Diana Bowman and Noel Lim discuss the support available to the participants in their legal clinic
In 2021, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University’s School of Law and renter-focused not-for-profit legal service Anika Legal entered into a partnership that would enable students to gain firsthand experience working on legal cases. Recently, the partnership went deeper when Anika Legal set up an office on-site at the university to further its work assisting disadvantaged people with their housing-related cases.
Last week, RMIT law dean Diana Bowman and Anika Legal CEO and co-founder Noel Lim told Australasian Lawyer how the partnership began – in the second part of this interview, they share the criteria students must meet to become part of this program, and how they’re equipping participants for the necessary work.
How does a student go about becoming part of this programme?
Diana Bowman: We have a person who overseas this partnership and personally interviews every single student to ensure that they are both fit for purpose in terms of the skills coming in but also understand that this is really difficult work. It can be confronting at times in terms of the type of issues that a student will be dealing with. So [we] recognise that it is not just clinical or practical skills, but it's actually having the right mindset to be able to go in and be the best student lawyer that you can possibly be when dealing with difficult, challenging, emotionally taxing problems.
With that being said, I think we do a really good job with that process. I've spoken to students who have come out of that internship placement [and seen] just how passionate they are about real-world problem solving and working with people in need. That's probably another factor in why this works. Many of our students face their own difficult life circumstances, and these experiences just make them more passionate about doing good for as many people as possible during law school, and when they graduate.
Noel Lim: [The students are serving as] the point of contact for someone who is sometimes going through the toughest time of their life, wondering if they and their family are going to lose their home or going to have enough be able to recover a bond that was unfairly claimed so that they can put food on the table. The students have a lawyer overseeing them, but they're the ones talking to the client, who are drafting the legal letters, and in many cases, the ones negotiating with the other side via e-mail. The right mindset to handle those stakes and handle them with responsibility is much more important than any of the sort of technical skills that that might have already learned.
We teach the technical skills within the first couple of weeks, and then off they go. That's part of the process. You see the students come in, learn this stuff, and go from never having been this close and involved in a legal dispute, for most part, all the way through to becoming work ready and having a really clear understanding of the power of the legal profession and their responsibility as a lawyer and the responsibility to access to justice as well.
What are some examples of those skills that you teach the students in those first two weeks?
Noel Lim: Our cases focus on housing, so it's a lot of tenancy law. And then there are soft skills like, how do you talk to your client? How do you work within a team and work with your supervisor? And I think [there’s] also learning our systems and how to work within the Anika Legal practice environment.
But the vast majority of it is learning that stuff on the job, and learning by doing.
Is there support available for students given the challenging nature of the work?
Noel Lim: Anika is probably the front line for this kind of stuff. So we are very well prepared for this. This is one of the key capabilities that you need when you're running a student clinic where students are so close to the legal dispute. That's part of the preparation. It is very common that clients will be talking to students in ways that are challenging. I'm not a huge fan of the concept of vicarious trauma – there are aspects of it which we seek to safeguard against, both in [terms of] preventing it, through the education upfront, and also through the process of the case having hands-on supervision from both a supervising lawyer as well as a paralegal coordinator who's more able to step in and oversee individual bits of the case. Insurance and access to EAP are in place as well.
Diana Bowman: This is one of the huge benefits of actually having Anika in-house within the law school. The team is [around] in person a certain number of days a week in a very visual space, so our students are able to drop in and have a one-on-one with the team. They can talk to their peers who may be working in that space. It is a very visible safe space for them to be actually talking about the cases and the individuals that they might be working with.
More generally, the law school is a high-tech but also a high-touch law school, so our students are very well aware of who their professors are, who their tutors are. Because of the small size of the law school, they have quite deep relationships with the staff so they know there is always somebody on that next tier that they can go and talk to (while respecting client confidentiality).
There are multiple tiers of support from Anika – from their alumni, from peer students, as well as the broader law school. So I think we have a great system in place where the students can do this work, feel fantastic about the work they're doing, and know that if and when they do have a challenge, there are always going to be multiple people available for them to talk to.
