New England Clinical Conference: Inspiration, Ideation & Innovation

Download the NECC 2025 Agenda

Thursday, November 20

Evening Reception
5:30-7:30 p.m. Location: TBD

Small Group Dinners
7:30 p.m. Location: TBD

Friday, November 21

Registration and Breakfast
8:00-9:00 a.m. Barristers Hall, Room 108

New Experiential Faculty Workshop
8:00-8:45 a.m. Room 526

Works-in-Progress Session
8:00-8:45 a.m. Room 528

Welcome from the Dean
9:05-9:15 a.m. Barristers Hall, Room 108
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean

Plenary Session
9:30-10:30 a.m. Barristers Hall, Room 108
Dr. Charmain Jackman, PhD

Concurrent Sessions #1
10:45-11:45 a.m.

Innovating Access to Rural Justice with Clinics, Fellowships and Financial Incentives

Room 528 (60 minutes)

Christopher Northrop, Maine Law School
Marcia Levy, Maine Law School

When you say you are from Maine, people talk about Portland and its great food scene, but they don't think about the "rural" nature of life for most Mainers. But, "rural" describes most of the state, and lack of access to justice is rampant in rural areas both for logistical reasons and because many of the private lawyers serving the population are at retirement age. Those truths provided an imperative for Maine Law School to take steps to address the problem.

Three years ago, after at least a decade of committees, reports, and conversations, and with substantial assistance from the state legislature and Governor’s Office, Maine Law was able to launch a stand-alone Rural Practice Clinic (RPC) five hours north of Portland. This clinic is located on the University of Maine at Fort Kent campus and provides year-round legal representation to residents ofAroostook County, with one clinical professor supervising students who spend at least one semester full-time at the clinic. Support for the RPC came from many quarters, and benefited from Maine Law’s long standing Rural Legal Fellowship(RLF) program that places about 6 students in rural law firms over the summer, a program paid for by contributions from law firms and the Maine Bar Association. The RLF helped build relationships in small towns in Maine’s rim counties and has been a focus of our admission’s team recruitment for a number of years. Currently, both the clinic and the summer fellowship program are fully subscribed, students are getting post graduate job offers, and a pipeline exiss from admissions to RLF to RPC exists to post-graduation opportunities.

This session will be an interactive discussion of what’s gone right (inspiration), what’s gone wrong (challenges), and where we should go next (innovation). The session will enable brainstorming about different models, how to fund, using the legislature for support, and the ongoing difficulties in getting young, talented attorneys to settle in Maine’s small towns.

Pro Se Litigation Assistance Programs…and Beyond

Room 413 (60 minutes)

Claire Donohue, Boston College Law School
Jeffery Cohen, Boston College Law School

Boston College Law School was awarded a grant by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts to staff a Pro Se Legal Assistance Pilot Program. As we boasted in our proposal: Boston College Law School’s success is based on a tradition of educating lawyers through theory and practice, and shaping leaders prepared to grapple with society’s most important moral and ethical questions. In Boston College’s Center for Experiential Learning (“CEL”), our pedagogy centers on development of legal and ethical judgment and essential practice skills as well as continued expansion of our students’ substantive knowledge base. The CEL also promotes engagement with practice and with our community and advances commitments to social and economic justice. In this way, the Center is an essential pillar in the Law School’s mission to support Boston College Law School students not merely in becoming excellent lawyers, but in living lives of excellence. The court agreed with our assessment that given our strong history of serving indigent clients, advocating for access to justice, and offering social service advocacy to our clients, the CEL is well-equipped to support non-incarcerated pro se litigants navigating federal civil cases in the District of Massachusetts.

We are thrilled. Now we have to do it.

This discussion will offer initial reflections about taking this leap, reflections on how early months are going, and then open to a broader discussion about the highs and lows, pits and cherries, joys and challenges of growing clinics in non-traditional ways including, but not limited to pilots, pop ups, and soft money initiatives.

So You Want to Start a Health Equity Clinic?

