As a holistic team approach is becoming more critical (and common) in legal representation, it becomes more vital that we prepare law students to work on interprofessional teams. This program will discuss a criminal defense clinic that is also a Masters of Social Work practicum site, and a recent law course cross-listed with a school of social work that covers the foundations of interdisciplinary defense and criminal sentencing mitigation.
We aim to share the class's successes and failures; the ways in which the different disciplines’ pedagogies are complementary and in conflict; how the students were or were not open to collaboration; how to get buy-in from different departments; how to co-teach with multiple disciplines; and ways other law schools can develop interdisciplinary clinics and classes.