Abstract
In common with the wider higher education sector, clinical legal education practitioners are facing the challenge of how to adapt their teaching practices to accommodate the restrictions imposed by governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Facilitating distance learning via online technologies has unsurprisingly become an area of increasing interest in the hope that it may offer a potential solution to the problem of how to continue teaching undergraduates in a socially distanced environment.This paper seeks to provide clinical legal education practitioners with evidence-based insights into the challenges and opportunities afforded by using digital technologies to deliver clinical legal education. It adopts a case study approach by reflecting on the Open Justice Centre’s four-year experience of experimenting with online technologies to provide meaningful and socially useful legal pro bono projects for students studying a credit bearing undergraduate law module. It will analyse how a number of different types of pro bono activity were translated into an online environment, identify common obstacles and posit possible solutions. In doing so, this paper aims to provide a timely contribution to the literature on clinical legal education and offer a means to support colleagues in law schools in the UK and internationally, who are grappling with the challenges presented by taking clinical legal education online.
Highlights
Part II: The projects Open Justice Law ClinicOnline legal advice The Open Justice Law Clinic utilises Clio, a web conferencing platform and a cloudbased case management system, to deliver online legal advice. 4 Free access to Clio is made available to universities through its academic access programme and facilitates the provision of legal advice to members of the public anywhere in the United Kingdom. Clients access the law clinic via a website where they complete an online form outlining their legal issue
In common with the wider higher education sector, clinical legal education practitioners are facing the challenge of how to adapt their teaching practices to accommodate the restrictions imposed by governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic
We have argued that it is possible
Summary
Online legal advice The Open Justice Law Clinic utilises Clio, a web conferencing platform and a cloudbased case management system, to deliver online legal advice. 4 Free access to Clio is made available to universities through its academic access programme and facilitates the provision of legal advice to members of the public anywhere in the United Kingdom. Clients access the law clinic via a website where they complete an online form outlining their legal issue. Given the deficit in the provision of legal advice, technology has the potential to be leveraged to address issues of access to justice (McGinnis & Pearce, 2014) and the flexibility offered by digital platforms raises the prospect of university law clinics collaborating in ways that are not possible using face to face clinics This could potentially include students from different institutions working together on cases, or the pooling of supervision expertise to allow the coverage of a wider range of legal issues for example. Following an online briefing from a director of the charity, students carried out initial training on conducting legal research, carrying out literature reviews and collaborative working They carried out desk-based research into the issues including comparisons with protections provided by other countries. Aspects covered include security issues and the professional responsibilities of law students
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