Abstract
This article is the first in a series that examines the experience and impact on clients, students, and cases of lawyer, social worker and researcher collaboration in an interdisciplinary domestic violence clinic and the ethical challenges that such a design creates. After describing the collaborative structure of this particular clinic design, the author summarizes the reports of students and faculty about interdisciplinary collaboration, and makes suggestions for improvement in collaborative service delivery. The article reviews the current literature on interdisciplinary legal collaboration and evaluates alternative solutions to confidentiality dilemmas, and proposes the use of a confidentiality wall as a means of reconciling the competing professional ethics. The article provides a discussion of how to construct such a wall and how to provide interdisciplinary clinical training to teach students to work together and to maintain the integrity of the confidentiality wall. Based on one-on-one, structured interviews with students and faculty, the author reports the effectiveness of the confidentiality wall from various viewpoints: those of lawyers inside the wall; those of social workers outside the wall; and those of a hypothetical child advocate considering the impact of the confidentiality wall on children. The article also describes some of the details of client, student, and faculty experiences of collaboration. Finally, the article concludes with several proposals to fix gaps the author and her colleagues identified in the confidentiality wall and to remedy the conflicts of confidentiality.
Publication Title
Clinical Law Review
Volume
7
Issue
2
First Page
403
Recommended Citation
Jacqueline St. Joan,
Building Bridges, Building Walls: Collaboration Between Lawyers and Social Workers in a Domestic Violence Clinic and Issues of Client Confidentiality,
7
Clinical L. Rev
403
(2001).
Available at:
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/clr/vol7/iss2/6