Room 416 (60 minutes)

Jay Sicklick, UConn School of Law

The session will focus on the creation and implementation of a health equity medical-legal partnership (MLP) clinic in the present political atmosphere. The focus of the session will center around equity-based work with a community-based health provider (a large hospital system) and integrating clinical training with advocacy on both individual and systemic health harming legal needs. Sub-topics will evaluate the initial impact on students who face unique challenges working with vulnerable populations (chronic disease, end of life care, disability related challenges and “stuck patients” who face “legal determinant” barriers to discharge). Key “first impression” clinic issues that we faced were: First clinic client passing away – the impact on student well being and vicarious trauma; Working with immigrant populations facing extraordinary hardships and challenges – and the lack of legal resources to “solve” a case; and working through “challenging dynamics” when advocating for patients whose goals did not necessarily align with some clinical partners.

Attendees can expect to take away the need to consider important interdisciplinary challenges such as confidentiality in a hospital setting; information sharing with non-lawyer partners; controlling the “uncontrollable” – bad outcomes due to health consequences; and team building in a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural practice setting. In addition, one unique take away will be how to create a MLP clinic that serves two stakeholders – clinical law students and clinical healthcare providers – and negotiating the brave new world of advocating for “health equity” given the stakeholders respective commitments to this concept. Finally, how to appropriately review student success as “clinical practitioners” when collaboration with interdisciplinary partners varied greatly from case to case.

Beyond the Black Box: Teaching Ethical and Effective Use of AI in Clinical Legal Education

Room 417 (60 minutes)

Christina Miller, Suffolk University Law School
Darrell Mottley, Suffolk University Law School
Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School

Artificial Intelligence is no longer a speculative future tool—it is now a daily part of law practice, client counseling, and legal analysis. Yet, the rapid proliferation of generative AI tools presents new challenges and opportunities in clinical legal education. Law schools must equip students not only with technical proficiency but also with the ethical compass, judgment, and critical thinking required to integrate AI responsibly into lawyering practice.

This presentation will explore how two clinical professors—one leading a litigation-based clinic and the other directing a transactional clinic—are embedding generative AI and technological advancements into their clinical teaching. The presenters will share practical strategies for guiding students in the ethical, effective, and proactive use of AI in both advocacy and transactional work.

The session will focus on helping students understand AI as an integrative tool—one that complements, rather than replaces, their legal reasoning, professional judgment, and analytical skill development. The presenters will discuss how to frame AI use as an exercise in client-centered lawyering, mindful assessment, and ethical reflection, consistent with ABA Model Rules 1.1 (Competence), 1.6 (Confidentiality), and 5.3 (Supervision of Technology).

Attendees will leave the session with concrete examples of classroom exercises, supervision techniques, and real-client applications that teach students how to:

• Use generative AI to brainstorm, draft, and revise documents while sharpening—not dulling—their legal analysis.
• Assess when AI is an appropriate tool and when human judgment must lead.
• Engage in reflective practice about bias, confidentiality, and professional responsibility in tech-assisted lawyering.
• Build comfort and critical literacy with new technologies without sacrificing rigor, ethics, or personal growth.

The session will include interactive components, including how each Professor specifically incorporates AI as a responsible tool, including live demonstrations of AI prompts that can either help or hinder lawyering depending on student engagement and oversight.

Experiential Readiness & Contingency Planning

Room 418 (60 minutes)

Jessica Rubin, UConn School of Law
Beth Locker, Vermont Law
Julie Dahlstrom, Boston University School of Law
Sarah Boonin, Suffolk University Law School

This panel will examine innovative strategies to support and sustain clinical programs amid a range of challenges, including the uncertain financial and legal landscape for higher education. Panelists will address how experiential programs can proactively respond to these pressing issues, including adopting alternative staffing models, identifying creative sources of support and collaboration, and developing new policies to safeguard casework and academic operations from external and internal attacks. They will address the need to respond quickly at this critical inflection point for experiential legal education, while still considering the impact of changes over time. Furthermore, the panel will consider how experiential programs can better serve the diverse goals, concerns, and skill development needs of students, ensuring they are well-prepared to succeed in the legal job market and excel as lawyers in today’s evolving profession.

