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Abstract

In the last issue of the Clinical Law Review, Dean Richard A. Matasar and Professor Gary Laser set forth their solution for offering clinical legal education to a significant number of law students without raising tuition fees above market rates. At Chicago-Kent College of Law, the law school will hire clinicians from now on only on the condition that the clinician engage in law practice and bring in fees that are at least 150 percent above the clinician's salary. If the clinician fails to bring in that amount of money, s/he can be fired. If the clinician generates fees above that amount, the school and the clinician each share in the additional revenues. The avowed goal of the program is to raise enough money to be self-funding. (Of course, no one will mind if the office strikes it particularly big and makes lots of money.) The clinicians work with students on their cases. Most of the clinicians' and students' time on cases is devoted to fee-paying cases. The Chicago-Kent plan ("the Plan") has considerable superficial appeal. For deans of law schools who are interested in expanding clinical programs but who are unable or unwilling to pay for additional programs as part of the operating law school budget, the Plan looks like the perfect answer. Under the Plan, clinical programs can flourish without costing the law school anything. Even better, the Plan is likely to eliminate opposition to clinical education from the academic faculty. Traditionally, that faculty's concern has been that clinical education drains the school of money needed to fulfill the law school's core mission (defined, by these faculty members, as instruction that affords ample time and resources for faculty production of important scholarship). Academic faculty members now may support expansion of clinical programs at their schools in the hope that the profits generated by clinical law offices will furnish money to underwrite expansion of the academic curriculum and production of scholarship. Talk about killing several birds with one stone!

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

1

Issue

3

First Page

677

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