Children’s Law Center Clinic

Children's Law Center Clinic

Clinic students participate in preparing and presenting cases involving children and teenagers, such as education rights, delinquency, custody, and access to social services. Students can develop skills – including interviewing, investigating, negotiating, and litigating – that apply to many adversarial situations in addition to children’s law.

“Students in the Children's Law Center Clinic learn to be competent, zealous advocates and creative problem solvers. They work with professionals across disciplines, including social workers, physicians, educators and other service providers to ensure the best outcomes for their clients.”
– Professor Amy Halbrook, clinic director

How to qualify
Students must have completed 28 credit hours and have completed, or be concurrently enrolled in, the Professional Responsibility course. However, upper-level students who have had courses in trial advocacy and either juvenile law or family law receive priority for clinic positions.

What to expect
The clinic is a three or four-credit-hour course that includes class time and clinic work. Students must attend a “boot camp” to prepare for clinic work, be available for some business hours each week, and complete 50 hours of clinic work for each credit hour enrolled.

I came to Chase for the amazing opportunity to start up the NKU Chase Children's Law Center Clinic. And the clinic is a partnership between Chase and the Children's Law Center, which is a community-based organization in Covington. So the clinic is actually housed in the Children's Law Center, which is an agency that represents children and teenagers in a variety of legal matters. And they built out the third floor of the Children's Law Center space, specifically for the clinic. And so that's where we as a class, and as kind of a legal cohort, represent clients together.

So the clinic is a practice model and it's a little bit different than what people think about when they think about legal internships or legal externships or clerk clerkships. The - so usually, when students work on cases, in a law office setting, they are providing support to attorneys, who are the lead practitioners, the lead attorneys on cases. The clinic model flips that and instead, the students are lead counsel on the cases and we provide support to them.

So the students in the clinic learn how to do everything that they have to know to represent clients. So we start at the very beginning, they learn, you know, adolescent development and child development principles. They learn everything about how juvenile court works, both on the juvenile justice side and the custody, the family law side. They learn civil procedure. They learn criminal procedure. They learn how to interview clients. They go to the courthouse. They draft and argue motions. They learn how to examine witnesses. They - and then they have their own clients - and we have hearings and trials and sometimes appeals.

In addition, we have a clinic class where they're constantly developing skills, talking about issues of justice for children and families, and really getting a chance to reflect on their practice experience. You know, part of the reason that the clinic model is really the gold standard in terms of experiential learning is because it's the time that students get to slow down, work collaboratively with their peers, have a you know, a practicing attorney, a professor who is their partner, who's going to make sure that there's a full safety net in place for them as they're learning to practice, but also that they're learning the higher-level thinking skills and collaboration skills that they need to develop as really competent attorneys.

Kentucky is actually pretty cutting edge when it comes to juvenile and family law issues, things related to children. Kentucky is the first state in America to have a presumption of joint custody and shared parenting time in private family cases. So in parties were part, uh, in cases where the parties are getting divorced. And so we've had — because in the clinic we represent kids in high conflict custody matters — students have had an opportunity to grapple with all of the practical and ethical issues that have come with being at the very forefront of the law.

Students who come to Chase get great experiential learning opportunities. There is a focus on students graduating and being able to hit the ground ready to practice. Any student who comes through my clinic knows how to find the courthouse, file a motion, address the court, do a basic - basic witness examination, argue of basic motion, and how to do the basic research that they would need to do to do more complex legal work. That's the kind of thing that they don't teach in most law schools.

And so - so most people are graduating from law school, kind of at a deficit, not knowing that kind of basic procedural information that they need to be able to just go out and practice. I know that our students graduate and they can do those things and it makes it easier for them to have a successful practice right out of law school. And I know that our students are known as practitioners who go out and know how to practice law

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