Looking Back: WashU Law’s 50th Anniversary of the Clinical Education Program

Anna Donovan: Welcome back to Applying Yourself, a law school admissions podcast from Washington University’s School of Law in St. Louis. My name is Anna Donovan. I’m the Director of Admissions and one half of our hosts here on this podcast. And today, we are talking with Sarah Narakowicz. She is the Associate Dean for Clinical Education, and she is going to be talking to us a little bit about our Clinical Education Program’s 50th year anniversary. Sarah, it’s so great to have you. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Anna Donovan, thank you for having me. 

Anna Donovan: Fantastic. We will jump right in with some of our hard-hitting questions. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how long you’ve been involved in WashU and then also in the clinics? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, absolutely. So I went to WashU for law school last century. So you could say I’ve been involved for several centuries. And then I practiced as a tax attorney for several years. When I had my first child, I came and started teaching in the tax LLM program. I originated the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic in 2014. And I took over the leadership of the clinical program in 2021. 

Anna Donovan: Excellent. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess, what you all are doing to celebrate the 50th anniversary, but also, I guess, going ultimately back to our basics, what is a clinic? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so that’s one of the things that I am proudest of because I think we have the best and perhaps the most important job in the law school. So when you come to law school, everybody sees movies on TV where you learn in a classroom and you have a book and you learn how to brief cases and the Socratic method is in play. And that all happens. But none of that actually prepares you for the practice of law. 

So after you finish your first year, you’re allowed to participate in this weird thing called the Clinical Education Program. And that’s where you can either do a clinic or an externship where you’re actually practicing law, either as a student attorney or as an extern. In an externship context, you actually have the opportunity to go work under a practicing attorney and kind of help them with what they’re doing. We have options here in St. Louis and across the country, and frankly, anywhere in the world. 

In a clinic, you are actually the first chair. So a clinic is sort of an in-house law firm. We also have some external clinics. But in a clinic, you as a student are actually representing a client, doing everything from the interview to the case planning to the execution of the case to contacting the client to going to court to mediating with an administrative body. Everything is on you, but it’s a really amazing opportunity because, as scary as it sounds, you’re practicing under your professor’s license, and that means that everything you do is reviewed very carefully. So it’s a way to really give you great practical experience that oftentimes you won’t get in practice for many years. 

Anna Donovan: Excellent. Can you give me and our listeners, our millions of listeners that I refer to all the time, some examples of kind of what types of clinics we have and like kind of what specific work that the students do? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Well, first I want to say after this particular podcast, you’ll probably have billions of listeners. 

Anna Donovan: Yes, that’s correct. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: But we actually have 20 separate clinic and externship opportunities. We have seven externships divided between local and non-local and 13 clinics. Our newest clinic is our Veterans Law Clinic, which we’re excited to launch this fall. But in addition, we have many others. And I’m gonna go in no particular order because the way my mind works is how I can visualize offices. 

Anna Donovan: Sure. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: But the first one I’m gonna talk about is our Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic. That’s a really unique clinic because in addition to teaching law students, we bring in students from every other part of WashU. So we might have med students or business students or engineering students, and they’re all working to solve environmental problems, traditional problems like air and water, but also working in the environmental justice field. So with all those disciplines, they can do quite a lot. 

We also have our new Veterans Law Clinic, which I mentioned. We have our Intellectual Property Clinic. One thing that’s important about that clinic is you don’t have to be a STEM major. They work on both IP and trademark issues. We have our Entrepreneurship Clinic, where we have corporate-type issues, both startups, established corporations, nonprofit, for-profit. We have our Immigration Law Clinic, obviously a very important issue in this day and age, where we work with individual clients, oftentimes on asylum or family reunification-type issues. 

We have our First Amendment Clinic, which is a litigation-focused clinic, where we represent, obviously, journalists and newspapers, but also regular people who have First Amendment issues. We have our Appellate Clinic, where we have the opportunity to actually argue before federal courts of appeals. Just this week, one of our student teams was notified that they had won a case in the Fourth Circuit, which was pretty amazing. 