Cross Clinic Collaboration with Community Lawyering

Room 419 (60 minutes)

Erin O’Sullivan, New England Law - Boston
Susan Schwartz, New England Law - Boston

Recognizing that clinical programs are organized in a variety of ways, we believe there are always meaningful opportunities for cross-clinic collaboration, regardless of structure. One of the most effective strategies we have employed is the development of community lawyering experiences that are open to all students enrolled in the civil legal clinic. These events allow students to engage in interdisciplinary, team-based advocacy and deepen their understanding of how community engagement can enhance individual representation. Students can attend these events with a different supervisor in a different area than what they have already experienced in the clinic. This benefits students by exposing them to additional supervision styles, substantive areas of the law, and client interview experiences. Supervisors provide brief training and materials ahead of time, but all events are set up to be accessible to students who have not had prior experience in the particular legal area. We will give an overview of our systems including our sign-up, training, supervision and feedback processes. We will then conclude with an interactive discussion on how other programs are using cross-clinic collaboration and how we all can further innovate to improve this concept.

Maine Law’s Immigration Detention Project: Innovating to Meet the Challenges of Unprecedented Immigration Enforcement and Detention

Room 420 (60 minutes)

Bri Zhuang, University of Maine School of Law
Anna Welch, University of Maine School of Law
Sara Cressey, University of Maine School of Law

This presentation will focus on the New England Immigration Detention Project, a collaborative project launched by the Maine Law Refugee and Human Rights Clinic in 2025 in response to unprecedented increases in immigration enforcement in Maine, other parts of New England, and the entire country. We will begin the session with an overview of the project, including its purpose, its benefit to law students’ clinical educational experience, and different ways we’ve engaged in broader advocacy in conjunction with our project. We’ll then discuss the nuts and bolts of launching the new project, including how we’ve coordinated and collaborated with other legal aid organizations and community stakeholders, in Maine and regionally. Finally, we will engage in a broader reflection about challenges we’ve encountered and lessons learned throughout the process. During this portion, we will open it up to the audience for a more free-flowing brainstorming session about how we can improve our model, how our project can be implemented in different communities and law school clinical settings, and how we might forge new partnerships moving forward.

This concurrent session will directly address the issue of navigating rapidly evolving legal landscapes, specifically regarding immigration detention, in light of Trump’s second presidency and the astronomical growth of immigration enforcement. It will discuss how clinical programs can be creative in their responses to sudden changes in the law and be nimble when crises arise in our communities. Our proposed session will discuss the process of developing and launching our detention project, student involvement and educational opportunities, and strategies for remaining responsive and nimble during these unprecedented times.

Expanding Access and Increasing Opportunity for Student Learning: Utilizing a Clinical Model for Pro Bono Projects

Room 526 (60 minutes)

Rachel Reeves, UConn School of Law
Suzy Harrington-Steppen, Roger Williams University School of Law

In a time of great need and limited resources, how can we find alternative opportunities to serve our communities and our students? Two externship faculty will describe our experiences creating “mini-clinics” for pro bono projects, which allow us to serve as clinical instructors/supervising attorneys for projects that promote student learning while providing much-needed support to vulnerable members of our communities. While we are both experienced externship teachers, we have differing levels of experience with this mini-clinic model, ranging from 16 years to 6 months. We will describe our processes for identifying, starting, and running mini-clinic projects. Participants will leave our session with important considerations before embarking on a mini-clinic project, including potential roadblocks, ideas for community collaborations, suggestions for incorporating clinical pedagogy, and perhaps most importantly, an understanding of the many benefits to the law school, students, community, and individual faculty member supervising these projects.

Lunch
12:00-1:30 p.m.

Barristers Hall, Room 108

Concurrent Session #2 (Lightning Round #1)
1:45-2:15 p.m.

Leveraging Community Partnerships to Enrich Student Experience

Room 416 (30 minutes)

Jennifer Brinkman, Northern Kentucky University School of Law

In this session, I’ll share how inviting guest speakers from community partner organizations has enriched student learning, increased engagement, and deepened the real-world relevance of course content. I’ll discuss the benefits of these collaborations for students, faculty, and community partners alike, and highlight how instructors can leverage community partnerships to strengthen course design and connect academic learning with lived experience. Participants will explore ways to identify partners and align their contributions with course objectives.

An Overlooked Opportunity for Justice: Clinical Collaboration with Prosecutorial Offices to Remedy the Conviction of the Innocent

Room 420 (30 minutes)

Brian Wilson, Boston University School of Law
David Lewis, New England Law

For decades, law school clinics and practicums dedicated to remedying the convictions of innocent persons have typically followed a relatively standard model: a “wrongful convictions” or “innocence” program in which students partner with an organization and directly represent clients in petitioning courts for postconviction relief. While those programs do remarkable work, there is another, almost universally overlooked forum in which students can work toward achieving the same critical goal, but through different means: collaboration with the conviction integrity unit (“CIU”) of a prosecutor’s office.

