The Learning Legal Interviewing & Language Access Film Project

Go Back

Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Franciscan C

Floor: Ballroom Level

Building upon two newly-released short films and a teaching guide, this concurrent session will focus on teaching law students about client interviewing and working with an interpreter. We will share excerpts from the Learning Legal Interviewing & Language Access Film Project and highlight a variety of ways to use the videos inside and outside the classroom. Since releasing these films in Fall 2018, more than 40 faculty members nationwide teaching in survey courses, seminars, and clinics ranging from tax, veterans, domestic violence, civil practice, community economic development, and immigration have reported their interest in incorporating the videos into their courses. This project is particularly salient in this time of polarization and xenophobia, as the videos center around serving immigrant clients, an asylum-seeking teenager and a LGBT woman seeking a U visa. The students and their two clients have a number of cultural differences—race, gender, age—such that in addition to teaching “traditional” interviewing skills, these films demonstrate how conflict or bias may surface, and how students may address these issues in the interviewing context. The videos also raise a number of other issues including working through difference in partnerships, building rapport, role description and scope of representation, confidentiality, verbal and nonverbal cues, tone, word choice, pacing of speech, road mapping and organization, answering unexpected and difficult client questions, recording the interview and seeking permission, client-centered lawyering, form of questions, approaches to sensitive topics and responses to client’s distress, using third person, summarization/expansion of interpretation, and use of interested parties as interpreters.