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CLE and CLE - Twins or Distant Cousins?
What does the abbreviation CLE mean in legal education? Is it Clinical or Continuing or both? For law students it refers to Clinical Legal Education. For most practising lawyers it stands for Continuing Legal Education. In both cases legal education is claimed. Yet these two are presently worlds apart. Because of this, their shared DNA, has not been at the foreground of legal education.
As a law student I undertook Professional Practice at Monash University in 1977 at Springvale Legal Service. With Simon Smith as my clinical teacher. Yes, we served the local community and tried our wings out at becoming real “baby lawyers.” My commitment to social justice was sparked. I learnt to deliver competent service to individual clients.
What I Didn't Learn - How To Work Best in a Legal Workplace
What I did not learn was about the nature of legal workplaces and what I now call Legal Working Culture. It is surprising that given the complex nature of professional legal work in which there exists concurrent streams of cultural expectations and ways of doing things, that more research work has not occured in this field.
I was not taught anything about Legal Working Culture because it had not been discovered. It was not a recognised phenomenon. Understanding the values, beliefs and behaviour of best practice legal working culture has been a non-issue. Arguably the closest law academics have got is in the teaching of ethics. Even here, the focus is on service to the client and the court, not necessarily a consideration of how best to equip law students to learn to work best in legal workplaces.
Legal Working Bee Chapter One
Chapter 1
As I lay on my lounge room floor after a stressful day working in industrial law, aged 26, with serious chest pain my legal career was at a crossroads. I was a worker bee and although I didn't know it my end was near. It got worse.
After I got better I decided to make a difference for other young lawyers. That was 22 years ago. I'm trying again.
Regrettably, for my well being, my practical knowledge about how to survive, much less thrive, working in legal organisations was understandably sparse. My journey as a lawyer had hit some serious road bumps.
From Social Justice to Self Survival
Importantly my allegiance to social justice for socially disadvantaged clients, germinated in the heady 1970’s at Monash, transitioned to a focus on the wicked problem of career development and wellbeing for myself and many other practising lawyers.
I could see that there was a lack of cohesion for lawyers' professional, workplace learning and lifelong learning. And that legal workplaces needed to become safer workplaces. There was in fact a gaping chasm of both knowledge and attentiveness to how to support the professional development and wellbeing of lawyers post admission by legal workplaces and their leadership.
As a workplace learning theorist I equate work with learning and propose that as a guiding principle professional workers will aim for better practice. My lifelong commitment and academic and consulting interest to improve the working and learning experiences of practising lawyers was born that day I lay on the floor of my lounge room.
Absence of Pedagogy in Clinical and Continuing Legal Education
In 2002 I became the Director of Legal Professional Development, Leo Cussen, after a broad legal career and then experience as a vocational management educator. I was excited because now I could make a difference.
By then I had commenced a master’s in education by research at Melbourne University. Notably this was in the Education Faculty. Here lay the expertise in workplace learning theory, professional learning and practice. Work integrated learning (WIL) and situated learning are only part of the broader spectrum of workplace learning for lawyers, Hann (2007).
The absence of any education theory underpinning the delivery of the voluminous suite of programs we offered in Continuing legal education was stark. And of concern. Yet it wasn’t a live issue. 22 years later it remains the case that there is no established pedagogy for Continuing legal education. And my PhD research, completed within 3 years, was overlooked or, more likely, stonewalled. Why?
Stonewalled
I do not know why my proposal for an integrated Legal Professional Development model and recognition of Legal Working Culture was stonewalled. My supposition is around the fact that law is a hierarchical profession and I sat on the outskirts of respectability being a distant relative, namely a Continuing Legal Educator. My other suspicion is that, had I been a man, my opinions would have carried more weight.
Just as “Australian clinicians have long laboured in law schools and external clinical sites with too little appreciation and too many obstacles” (Evans, A., et al 2017) so have Continuing legal education practitioners who want to ensure that the individual lawyer can thrive, not merely survive their career. Of course, education is not the only determining factor but its absence ensures that legal practice is even less of an equal playing field.
Here social justice in the context of social dominance theory, and the opportunity for an individual lawyer to progress in their career, is relevant. If Clinical Legal Education is the poor cousin in legal education then Continuing Legal Education is a distant relative.
Evans and his fellow authors go on to state their key concern is that in the “absence of agreed clinical pedagogies for Australian clinical programs, we say, see mediocrity posing as diversity – and worse, to our minds – a diminution of focus on serving clients in poverty and striving for social justice” p ix.
You Can't Help Others If You Do Not Help Yourself
I have a different perspective. I propose that equipping lawyers with the practical knowledge to survive their legal careers is even more important than the social justice aspiration. You can’t help others if you haven’t adequately cared for yourself first.
I sincerely wish someone had reminded me of this as I lay on my lounge room floor, after a stressful day in industrial law, at the age of 26, with serious chest pain, unable to breath properly.
I was taught to put my client’s needs and interests first, before my own wellbeing. To be a dedicated worker bee lawyer. This is not sustainable. Not safe. And not sensible.
As I progressed in my legal career, into legal professional practice, there was no law faculty or university led legal education roadmap. Just as there is no agreed pedagogy for Clinical legal education. Likewise there is no agreed pedagogy for Continuing legal education. And the expertise within the Clinical law educator community has not been recruited into developing a Professional Development continuum for lifelong learners. This is a significant loss.
Whereas the focus in Clinical legal education appears to remain one of service to social justice the focus in Continuing legal education is now upon compulsory professional development. In both swim lanes there is a failure to foreground the wellbeing of people, who enter into what the authors concede is the reality, that “law schools are delivering larger numbers of graduates into a shrinking, or at best, stable legal jobs market”
Now with the advent of Ai even these existing law jobs are under new threat. What are we going to do about this?
Call to Action
Where is the accountability at the University as well as Faculty level? Why is it acceptable that Law Schools are treated as cash cows and the quality of legal education for individual law students, itself, seems to be such a low priority for universities?
Where are the principles of continuous improvement and quality principles and practices in ensuring that legal education, all branches of it, provide a high quality education with a roadmap into lifelong learning for lawyers?
Why hasn't the legal profession, eloquent as it is as an advocate for others, accepted the brief for this matter? What is wrong with us?
Footnotes
Hann, D (2007) Lawyers Practising Learning: Reshaping Continuing Legal Education, PhD, the University of Melbourne.https://debhann.academia.edu/
Evans, Cody, Copeland, Giddings, Joy, Noone and Rice (2017) “Australian Clinical Legal Education, Designing and Operating a Best Practice Clinical Program in an Australian Law School (2017).
Dr Deborah Hann
1 June 2024
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