This session will focus on how partnering with a CIU, either as a standalone practicum or branch of a wrongful convictions program or criminal clinic, provides a unique opportunity for students to understand how a prosecutor’s responsibility “to seek justice within the bounds of the law” creates an affirmative duty to remedy the conviction of a person determined to be innocent. We’ll highlight how law students at New England and BU are engaging in this work on behalf of two Michigan prosecutor’s offices by screening applications for relief submitted by convicted persons directly to their CIUs. As a group we’ll exchange ideas on how conviction integrity and wrongful convictions programs at the same school could complement each other, even where two distinct groups of students are working independently and with different organizations, and how both would create invaluable opportunities to work toward this common vital objective.

Law-Themed TTRPGS (Tabletop Role-Playing Games/Simulations)

Room 526 (30 minutes)

David Colarusso, Suffolk University School of Law

In role playing games (RPGs) players assume the roles of characters in a simulated world. Not just anything goes, however. Outcomes are shaped by structure, the result of a player's actions interacting with an imagined reality. This session will show you how to turn legal cases into simple tabletop RPGs you can play with students by wrapping some rules around legal fact patterns and gathering a group of three or more players. Building on top of lessons learned from a class taught in the fall of 2024, https://lawrpg.org, this session will provide attendees with all they need to run case simulations of variable fidelity, including how to set up "AI" bots to help students moot their work before engaging IRL. 20-sided dice will be provided.

The Operating Manual for Me: Conscious Contracts® Tool for Values-Aligned Teamwork in Clinics

Room 528 (30 minutes)

Kara McCarthy Perry, Quinnipiac University School of Law

Entrepreneurial thinking thrives on experimentation, shared vision, and strong relationships—especially in the face of uncertainty. Clinical legal education, too, demands that students learn to collaborate, communicate, and lead with both flexibility and purpose. This session offers a reflective and relational tool, the “Operating Manual for Me,” adapted from the Conscious Contracts® process taught in the Integrative Law Approach to Negotiation Clinic at Quinnipiac Law School.

This practical exercise invites students to articulate how they work, what support they need under stress, how they handle disagreement, and what helps them feel seen and respected in a group. By making these often-unspoken dynamics explicit, clinical teams can prevent common miscommunications, surface potential friction points early, and build more trusting, values-aligned collaborations. It fosters honest dialogue around personal rhythms, needs, and circumstances—bringing a whole-person lens to collaborative clinical work and supervision.

Though the structure is straightforward, it invites meaningful reflection and supports the development of self-leadership and professional identity in line with ABA Standard 303(b). Faculty may also choose to complete their own Operating Manuals to model reflective practice and strengthen communication within student-faculty teams.

Examples of student and faculty Operating Manuals will be shared, as well as exercises and reflective prompts that can be easily adapted across clinics and contexts.

Takeaways:

1. Tools to support values-based collaboration, clearer communication, and shared expectations in clinic teams.
2. A whole-person approach to legal education that supports both professional identity formation and high-functioning teamwork.
3. A practice for integrating healthy boundaries, personal responsibility, and reflective communication into collaboration.
4. A framework that strengthens resilience, trust, and alignment.

Whether your clinic is long-established or just beginning, this session invites you to try something new: a relational tool to help your students—and you—to work with greater awareness, intention, trust, and alignment—key ingredients for any clinic committed to innovation and impact.

Concurrent Session #3 (Lightning Round #2)
 2:20-2:50 p.m.

From Error to Advocacy: An Innovative Approach to Real-World Learning in Clinical and Experiential Legal Education

Room 419 (30 minutes)

Stephanie Kupferman, Vermont Law
Mary Mason, Vermont Law

Adhering to deadlines as an attorney is a crucial part of lawyering. Failure to file a complaint timely or missing the statute of limitations may result in malpractice and preclude a client from their day in court. Failure to assert an affirmative defense in a pleading means that you have forever waived that defense. Most jurisdictions have corrective motions for a suite of missed deadlines like calendar default. This panel will discuss how to incorporate restorative motions in a variety of jurisdictions and how to teach law students to creatively fix mistakes before facing real life consequences.

