HLS in Focus

An admitted student recently asked me how supportive Harvard is of student initiatives that maybe don’t match up with existing opportunities here. I asked Lisa Dealy, who heads up our office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, to respond. She forwarded me her response so I would know what’s happening around here too and said I could post it here if I liked:

“We actually spend a lot of our time with students helping them design and implement clinical and pro bono projects (and sometimes even non clinical/pro bono things) and I like to think we are very supportive of student initiatives. Here are some examples:

“Students wanted to start a Spanish for Public Interest Lawyers course & came to us…we were able to do it quickly (by the next semester) and fairly cheaply by hiring LLM students who are native Spanish speakers; we run it out of the clinical office even though it is a non credit (and non clinical) course. It’s been very successful and now we offer two different levels of the course.

“A few years ago, students approached us about sponsoring trips during fly-out week. We now have established programs during fly out week and spring break and winter intersession—this year about 40 students did pro bono work over spring break and we arranged the placements through various HLS alumni and Lee Branson went as far as arranging housing and group activities for the students. We invited clinical instructors to go and provide extra on-site supervision. So, not only did we respond to the initial student idea, but we’ve continued to refine the idea and make it better each year.

“We also recently assisted a student who was trying to set up a program for local kids coming out of foster care—she was not seeking credit for this, but she wanted replicate a model she had learned about during her independent clinical work last winter. We gave her contacts with people both within HLS and outside of HLS and gave her advice on how to proceed and what she could do within HLS to ensure this program kept going after she had graduated. I met with her several times and last week she was in to report that a Cambridge non-profit had picked up the program and she has 1L students interested in keeping the program going.

“We work really hard to make sure students aren’t duplicating efforts (either within HLS or trying to start an organization that already exists in the community)…but even when we find students trying to reinvent the wheel we don’t turn them away, we talk to them to see if they can do something that hasn’t been done yet!”