AALS Externship Winter 2019 Newsletter

The externship world is vast; one where we all join together from different professional backgrounds. For those of us entering from the lens of private practice, it is refreshing to see how collaborative the externship community is! Others have a long-seeded history in academia providing a historical and supportive vantage point imperative to any program’s foundation.

As part of this collaboration, the AALS Externship Membership Subcommittee focuses its energy on connecting our diverse members and equipping our community with resources for success. One mission is ensuring we have an up to date directory of externship colleagues at law schools around the country - no small feat with the changes at many of our programs. We take primary responsibility for the most comprehensive list of Externship contacts.  

The directory allows members to find specific primary contacts at schools as well as identify colleagues based on years’ experience, program title, and more.  This is an additional resource to the LEXTERN listserv as the listserv allows our community to present topics to all subscribers. The directory exists on LEXTERN at http://bit.ly/LexternWebDirectory.

We reach out throughout the year, as our community is growing and changing at a rapid pace, as we all know.  In addition, the Subcommittee reaches out to new members of our community when we hear about them through LEXTERN, via word of mouth (so send their names and contact information our way!), or through new clinicians sessions at our annual conferences. Our goal is to make sure we are all getting connected with resources (like our “Top 10 Resources for New Externship Clinicians” found here) and answers to FAQs and not-so-FAQs. 

We also support the efforts of the ​AALS Clinical Section's Membership, Outreach, & Training Committee and “The Clinician’s Helping Hand Project,” (here) which pairs new clinicians with experienced mentors. Finally, the Subcommittee is always looking for ways to embrace, support and highlight our members. We would love to hear more about what you like, what you love, and what you want to see more of from our community!

Co-Chairs: 

A New Way to “Train” Supervisors

How do we train and stay in touch with externship supervisors?  And how do we (re)educate them about extern recruitment, assignments, feedback, etc.?  Through the years, our community has shared lots of helpful ideas about these questions.  Here’s another idea (we think first of its kind) -  get in touch with your regional legal news source to publish regular installments about externships!  We got in touch with The Daily Journal – purveyor of legal news to California – and they agreed to publish our externship pieces.  Five to date!

The “we” is SoCalEx (formerly GLACE) and BACE.  This has been not just a creative way of reaching the legal community about externships but an excellent collaboration to send a uniform message statewide about the what, why, and how of externships.  In addition to educating supervisors and helping improve our students’ educational experiences, we hope that the articles get more attorneys and judges thinking about taking on externs of their own.

We began last summer and topics and publication dates so far include the following:

CSALE Triennial Survey: Externships – Look for it in January!

The Center for Applied Legal Education has just started its two-phase survey of all experiential faculty in law clinics and externships. The Phase I survey is sent to a single person in each law school with a broad knowledge of the clinic and externship programs. It might be the associate dean for experiential education or someone with a similar wide perspective on the school’s live practice curriculum. That survey was sent in mid-October and will be open until December. It is aimed to collect data on school-wide programmatic or policy decisions (e.g., does your school guarantee a clinic or externship for all interested students, or does your school allow paid externships). That survey also asks for the names and email addresses of everyone who teaches or directs each externship or law clinic course offered at the school. That list becomes our mailing list for Phase II.

Phase II survey is the one that gathers extensive data on the details of each course and faculty status. We expect that we will release it in January. Over the past two surveys, the questionnaire writers have tried to reframe many of the externship questions to make certain that we collect info on the variety of methods we use. We plan to distribute the Phase II survey in January 2020. Stay tuned! If you see a notice on Lextern listserv that it has been released but did not receive an email with a link, please let me know (Meg Reuter, reuterm@umkc.edu). I will try to sort it out.

All my thanks for supporting CSALE and our efforts to be the best place to find information on field placement and law clinic courses. Come visit our snazzy new website: https://www.csale.org/

Resilience: The brilliant case of Irene

By Meg Reuter, University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law

Can you learn from heroes? Can you learn from geniuses? Can you learn from people who have reached some pinnacle of accomplishment?

Sometimes they feel so far beyond your circumstances or talents (at least as you currently understand the limits of your talents). Their paths to success seem different from ours, the mere mortals.

