Post
by nixy » Thu Mar 12, 2020 7:13 am
Clinics are school-specific, so even though there are probably a lot of similarities (a criminal defense clinic is likely going to do a lot of the same things at any school), no one can really recommend a specific clinic without knowing what school(s) you’re talking about.
There are certain kinds of clinics many schools have - criminal defense (one variety might be an innocent project kind of thing), civil legal aid (often landlord-tenant law, social security, unemployment), juvenile/family law, appellate (this will almost invariably be criminal, I think). Other possibilities are more specialized like environmental, tech/entrepreneurship, and so on. I think as you get up the law school rankings, there are more and more so a wider variety depending on the school and which profs felt like putting a clinic together. Again, there will be a lot of commonalities, but how Georgetown and Texas each organize their criminal clinic, say, could vary, as could the ability of the profs leading them. (Also, clinics tend to be in the lower paid/public interest-y kinds of fields where volunteering is common and student labor is welcome.)
I think a clinic can give you a relatively good idea of whether you like certain kinds of work. Like if you do a criminal defense clinic you’ll get a decent sense of what it’s like working with indigent clients, going to court in (usually) low level state cases, and a lot of the common issues public defenders face. I’d identify two main limits on how much you can take from clinics: 1) there are only so many kinds of clinics that will be offered, so you can’t get exposure to every kind of possible job through a clinic, and 2) the setting is sort of artificial. What I mean by that is, while clinics are often a lot of work, they’re not going to give you a fully accurate sense of how you spend your day once you’re working full time in a field, since they’re fit into your student life generally, you’re not doing a full workload in that field, and cases are picked for their suitability for students. I guess this still gives you a sense of what kind of work you might do, but for instance, while some people hate the actual work of biglaw, others mostly hate the circumstances in which you do it (on call 24-7, no control over when you get work, having to cancel plans last minute, partners yelling at you, etc.) (I’m just describing some of the things people complain about, not saying what biglaw is actually like), and those kinds of circumstances are harder to evaluate the further you are from the actual job. On the one hand, I suppose at a certain level you can’t know if you’re really going to like a specific job until you do the specific job, but on the other, clinics are a tiny bit more removed from the daily reality of the job than, say, interning for a given organization would be.
(To be clear, I think clinics are great and you should do at least one in law school. But I also don’t think you should pick a law school based on the clinics it offers, unless everything else is truly equal.)