Anna Donovan: That’s incredible. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yes. The Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic, which is close to my heart because tax is cool, but we represent people who are in trouble with the IRS, and we can often make a difference in their lives. They can sleep at night. 

In addition, we have several other clinics that are not on-site. We have our Prosecution Clinic, where we give students the opportunity to work with both the city of St. Louis or the county of St. Louis and prosecute cases. They can do misdemeanors on their own, second-tier felonies. We have our Criminal Defense Clinic, which is in St. Louis county, and they do public defense. We have our Wrongful Conviction Clinic, which is our innocence clinic. We have our Post-Conviction Relief Clinic, which is similar in sense to the innocence clinic, but the clients don’t have to have a credible claim of innocence. They do have to have a sentence of death or life without parole. We have civil rights and mediation, which focuses on housing and education and does a lot in the mediation space. I think I’ve hit them all. 

Anna Donovan: I think you did. 

Okay, excellent. So, say I am a rising 2L and I am considering all of these great options and figuring out what I should do, what advice would you give someone who is considering a clinic or an externship, you know, and I guess speaking specifically to maybe someone at WashULaw? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, first of all, I would say do as many as you can. Unlike a lot of other schools, we don’t put a lot of restrictions on clinics and externships. Some schools have these weird systems where you have to have points and you have to bid on a clinic or externship. We allow you to start your 2L first semester, and all you do is every spring, starting with your 1L year, you’ll go to a clinic fair, you’ll fill out a short survey explaining what is your first choice, what’s your second choice, what’s your third choice. 3Ls get preference, but there’s a ton of opportunities for 2Ls. 

What I would tell you as an incoming student is that there is no such thing as a bad clinic. While the subject matter between the clinics varies, what you’re going to get in any of them is the ability to pick up practical legal skills. You’re going to learn how to practice. You’re going to learn how to interview a client in every single clinic, and that’s applicable no matter what area you ultimately practice in. And I guarantee you that most people do not end up practicing in the clinic that they take, but it’s no less valuable for that experience. So take as many as you can. It will help you not only get a job, but be better at the job when you get there. 

Anna Donovan: Absolutely. I, sometimes I get thrown into giving some prospective students tours, and I stop outside the clinic office, and my spiel is always, I think you could close your eyes and blind pick a clinic, and you would have an extremely, like, rewarding and fulfilling experience in law school. And it doesn’t have to, kind of, perfectly align with what you think you’re going to do with your law degree. The skills you’re building are applicable, and I think the work that students are doing in the St. Louis area, but outside of St. Louis and Missouri, Illinois, you know, the student externs that are outside of our city as well are doing such incredible things. 

Could you talk a little bit about, you know, in your time just in the clinic office, sort of, you talked about the new clinic, but sort of the progress that the clinic office has made and sort of any changes in the clinical education space. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so the ABA, something that’s interesting about clinical education is the ABA has only been mandating clinical education since 2014. And law school is incredibly different than other types of professional schools, right? If you think about med school, they have to do a residency, and med schools realized that you have to kind of practice in order to be able to be a good doctor. WashU has been doing this 50-plus years, right? So we recognize the importance of this really, really, really early. 

But we, in that 50 years, continue to increase our clinical offerings. I think we are amongst the best in the country. We’re ranked amongst the best, but I think our breadth is amongst the best. And we’re always looking for new opportunities, new clinics to add. In addition to our established clinics, one of the things that I’ve instituted over the past three years is a volunteer estate planning clinic where we give students that are interested in that space the opportunity to work with volunteer attorneys in the community, which not only gives them networking opportunities, but additional, you know, work experience. 

And one of the other things that I have not emphasized, but I think is so incredibly important, is that clinical education doesn’t only help the student, but it also helps the community because our clients generally can’t otherwise afford legal representation. So while you know that you have the right to representation in a criminal matter, you don’t have that right in a civil case. And oftentimes, civil cases are just as impactful in your life. So students really are making a difference, not only in their own lives, but in the lives of their clients. 

