Enhancing Law Classes with Pro Bono
Steven Schwinn,
Assistant Professorial Lecturer in the Law
Associate Director, Legal Research & Writing Program
George Washington University Law School

Students at the George Washington University Law School are engaged in a variety of extra-curricular pro bono activities. GWU students volunteer regularly with the myriad non-profits and community service organizations that provide legal services to those in the Washington, D.C., community; and students volunteer regularly with faculty members who are engaged in diverse and exciting pro bono work. Yet, like many other schools, GWU does not have a centralized, coordinated pro bono program or staff; and most of the good pro bono work in which students engage is performed on an ad hoc basis. As a result, students’ pro bono work tends to be individualized; and it is generally not formally integrated into their classes or the law school curriculum.

Against this backdrop, I experimented with incorporating pro bono and service-learning into my courses to promote community service and enhance students’ understanding of material through experiential learning. Students who volunteered to participate on a pro bono case worked as a team to provide assistance to a client outside the classroom. They used the skills and knowledge that they gained in the classroom to assist their client and serve their community; and they used their pro bono experience with their client to enhance their understanding of material presented in the classroom. Students in my Introduction to Advocacy class worked with me on Social Security disability appeal cases of low-income and homeless clients; and students in my Client Interviewing and Counseling class assisted me with intake interviews, general problem-solving, and legal representation of homeless clients. I tailored the students’ pro bono work to correspond with particular course topics so that the pro bono work related directly to the material that we were covering in class. I discovered that these course-specific pro bono opportunities were relatively easy to manage without additional resources or support and yielded remarkable pedagogical and community service benefits.

This course-specific pro bono model differs from a clinic because students do not receive course credit for their work. It differs from participation in a coordinated pro bono program because it is tied to a particular course and has a specific pedagogical goal. And it differs from mandatory pro bono because it is purely voluntary. It is a model that is relatively easy to implement in a wide range of classes, yields tangible pedagogical and community service benefits, and is adaptable to courses in schools with or without coordinated pro bono programs.

This paper summarizes the benefits of using course-specific pro bono and details the steps to establish a course-specific pro bono project based on my experiences at GWU.

Why Course-Specific Pro Bono?

My goals in incorporating pro bono into my individual classes were to enhance students’ understanding of course material through experiential learning, to introduce students to pro bono and promote a pro bono ethic, and to serve the local community. But I quickly learned that course-specific pro bono advanced other goals, as well: students became responsible for their own learning and professional development; students learned about alternative career options; students gained experience and made contacts in a public interest practice area; and clients received superior legal counsel and representation.

1. Pedagogical Benefits for the Students

As law teachers, we know that different students learn in different ways. Some students learn best by listening to a lecture or participating in a class discussion, while others learn best by reading and studying course material. Thus we attempt to incorporate many different heuristic techniques to reach all of our students and enhance their understanding of the material.

Course-specific pro bono gives us one more tool with which to educate our students. Unlike other tools, however, course-specific pro bono allows students to learn and experience material in the context of a real client problem. It also allows students to experience how very different legal concepts-which are often presented in isolation in traditional law courses-relate to each other. And course-specific pro bono, as a voluntary supplement to the course, requires students to take responsibility for their own education.

In my Client Interviewing and Counseling class, for example, students had the opportunity to interview and counsel homeless clients at a shelter in Washington, D.C. Students met clients with no prior knowledge of the clients or their legal issues, interviewed them, and helped them solve problems such as how to obtain housing, how to obtain a divorce, and how to meet child support obligations. The experience supplemented the material on interviewing and problem-solving that we covered in class and allowed students to integrate these skills in the context of real client problems. And because students self-selected and worked with live clients, they were particularly well prepared and well studied in the relevant course material. As a result, many students reported to me that their pro bono work was the single most valuable educational experience of the course; and all participating students reported to me that their pro bono work was a unique and valuable supplement to the material presented through more traditional means.

2. Professional Development Benefits for the Students

A second important benefit of course-specific pro bono is that it promotes students’ professional development. Students participating in pro bono gain experience and knowledge, learn of public interest career options and meet important contacts in the public interest community, and discover pro bono as a professional opportunity after graduation. These benefits are particularly important for students at schools that do not have strong or centralized pro bono or public interest programs from which they could otherwise gain these professional development benefits.

Most of my students who participated in pro bono work had not previously worked with low-income individuals or communities; and many of them had serious reservations about certain aspects of the work, e.g., interviewing clients at a large homeless shelter. Nevertheless, participating students universally indicated an interest in continuing pro bono or public interest work as students and lawyers. Some of them met practicing attorneys and other professionals that could be resources as they begin their careers. And all of my students, whether they participated in pro bono or not, were at least introduced to the concept of pro bono as a professional activity to supplement their future law practices.

3. Service to the Community

Finally, course-specific pro bono offers a valuable service to the community. At GWU, my students have assisted homeless individuals with a variety of issues related to housing, family law, and public benefits; and they have assisted low-income individuals with AIDS with public benefits appeals. Because students work in small groups under my supervision, and because their pro bono work is closely related to the topics that they study in class, their work on behalf of these individuals is very high quality. Moreover, course-specific pro bono encourages broader and future commitments to public service by introducing students to pro bono and public interest and reinforcing pro bono and public interest opportunities.

