert declaration or other exhibit. Presenters will guide a discussion of interesting teaching issues in this context such as ensuring the processing of expert information, the use of technical v. non-technical language, and framing the expert declaration as an advocacy document in and of itself.