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4 Conn. L. Rev. 437 (1971-1972)
Contributions of Clinical Programs to Training for Professionalism

handle is hein.journals/conlr4 and id is 451 raw text is: CONTRIBUTIONS OF CLINICAL PROGRAMS TO TRAINING FOR PROFESSIONALISM by Lester Brickman* N VIEW of the substantial literature on the subject, and the pre- vious remarks made by my fellow panelists, I will not dwell at all on the inadequacies of present forms of legal education. Suffice it to say, both by way of summary and by way of beginning, that a legal education which does not provide the opportunity for clinical ex- perience is simply deficient. It is deficient in that professional standards are not developed and professional responsibility cannot be adequately examined; it is deficient in that the student is not re- quired to face an unstructured fact situation in a supervised setting and in that he is not exposed to clients for whose service he must fit together all the seemingly unconnected pieces of his legal education. Traditional classroom models cannot overcome these deficiencies. Thus albeit briefly, this presentation attempts to lay a predicate for clinical legal education and to identify certain of its educational values. Clinical programs should seek to meet three major educational goals: skills training, the production of competent legal counsel and the inculcation of professional responsibility. Skills training includes the following elements: interview tech- niques, fact investigation, counseling, negotiation, trial practice, drafting, legal research, and brief and memorandum writing. On the basis of having observed several score of students at differ- ent law schools engaged in interviewing clients, it is my conclusion that most students simply do not know how to ask questions of a client in a step-by-step chronological fashion so as to elicit the desired reconstruction of the relevant fact situation. Rather most students fail to start at the beginning, and fail to follow up on responses which *Professor, University of Toledo College of Law. In 1969-1970, the author was a Visiting Research Professor with the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc. and as part of his study of clinical education, he visited and evaluated almost a score of clinical programs. This presentation, delivered at the 1967 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, is based primarily on those evaluations.

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