Case Experience - News from the Experiential Education Program at CWRU Law
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Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s Experiential Education Program.
The Clinical Faculty recognize that learning and developing the professional skills and values of a lawyer are a lifelong process. We emphasize to students the importance of lifelong learning and help them develop the ability to learn from their experiences. In designing the clinic and in selecting cases, our aim is to build upon earlier training received in the CaseArc Program and to further deve
lop each students’ mastery of the fundamental lawyering skills:
* problem-solving
* legal analysis and reasoning
* legal research
* factual investigation
* effective written and oral communication
* counseling clients
* planning
* litigation and alternative dispute resolution
* organization and management of legal work
* recognizing and resolving ethical dilemmas
We also stress the fundamental values of the profession: providing competent representation, striving to promote justice and fairness, striving to improve the profession, and engaging in professional self-development. Our methodology is based upon the goal of assisting students to learn through unstructured, real-client representation. The clinic provides interns with the opportunity to take on the role of a lawyer facing the indeterminate demands of representing multiple clients. Students learn lawyering skills in the context of ever-changing variables such as client demands, opposing counsel’s personality, the pressures of court deadlines, and working on more than one case at a time. Students work closely with expert faculty-supervisors who assist students as their cases unfold in their development towards becoming independent lawyers. Each clinic also includes a weekly seminar where the students in that clinic meet to learn about substantive law and procedures governing their cases and to discuss practice issues that arise in their individual representations. The clinical faculty see our education of students in the context of real client representation as reinforcing the pro bono commitment lawyers should have in our society - fulfilling the legal profession’s ethical and moral obligations to serve the unrepresented or underrepresented in our society.
