Abstract
The Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession (the MacCrate Report) observes that law schools are deficient in training students in the skills and values needed to practice law. The report urges curriculum revision to attend to these important objectives. Many law teachers-especially clinicians-agree at least in principle with the main message of the MacCrate report; the question is what to do and how to pay for it. Clinical teaching tends to be more expensive than large lecture classes, if only because of the lower teacher-student ratio. This poses a barrier to massive expansion of in-house clinics, and renders it unlikely that live-client clinical programs will serve every law student. The Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology has addressed the need to expand skills training with limited financial resources by constructing employment contracts with most of its clinical teachers in which the clinicians "pay for themselves" by representing clients who pay fees for legal services. The clients are charged as they would be for the services of a lawyer in a private law firm. If a teacher brings in more in client fees than is necessary to cover his or her salary and overhead, most of the excess is paid to the teacher as a bonus.
Publication Title
Clinical Law Review
Volume
1
Issue
3
First Page
685
Recommended Citation
Lisa G. Lerman,
Fee-for-Service Clinical Teaching: Slipping Toward Commercialism,
1
Clinical L. Rev
685
(1995).
Available at:
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/clr/vol1/iss3/9