Scholarship Challenges for Experiential Teachers

Room 417 (30 minutes)

Margaret Drew, UMass School of Law
Kate Devlin Joyce, Boston University School of Law
Julie Dahlstrom, Boston University School of Law

Experiential teachers face unique challenges to engaging in scholarship that other faculty do not. Time for scholarship are one of the biggest challenges but other challenges can influence how and when we write. For example, there may be institutional barriers that elevate doctrinal writing over This workshop is designed to acknowledge the challenges faced by experiential teachers who may be required to write as part of their position, or who may want to write, even without requirements to do so. In addition to identifying challenges to writing, the panel will identify strategies to help experiential teachers reach their research goals.

Pivot to on the Road: The Travel Clinic

Room 526 (30 minutes)

Rebecca Nowak, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law

Since 2019, Detroit Mercy Law has conducted 1-2 traveling expungement clinics per year for underserved communities and groups, serving more than 500 people and handling more than 200 ZOOM expungement hearings in 62 Michigan courts. As a choice of law for a travel clinic, expungement work is ideal as it clears criminal records, increases opportunities for clients and the length of a case is 4-6 months.

This session is to imagine legal education to be mobile, human-centered, and solutions-oriented, pivoting from the traditional model by bringing pro bono legal services to a community while providing students with an unparalleled legal educational experience and diverse perspective of other communities and groups.
Students who take part often return as licensed attorneys to volunteer.

Planning involves:

• Identify under-served areas or groups and legal need.
• Coordinate clinic physical location.
• Determine number of students and clients.
• Secure partnerships with courts, judges, volunteer supervising attorneys, nonprofits, public defenders, and social workers.
• Create budget/ secure funding.
• Negotiate rates and waivers of fees.
• Market clinic – typically local partners distribute fliers law school prepares.
• Secure housing - negotiate rates.
• Coordinate notary at clinic, if needed.
• Coordinate with local police for fingerprints.
• Coordinate equipment and clinic process, including pre-registration.

In advance of the clinic students learn client interviewing, study the expungement statute and case law, and are trained to review a criminal record.
At the clinic, students also conduct legal research about eligibility by looking at criminal statutes and call courts. With the help of free software, Michigan Legal Help, students interview clients, assess eligibility, prepare the required pleadings, and inform the client of next steps.
Post clinic students are able to handle the zoom expungement hearing with court approval and under the supervision of assistant dean or another attorney.

Emerging Adulthood in 2025: Why Today’s Law Students Behave the Way They Do

Room 528 (30 minutes)

Diana Hortsch, Brooklyn Law School

There is broad consensus among law schools and legal employers that today’s law students are markedly different from previous cohorts. While we see many positive developments, we also see increased challenges with maturity, organization, and personal regulation.

Participants will be introduced to the developmental stage known as Emerging Adulthood (ages 18–28), first identified by psychologist Jeffrey Arnett in 2001. This stage is marked by delayed adulthood milestones, including later entry into full-time work, marriage, and financial independence. Over the past two decades, these delays have become more pronounced and are now a global phenomenon. The pandemic and rise of social media have only exacerbated the trend.

I will explain core developmental tasks of emerging adulthood (identity formation, executive function, self-regulation) and how they explain some of the behavior of today’s law students. I will share data about the broader societal, cultural, financial and educational shifts behind these changes.

Looking at this phenomenon from a developmental perspective, it seems that professional identity formation curriculum, while important in legal education, is no longer sufficient.

This session engages the conference theme by challenging us to pivot away from potential frustration with this cohort and toward innovation grounded in developmental realism.

In the second half, we will shift into an incubator model, where participants will work in small groups to generate bold “what if” statements. For example:

*What if law schools built structured pre-1L mentorship pipelines?
*What if law school admissions were reimagined to decrease or eliminate the “K-JD” students who take no time off?

Participants will leave with three takeaways: (1) a fresh developmental lens for understanding today’s students, (2) greater understanding of and empathy for the challenges they face, and (3) potential strategies and/or prototypes they can bring back to their own schools for discussion.

Concurrent Session #4
3:00-4:00 p.m.

