Introduction

Given the context in which most learning in law school takes place, the sources of learning logically follow. Students will typically learn from:

1. Professors/ instructors,
2. Colleagues (other students in the program),
3. Career services staff,
4. Mental health professionals,
5. Elders,
6. Alumni, practicing lawyers, judges, other legal professionals associated with the law school,
7. Other staff employed by the law school, coordinated programs.

Learning in an Externship  – From Whom do Students Learn?

In an externship, the context of learning is obviously different from a lecture-style class. Externships take place in a real life (sometimes called “live client”) context. Even when a student is doing research or working in an appellate context, the work has real impacts. Because students will be learning from lawyers doing real-world work, students typically need to shift their expectations about where learning occurs, and who is acting as a teacher – either formally or informally.

Writing about learning in a clinical environment, Patrick Brayer notes:

“[S]tudents learn from three main systemic sources: learning from people they work with and for, learning from clients (including the client’s social and professional system), and learning by interacting mentally and emotionally with self. Throughout her career, a practitioner will draw from the resources that are her environment. For example, her supervisors and colleagues, as well as judges and opposing counsel, will serve as a continual resource for information, assistance, strategizing and reflection. One shortcoming faced by many practitioners is the inability to effectively interact with individuals who make up their environment…”

Patrick Brayer, “A Law Clinic Systems Theory and the Pedagogy of Interaction: Creating a Legal Learning System” (2012) 12:1 Conn Pub Int LJ 49.

Brayer describes the clinical (or in this case, externship) environment as a “learning system” in which law students are exposed to the complex milieu and relationships that make up a professional context. The section on reflective practice will engage more deeply with these ideas.

Brayer’s insights about the challenges practitioners face in interacting with others – essentially, recognizing and maintaining relationships – are important. Law school can privilege certain skills – for example, cognitive efficiency and precision, doctrinal analysis, and intellectual analysis. All these are important, but without supplementing these with relational skill, the opportunities presented in a workplace environment will be lost.

Regardless whether students are working in a firm, a court or tribunal, a nonprofit, clinic, or other context, you will be introduced to a range of people who play distinct roles. In an externship, two main people will support your work: Your onsite or placement supervisor and your academic supervisor. There are many other people and relationships essential to a successful externship placement. A description of these roles is also contained in this section.

Learning from Your Onsite Supervisor

An onsite supervisor (or placement supervisor) is the person to whom students report at an externship. This person plays a role very similar to an articling “principal” (the person who will supervise articles), but with different supervision requirements. In an externship, students will act as lawyers in their placements and, in most provinces, their onsite supervisor is held responsible for their activities.

In an externship, student practice under the license of their onsite supervisor. This person will give assignments, feedback, and generally make sure students get a good experience. While most externships have one primary supervisor, students might also get work from other lawyers, community legal workers, or others. This should be made clear at the beginning of the externship placement.

The student’s relationship with the onsite supervisor is essential to a good learning experience. The supervisor is the person students will probably interact with most. This person fills out the learning agreement and other documentation. They will assign work and give feedback. This person might also be the individual a student would approach for a reference letter, career advice, work/life balance advice, or other information outside the strict confines of assigned duties.

The onsite supervisor is also helpful in figuring out how students want to (or perhaps don’t want to!) practice – professional identity, ethical boundaries, relationships with clients, and so on. Part of the student’s role is therefore to be a keen observer of the onsite supervisor and others in the workplace (see the section above on “professional noticing”). Onsite supervisors are a great source of information as students negotiate the substantive, ethical, and professional aspects of lawyering.

Professor Neil Gold describes the roles that supervisors play in a law student’s legal education:

“The supervisor, as guide and role model, should seek to be: thoughtful; insightful; measured-to-person, need and context; learned; holistic; and above all, constructively helpful. The importance of the role of the clinic supervisor in explicating and supporting student learning cannot be understated. This interpretive and reflective modeling and methodology can contribute to students’ lifelong habits of learning and problem solving. In engaging the whole student, her thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears, the supervisor simultaneously engages the already stimulated affect and intellect of the student in her quest to deliver signal service. In this model, the student’s experiences as primary actor and her thinking and feeling about them before action, in action and upon reflection are the focal point for guided debriefings and interpretations by the supervisor and often by the student herself once she has been trained to reflect in and on action.” (Neil Gold, “Clinic Is the Basis for a Complete Legal Education: Quality Assurance, Learning Outcomes and the Clinical Method” (2015) 22 Int J of Clinical Leg Education 1.)