Anna Donovan: That’s incredible. I definitely am trying to brag. I think it’s always something in the ballpark of like 100,000 pro bono hours that the clinic students have done. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, that’s what we record and probably countless that we don’t. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I know that students are working well probably over their allotted time to get their credits, really wanting to serve their clients well and do good work. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: And they love it. So they could be finished, and then they want to come back. 

Anna Donovan: For sure. I mean, they do. 

Yeah, absolutely. You know, in for the 50th anniversary of the clinic, I know some prominent alumni in that space. They were honored. Can you talk a little bit about who that, you know, who those candidates were and I guess how the clinic office kind of chose who to give those honors to. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Absolutely. And it was incredibly difficult because you can imagine over 50 years, we’ve had some pretty amazing people come through. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: And so we ended up, I believe, with 11. And the ones we chose were people that were really impactful in a lot of ways. So, for example, we chose Clarissa Gaff, who graduated from the law school in ’06, but she runs Land of Lincoln, which is the Legal Services operation in the metro Illinois region. So she’s out there every day doing pro bono work for her clients. 

We also had Dan Glazier, who was actually in our original clinic back in 1973, which is kind of amazing. And he is running Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. And these are two individuals who have so much passion for the work that they do. And they’re public interest focused, but we certainly didn’t limit ourselves to public interest because the students that come through our clinics, some want to do public interest. Some want to do corporate law, right? It doesn’t really matter to us. We just want them to have the opportunity to learn. 

So Michael Gallagher was one of our alums that was chosen. And Michael has come back and serves in an externship leader role. So he actually brings students into his corporation and trains them in an externship. So we think that’s incredible. We have Travis Hill. He has been in public interest most of his career, but a lot of high ranking government jobs, right? So he’s out there really putting what he learned into practice. 

Maxine Lipeles, who was the founding director of our interdisciplinary environmental clinic and really a pioneer in the environmental space. We have Jessica Mayo and Nicole Cortes. And they both graduated in 2012. They were friends. They went on to form this incredible nonprofit that focuses on the immigration space. So those are just a few of our awardees, but every single one of them is amazing. And there was probably, of the 11 we chose, there was probably another 20 we could have chosen. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. So as we are, I guess, sort of midsummer at this point, but gearing up to start the fall, what are you most looking forward to in the clinic? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, so I always get re-energized by the return of students because they are so excited about the work that we’re doing. I have some new projects in my particular clinic that I’m working on that I’m pretty excited about, but one of the things that I’m most looking forward to this particular fall is just getting the Veterans Law Clinic off the ground because it’s so cool to just see how that process works and to see how a clinic evolves, but we’re really, really excited. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. Hope to have the new director in to interview for the new Veterans Clinic podcast. I know in Admissions we’ve been trying to kind of boost our veteran population and kind of work more with the university, so I think that’ll be such a great kind of tool to recruit other great folks. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Yeah, and there’s so many veteran resources in this city, but no legal resources, right? So there was really a hole. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah, excellent. Well, every, all of our billions of, now we have billions of listeners, everyone, we would like to thank Sarah for joining us. We will have her on again as well to talk about her specific clinic that she directs, the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic, but we like to end every podcast. This is maybe a throwing a curveball at you. Something we love to kind of circle back on and touch on always is our love of St. Louis. Could you give us a recommendation or a reason of why candidates should consider living in St. Louis for the three years for law school? 

Sarah Narkiewicz: I mean, there’s lots of reasons, Anna, as you know. The architecture is incredible, the community is incredible, there are so many free resources. If I had to pick one thing that was my favorite thing to do that is broadly applicable, I would say the botanical garden. We have an incredible botanical garden, but I also like to eat, so restaurants are good. 

Anna Donovan: Yeah, you heard it here first. Restaurants are good. Well, thank you so much for joining us again. For more information about our clinics, you know, we’ll post contact information, you know, for people to reach out to us and then stay tuned also to hear Sarah talk about the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. So thank you so much, Sarah. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Thanks, Anna Donovan, for having me. 

Anna Donovan: Bye. 

Sarah Narkiewicz: Bye.