Abstract
There has been a shift in attitudes towards clinical learning as part of the student learning experience at universities. Some modern Universities in the United Kingdom now integrate practical based learning in their law degree programmes. Kingston University London offers credits to its students as part of their law degree for participating in its law clinic. The view the University of East London (UEL) adopts in preparing students for the world beyond the university is that <em>“Students do not deserve to be handed a flat-pack degree without any extras – they deserve a fully rounded education and that is what they will get if they come [to UEL].” </em>UEL’s Law Clinic is a central vehicle to achieving this aim.<div><div><p>This practice-based paper looks at the development of our Law Clinic, which is a live client clinic, how it works in practice and includes a breakdown of statistics in demographics and advice areas. We present a selection of cases as well as extracts from students and clients’ testimonials. </p><p>Drawing on the benefits from our clients and experience of our students, this paper concludes that the experience gained from working in the Law Clinic should be integrated into the academic content of the law school. We suggest that live clinics increase the quality and experience of our students’ learning.</p></div></div>
Highlights
If graduates are to meet the expectations of employers, universities should acknowledge the virtue of learning by doing
It provides students with an invaluable opportunity to see how a case progresses in practice and how the skills that they will learn on the Legal Practice Course (LPC), for instance, come together in the context of a client’s file
We suggest that clinical or experiential form of legal education is increasingly becoming a feature of undergraduate legal education
Summary
If graduates are to meet the expectations of employers, universities should acknowledge the virtue of learning by doing. The Law Clinic was created to enable our students to acquire legal work experience within a supervised environment. How our live client clinic works UEL’s Law Clinic provides pro bono legal advice to members of the East London community. This service is provided by students under the supervision of professionally-qualified members of staff. Our student advisers are able to access the free CPD accredited training provided by LawWorks, one of our external partners18 These are short courses on relevant areas of law. The most popular areas of law that clients seek advice on are housing/property, employment and consumer/contract matters This is not a surprising result as these are areas in which civil legal aid has diminished. We anticipate that this area of law will be as popular over the academic year
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