Challenges & Benefits for Supervising Lawyers

Systemically, the role of supervising lawyer – whether at a clinic, externship, or other legal context – has significant challenges. Many clinicians and lawyers involved in Canadian experiential education are not professors. This means they are typically not involved in the curricular or governance processes of the university. They are often also professionally marginalized. A lawyer at one Canadian legal clinic described some of the challenges as follows:

“I would say that when I came [to the clinic] not a lot of time was spent determining whether or not I was going to be a good educator: people were wondering what my
legal skills were. The idea flows from the way that the practical aspect of law has been taught, which is: take individuals, have them go to law school, give them some abstract education, and then plunk them down in a work space, and they will learn how to practice law. I tend to think that that’s misguided, particularly given experiential education theories. But if the number of credits that the two supervising lawyers are involved in teaching were to be compared to the number of credits that a professor at the university was involved in teaching, our course load would actually be higher than most of the professors at the university. But, we aren’t professors at the university, and we aren’t really considered externally as being teachers. We’re considered to be lawyers.” (129)

Many lawyers are paid less and have less control over their daily work than professors. These working conditions are part of other challenges. Given the term model at law schools, students are typically at an externship or clinic for four months at a time. Students must be trained and go through a steep learning process to be able to adequately engage in the work. It requires mentorship, engagement, and energy. This process can be exhausting. As one lawyer notes:

“I think the biggest challenge is trying to figure out how to let go of control [of client matters] while also working to ensure that the level of service that is being provided is sufficiently high for you as a professional to be happy, and I think that that’s a really difficult tension to figure out. I also think that there’s a challenge around just the issue of capacity… the difficulty is the demands of time that are placed on me as a lawyer that are associated with education, and the effect that has on my ability to schedule my file work. ‘Cause I’ll go home, and I’ll think to myself: “Oh yeah. This has to get out. I can put three hours in on it tomorrow.” And then being at the office with ten students coming to ask questions about forty files means I will manage to get forty–five minutes done on it, and it’s not a straight forty–five minutes. I do think that there’s a downside to having this changeover every three months.” (136-7)

Supervision can also bring joy and satisfaction for supervising lawyers. Seeing students learn, create community, work with clients, and grow quickly in a few months can be professionally rewarding. Students often graduate from experiential programs committed to clients and with greater skill. Again, one lawyer notes:

“I also think that one of the benefits is the community that can be created… with students, and not just the sort of, the spark that students bring, but the fact that the people who work together…feel really close and support each other well. And I think there’s sort of, yeah, something special about the work environment…, both with and without students that can be pretty special, and then I think there’s a long-term benefit of being able to see the impact that… work has on people who are doing things that I don’t know that they necessarily would have done were they not to be exposed to the different areas of law…” (137)

More information and tips regarding working with your onsite supervisor are contained throughout this coursebook.

Memes, Facebook, May 7, 2020.

Academic Supervisor

Most externship programs also have an academic supervisor (typically a faculty member or adjunct professor). This person is employed by the law school to set up placements, develop policy, and support students throughout their placement. This person also usually teaches the externship seminar course that accompanies the placement.

This person will have crafted the placement itself and will help guide students through the learning experience; as such, student feedback on the placements is essential to program improvement.

The academic supervisor can also act as a navigator for law school policy and procedure, as well as act as a sounding board for issues that might arise. The academic supervisor has typically worked with many students new to a legal workplace environment and will have good advice and strategy to deal with issues that arise.

While the externship learning environment is comprised of a web of people and relationships, these two positions (academic and onsite supervisors) will guide much of the experience.