As more attorneys deepen their understanding of how trauma can affect the clients and communities they represent, there is a growing commitment to trauma-informed legal practice. Trauma experience frequently influences clients’ and communities’ trust in the legal system and can impact the attorney-client relationship. Trauma-informed practice is a growing trend within the legal profession, and its tenets are increasingly taught through clinical programs in law schools.
Trauma-informed legal practice places the realities of the clients’ trauma experiences at the forefront of attorney engagement with clients and adjusts accordingly to the attorneys’ practice approach. Trauma-informed lawyering requires understanding trauma in its many forms: collective, cultural, and individual. Trauma narratives have inspired civil rights and antiracist lawyers and academics to call for more trauma-informed training for law students and lawyers.
We will discuss how trauma-informed practice can be more broadly incorporated into advocacy training and clinical education. We will use recent civil rights cases as an example of how trauma-informed lawyering can both advance civil rights and provide healing. Building on our prior collective work on race, cultural trauma, individual trauma, civil rights, and anti-poverty lawyering, we will investigate the significance of racial trauma for individual, group, and community clients and for their legal teams. Through examples of litigation of individual and community racial trauma, we will demonstrate the use of racial trauma-sensitive practices within clinical pedagogy and advocacy. We will also discuss the lawyering process and the legal ethics of community violence-centered racial trauma advocacy in these civil rights cases.