New Clinic at Yale Law School

Thanks to Pace Law Library colleague Vicky Gannon for sending me this article from the Yale Daily News about a new clinic that has recently opened at the Yale Law School. According to the press release that announced the founding of the clinic,

The Ethics Bureau at Yale will be open for business in the spring of 2011. It will provide pro bono ethics counseling and opinions as well as advice on asserting ineffective assistance of counsel claims when counsel engaged in ethical misconduct.

“The course is the first of its kind. ... It will provide a valuable service not otherwise available and an opportunity for our students to understand the real-life dimensions to the professional responsibility obligations of lawyers.”

The Ethics Bureau is under the direction of Lawrence Fox, former chair of the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility of the American Bar Association and a Visiting Lecturer at Yale. The cases that the Bureau takes on come from around the United States, and according to the Yale Daily News, "Most of the clinic's clients are lawyers working pro bono for clients who cannot pay." Seven students are enrolled in the clinic this inaugural semester, and continuation of the clinic depends on steady enrollment and funding. It sounds to me as if this clinic gives students a chance to confront and ponder the real-life ethical dilemmas they will face when they begin the practice of law.

Innovation at Brooklyn Law School

One of my colleagues forwarded me this feature from the Huffington Post. It discusses an innovative clinic at Brooklyn Law School that "represents Internet, new media, communications and other tech entrepreneurs and innovators on both business and policy advocacy." This description comes from the homepage of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, better known as BLIP. The Huffington Post puts it even more succinctly: the goal of BLIP is to train the "lawyer 2.0 for the digital era." The clinic is the brainchild of Professor Jonathan Askin, who is the son of a former professor of mine at Rutgers Law School - Newark. Professor Frank Askin and his wife, Marilyn, also an attorney, recently gave a large gift to Rutgers for the purpose of creating an endowment to support the clinical programs. A nice photograph of the three Askins appears in the press release announcing the gift.

BLIP is large by the standards of clinical legal education--it has twenty students who are, according to the Huffington Post, "deployed into real legal work for clients facing tricky issues ranging from drafting privacy policy, to incorporation, to wider policy related questions. And as the startups they work grow into full-fledged companies, other benefits present themselves as well." Some of the pro bono clients anticipate eventual hiring of in-house counsel from the students with whom they worked at BLIP. This clinic is a great idea for law schools serious about graduating practice-ready attorneys ready to work in the twenty-first century.