Incorporating Pro Bono into Law Classes

With a little effort and planning, pro bono can be used to enhance most law school classes, even classes at schools where there is no centralized or coordinated pro bono program and even without significant additional resources or support. Following are the steps that I used in developing my course-specific pro bono programs.

1. Identify Educational Objectives

The first step I used to incorporate pro bono into my courses was to identify the specific course-related goals or objectives that could be enhanced with a pro bono project. These goals could include such things as exposing students to a practical application of a concept covered in class, testing the students’ mastery of a concept in a real-world situation, or demonstrating to students how different course concepts relate to each other in the context of a single client’s problem.

The goal for my pro bono project in my Introduction to Advocacy course was to illustrate the process of assembling a written legal argument. Students were called upon to investigate facts through interviews and document reviews, research the law, and write a brief in support of a client’s claim for disability benefits. In contrast to the non-participating students in my class, students who participated in the pro bono project struggled with complex facts, multiple witnesses, complicated documents, and a new area of the law. In short, they learned class material under real-life conditions.

In my Client Interviewing and Counseling class, I used pro bono to test students’ mastery of the interviewing and problem-solving skills that we developed in class. Students interviewed homeless clients with no prior knowledge of their legal problems and counseled them under my supervision on their various options. Again, students were exposed to material under real-life conditions.

2. Identify a Case or Problem

The next step I used to incorporate pro bono into my classes was to identify an appropriate case or problem for my students. For my Client Interviewing and Counseling class, I sought an experience for my students that would require interviewing and counseling clients without prior knowledge of their legal problems. I worked with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, a local non-profit with which I had volunteered for several years. The Clinic provided me with opportunities to bring small groups of students to a homeless shelter to interview and counsel clients, much as volunteer attorneys interview and counsel clients through the Clinic. The clients did not have appointments, and the students had no prior knowledge of the legal issues that the clients brought them. And because most of my students had not been in a homeless shelter or had not worked with a homeless individual, the experience required them to adapt to an interviewing and counseling situation with which they were unfamiliar.

For my Introduction to Advocacy class, I sought an experience for my students that would require them to understand complicated facts from multiple witnesses and complex documents and apply a new but relatively accessible area of the law in a forum with relaxed evidentiary rules and rules of practice. Thus, I worked with the Whitman-Walker Clinic, another local non-profit, to take on disability benefits appeals cases of individuals with AIDS. The students were called upon to put together written legal arguments from multiple and complicated medical records and interviews with different witnesses. The law was appropriately complex for the students; and the relaxed rules of the Social Security Administration allowed students to participate at all levels in representation of the clients.

Although I worked with local non-profit legal services providers to develop my pro bono projects, there are many opportunities to obtain pro bono cases to incorporate into various classes. For example, one could work with other faculty members who are already engaged in pro bono activities. One could also work with local law firms, the local bar association, or other organizations that could benefit from students’ work, whether the cases are pro bono for the organization or not. In my pro bono work at GWU, I have found these types of organizations to be extremely receptive to working with law students and faculty on a course-specific pro bono project.

3. Place the Case or Problem in the Course Syllabus

The third step is to place the case or problem in the appropriate part of the course. In my courses, this step required some advanced planning so that the case or problem would be at an appropriate point during the semester. For example, I selected a public benefits case for my Introduction to Advocacy class to ensure that the deadline for the brief and the date of the hearing would come soon after my class lessons on brief writing and oral arguments. I also adjusted my syllabus slightly to give the students flexibility in the event that we met unexpected delays in the case. Finally, I considered students’ other commitments-exam preparation, job interviews, travel during spring break, and holidays-to ensure that students could give their full attention to the case. I found the non-profits with which I worked extremely accommodating in selecting cases and meeting my criteria.

4. Assign the Cases to Student Volunteers and Supervise the Work

Finally, I assigned the cases to pairs or small teams of student volunteers at the beginning of the semester. I attempted to group students based on interests, abilities, and personalities; and, depending on the students, I assigned specific portions of the work to each student or asked the students to divide the work themselves.

Next, I met with all my student volunteers and, outside of regular class, trained them in additional skills and provided additional information. For example, I presented information on professional responsibility considerations in representing clients and the applicable substantive and procedural law. I also trained them in particular fact-gathering and legal research skills that were necessary to the case but that were not covered in class.

As students began their pro bono work, I closely supervised them. Depending on the students and the case, I used a range of supervisory models from dispensing specific work to students as a supervising attorney to working with students as co-counsel to asking students simply to report regularly to me on their progress. I provided structured and regular feedback to students during periodic meeting and asked them to be self-reflective about their work. As the cases and the class ended, I offered additional, extra-curricular pro bono opportunities to interested students.

Although I used this course-specific pro bono model to supplement two “skills” courses, the model can be easily adapted to almost any law school course. It requires little additional time and few additional resources, but it yields a remarkable impact upon student learning and understanding and community service.

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