I have watched one of those heroes for these last couple of years. A 3L student. Irene. She had a certain maturity as a second career student. She also had just about every characteristic that might have made a less dynamic person shrink to the corners. She was a woman. African American. She came from a family of limited means. First-generation grad student. She had multiple handicaps. Nearly blind. Cognitive processing issues. Difficulties walking that required braces. Suffering from diabetes and kidney disease, Irene had dialysis twice weekly, scheduled at the awful hour of 5:00 am so that she was able to make all her classes and outside activities.

As you might have guessed, by my use of the past tense, Irene is with us no more. She died this month. She died the week she thought her last medical tests might mean that she was eligible for a kidney transplant.

Like each one of us, she also had somethings going for her. For Irene, she had a lifelong drive to be a lawyer. She was passionate about justice and utterly confident in her ability to help others. She was gregarious by nature. She had a family and friends network that would be the envy of many. As a student she was a delight- always having read the material ahead of class, a critical thinker who wanted to weave together disparate issues.

Irene had been my student in multiple courses. So over many semesters, I came to learn in real-time about one set back after the next, extra visits with specialists, more tests, a stint in the hospital, etc. This Fall semester, she was in my small seminar of five students on ethics and the attorney-client relationship. It was an intimate group that included one of her roommates, one of her teammates in a competition, a fellow executive board member from one of her student groups, and her best friend. The hole she left was profound.

Resilience – Irene had greater resilience than anyone I have had the pleasure to know personally. How does a human being endure so many difficulties and struggles, but still find time and enthusiasm to devote intensive preparation for class, time to be active in BLSA plus lawyering skills competitions (and intensive practice sessions), and time to be the lead coach for the University’s undergraduate mock trial team. And she picks herself up and dusts herself off, each time she has to handle one more medical procedure or one more negative test result.

What have I come to learn from her? What might we all learn from exemplars like Irene? Here are my lessons from Irene.

First, you have to have someone’s shoulder to cry on (literally and figuratively). Someone who knows you at your most exhausted and vulnerable, and most ready to give up. Family and friends played that role for Irene. So too, a select few faculty and staff.

Second, be a good listener and encourage others. Irene’s great talent was her ability to be “present,” curious, and sincerely listening to those she encountered. Scores and scores of students counted her as a friend.

Third, encourage others. As a listener, she learned of other people’s struggles—small and large. She gave the well-timed “You can do it” talk to the student who was just readmitted to school after being academically dismissed. She was the one who reminded a classmate that it was worth plowing through the reading, even when her classmate was just dog-tired. They knew they could do it (and “had” to do it) because Irene did. The encouragement was reciprocal. Irene drew strength from their tenacity.

Fourth, share information about your struggles. This is actually quite hard if you want to avoid pity or cry-baby status. Many of Irene’s struggles were patently obvious. She naturally explained her limits, gave tips how others can help her or signal that she was fine without assistance. Nary a hint of “woe is me.” Her no-nonsense manner dissipated all kinds of awkwardness. Other struggles were less obvious and potentially embarrassing. Example, she would readily explain she didn’t know how to do something. Some students might see that in more embarrassing terms, e.g., I’m ignorant; I’m not smart enough; I should have paid more attention in class. She did not. She saw the gap as her next “learning task” and sought help.

Fifth, give people opportunities to help—whether it is for you or for another cause or person in need. Irene was happy to call all kinds of people to ask for help. Some things were little—help make sure her laptop charging cord could stretch to the outlet. Some “asks” were bigger. She coached the undergraduate mock trial team and needed scores of judges for the big competitions. She was not shy to ask every law student and faculty member to volunteer. When people give aid, they feel stronger. She made people feel stronger.

In this season of reflection and thankfulness, I am thankful to have known Irene.

My takeaway for teaching:

Sometimes we can be resilient for ourselves, when we make it a point to help others who need encouragement. Indeed, when I talk to students about overcoming difficulties and setbacks in their externships, I often frame it as a lawyering skill. I advise that as lawyers, our clients generally come to us in some kind of trouble. They need help sorting through and staying optimistic. We, as their lawyers, need resilience skills to help our clients bounce back, endure, and problem-solve.

I challenge myself to identify ways in which I help others find strength, stamina, and their talents. And then to use those methods more.

Meg Reuter
University of Missouri - Kansas City
reuterm@umkc.edu