Oops, I Did It Again: Embracing the Risk-Taking and Mistake-Making of Innovation

Room 526 (60 minutes)

Claire Donohue, Boston College School of Law
Bradford Colbert, Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Laurie S. Kohn, George Washington School of Law
David Santacroce, University of Michigan Law School
Carmia Caesar, George Washington School of Law

The invitation to courageous innovation is inspiring. It is also daunting. As lawyers and law professors we know full well that courageous action inevitably involves risks; and while risk-taking is full of opportunities to light upon something profound and effective, it is also rife with opportunities to make mistakes. This group will explore the taxonomy of mistakes that we have made, narrowly avoided, or worried about (both appropriately or with misplaced concern). Our discussion will focus on the aftermath of mistakes: admitting to having made them; and learning and recovering from them. For this Discussion Group, we have assembled a panel of administrators and clinical professors from a diverse range of clinical programs in terms of size, region, and resources. While willing to have the energy and interest in the room direct us, this group will plan to:

1. Encourage participants to reflect honestly on their own pedagogical and professional mistakes, and work to leverage those reflections toward a better practice of mistake-making;
2. Discuss what courage in action looks like for an administrator - with responsibility to serve our students and ensure the best possible legal education;
3. We will consider if growth and progress occur without risk-taking.

Fighting the Chilling Effect Through Collective Action

Room 416 (60 minutes)

Kate Gannon, Suffolk University School of Law
Elizabeth Valentin, Nova Southeastern University School of Law
Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University School of Law 

Amici, impact litigation, legislative advocacy, emergency filings … what projects or cases have you wanted your clinic to take on but have ultimately passed on out of a lack of resources or a concern that it would lead to consequences for your clinic, students, clients, funding, position, or job security? Would the backing of other clinicians have changed that calculation?

Conversely, does your clinic have the time, resources, and institutional cover to step into the fray, but you aren’t sure how best to help?

While the populations we serve and the institutions we operate within and alongside are under relentless attack, a chilling effect has descended on higher education. This session seeks to ask if law clinics can combat these twin crises by creating a secure and effective place for real-time crisis communication, community-building, and collective action across state lines and issue areas. Drawing from the wisdom of resistance movements, how can we activate our network in a time of crisis so we can benefit from our collective know-how, resources, and value systems?

At a conference that is “as much a call to arms as a call to dream”, let’s make space to discuss questions such as:

• If this resource existed, what would you offer to it and what would you need from it?
• How would real-time inter-clinical communication shape or shift our work?
• What are the upsides and downsides of creating a forum for collaboration?
• What would need to be hashed out to get it up and running?

This session may be of particular interest if you are: looking for ways to help or looking for help; feeling isolated and outnumbered; knowledgeable about different communication platforms, impact litigation, organizing strategies, or past inter-clinic communication efforts; interested in joining a working group to develop a pilot in time for AALS.

Ideating an Inspirational and Innovative Special Education Clinic

Room 417 (60 minutes)

Jim Wheaton, William & Mary Law School
Erin O’Sullivan, New England School of Law

Across the country, there are just a few law school clinics devoted to special education work, and a handful of others that include that work among other services they provide to children. Yet child-side special education representation is a legal desert in much of the country, the need is great, and the universally applicable practice skills (negotiation, strategy, and counseling skills) developed by law students while doing the work fulfill the mission of clinical legal education. This session will address:

• The scope of a clinic. The substantive law students need to learn is unfamiliar to most law students, but is relatively “cabined” in nature. Typical clinic representations include, for example, helping children gain eligibility and initial services, helping parents exercise their child’s rights to records and evaluations, addressing school failures to deliver required services, and representing children before a school committee or school board in connection with a suspension or expulsion.
• How do we move from ideation to implementation? How do we start a special education clinic, and source the initial clients? Are there funding sources? What geographic limitations should a clinic impose?
• The role of a special education clinic in filling an important gap. Most law students have lived for years in campus bubbles where they simply aren’t exposed regularly to the range of disabilities encountered in the real world (particularly intellectual disabilities not encountered in college and graduate school communities). But some of those students experienced special education challenges themselves, or come from backgrounds where siblings or others they knew struggled with special education problems. They are anxious to give back, and inspired by the work.
• In an environment where legal clinics are often under attack, can a new special education clinic be positioned as a “parents’ rights” initiative?

Breaking Out of the Box by Bringing It Back to Basics: Attention to Detail in the Experiential Setting

Room 418 (60 minutes)

Laila Atta, Western New England University School of Law
Kara Simrad, University of New Hampshire School of Law

In clinical legal education, success often hinges on the ability to spot the smallest details that could make a major difference in a case. Whether it's identifying a key piece of evidence, mastering the nuances of legal argumentation, or effectively guiding students through complex ethical dilemmas, attention to detail is paramount. But many clinical professors will recognize this pattern: students repeatedly overlooking key facts in case files, missing court deadlines, skipping essential procedural steps, or making assumptions without verifying details (let's not even get started on missing important information in the syllabus). These aren't just isolated mistakes—they reflect a broader challenge in how students approach legal work. Often, their mindset is reactive rather than proactive, narrowly focused rather than inquisitive. These repeated mistakes, while frustrating, raise important questions: Are we equipping students with the tools to slow down, think critically, and spot the subtle—but critical—elements in a client’s legal story? Or are we unintentionally rewarding surface-level performance? This session explores how to move beyond correcting mistakes to building the mindset that prevents them. By bringing students back to the basics of attention to detail —but through proactive exercises, resourcefulness, and ownership—we can help students develop the habits of precision, problem-solving, and curiosity that legal practice demands. 

Spark!ing Collaboration Across Campus

Room 419 (60 minutes)

Julie Dahlstrom, Boston University School of Law
Shira Diner, Boston University School of Law
Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Boston University School of Law

What if law students could build an interactive website to help immigrant communities avoid ICE arrests? What if they could develop an app to identify human trafficking and connect survivors with resources? What if they could create a tool to help lawyers discovery police bias?

This panel will explore how law school clinics can use technology to address important legal and social problems. Technology can provide new ways to understand legal challenges and create innovative solutions to address disparities within the legal system. Yet, too often, law faculty and students struggle to engage across disciplines and lack technological expertise to develop effective tools. This panel will showcase how three BU Law faculty members have developed innovative technology-related projects in partnership with Spark!—an experiential learning lab for computer science students at Boston University’s Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. The panel will highlight three such projects: (1) an algorithm to address police bias; (2) a website designed to document and report ICE presence and arrests across the state of Massachusetts; and (3) an app designed to assist investigators at the Office of the Attorney General in identifying labor trafficking. The panel demonstrates how these technology projects have tremendous pedagogical value for law students and can make a long-lasting impact on communities. The panelists will also offer practical tips for audience members interested in developing technology-related projects and in fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations with university computer science programs. Panelists will encourage attendees to brainstorm what technology-related projects could complement their clinical work and how to leverage university resources at their own institutions to create unique experiential learning opportunities for law and computer science students.

Scaling Legal Education for Small Businesses: A New National Clinic Model for Public-Facing, Student-Led Legal Education

Room 528 (60 minutes)

Nicole Killoran, Vermont Law School
Brian Bailey, Vermont Law School 

"Our clinic trains law and graduate students each semester to serve as legal educators for hundreds of small business owners and nonprofit leaders. Students build core professional skills—issue spotting, translating legal concepts, modulating tone, and adapting explanations to client understanding—through public-facing legal education. Students deliver targeted education and information on many bar-tested topics, from business formation to venture capital, contracts to bankruptcy. They learn to navigate ambiguity, anticipate client needs, and clarify unknown unknowns—essential skills for legal professionals.  They join a growing, public-service minded community of future lawyers who understand how to break down legal concepts and identify how to best provide relevant information for a legal question for the public.

Our dreams are to now scale this model, and incorporate students educating entrepreneurs in other parts of the country.  We are also developing partnerships with biglaw pro bono teams to co-mentor students and provide higher-level support to clients. We aim for these expansions to create a network of student-led legal educators to help their communities across the country, while also learning directly from experienced attorneys in a setting few law students can access.

Our session will share how we built this model and how we might scale it, then engage attendees in brainstorming.  How can student-led legal education clinics support not just small business law education, but other public legal educational needs?  What local challenges would you face adopting a public educational model in your school or your state?  How can we entice biglaw to support community-level work, and benefit our clinicians?  This model challenges traditional clinic-client boundaries, invites collaboration, and empowers students as public educators—not just legal technicians.  Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for adapting similar educational programs for their clinics, and integrating cross-sector partnerships in service of practice-ready, community-embedded legal education."

Closing and Farewells
4:10-4:30 p.m.

Charles River Room, Room 525