Veterans Law Clinic

Taylor Yocum: Hi, and welcome to Applying Yourself, a law school admissions podcast from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. I’m Taylor Yocum, an admissions specialist at WashU Law and producer of this season of the podcast. Today, I’m so lucky to be talking with Cormack Smith, the director of the new Veterans Law Clinic at WashU Law. Before joining the faculty this summer, he served over 20 years as an active duty U.S. Army officer and has spent roughly 15 years in the U.S. Army JAG Corps. Welcome, Cormack.

Cormack Smith: Hey, thanks for having me.

Taylor Yocum: Of course. Can you share a bit about your professional background in the military and in the legal field?

Cormack Smith: Sure. My military experience really started in college, so I participated in ROTC. I went to Truman State University in northern Missouri. When I completed my degree and was commissioned, I started off as a signal corps officer. Did that for roughly three years.

And then I applied for and was accepted to what’s called the Funded Legal Education Program. And that’s a program, each of the services have it, where they will take a certain number of officers and send them to law school. I attended Wisconsin Law School. When I graduated from law school, I started my JAG career, and that’s where I spent the rest of my 20 years, just under 21.

Most of my time in the JAG Corps was spent in crim law, so a lot of courts martial experience, both at the trial level, the appellate level, both for government and defense, and other types of adverse administration actions, so reprimands, discharges, things of that nature. Spent a year deployed to Afghanistan, multiple years in other jobs, such as advising commanders, what we would kind of call general counsel, probably, in civilian practice, both at the brigade level and the two-star command level. In those jobs, you lead a legal office, you advise the commanders and the staff and the organization on just a variety of different legal aspects.

Taylor Yocum: Thank you, and how has the transition to coming to WashU been?

Cormack Smith: Transition to WashU has been really good, and I was very happy and very fortunate to be able to start this career immediately after wrapping up my time in the Army. I have a lot of experience in the St. Louis area, although I’ve never lived there before. Coming back in my last assignment, my last duty station was Scott Air Force Base over in Illinois. So I’ve been here for a little over two years, but even though I’ve moved around a lot, St. Louis has always been considered my home, so I’m very happy to be back here, have lots of friends and family in the area.

Taylor Yocum: Yeah, and you recently launched the Veterans Law Clinic at the beginning of this semester. Can you talk about how the first few weeks have been?

Cormack Smith: I think it’s gone really well. It’s definitely a learning experience for me, for the students as well, obviously. For me, particularly with a new clinic, it’s just figuring out what are we going to establish as our standards, trying to make sure that we have a good curriculum in place, that we have everything we need to give the students the tools they need.

And at least for me, I have a lot of familiarity working in jobs where I’m a supervising attorney and giving guidance in that regard, but the adjustment is really adjusting that type of guidance to the semester structure and how are we going to be able to do that over the course of a semester, not just kind of with indeterminate beginning and end times for the legal representation. So I’m crafting that and working on developing that, and we’ll continue to do so in the future semesters.

Taylor Yocum: Yeah, and the clinic was much needed and formed in response to a gap of service in the St. Louis community. What was the inspiration for forming the clinic and what service gaps do you see?

Cormack Smith: And I should, as far as that goes, I certainly have to just say what I understand as far as the desires and the goals for the school. I really wasn’t a part of that. They had already made the decision to start the clinic. I applied for and was given the opportunity to serve as director.

But my understanding is what the school really looked at is the fact that we have a very large veterans community here in the St. Louis area. There’s a lot of VA resources, a lot of, you know, hospitals and other clinics and other vet centers that are out there. But in contrast to that, we have a relatively small community for providing pro bono legal representation. And I think the school recognized that as being a need and a gap there, and that’s what the clinic is designed to address.

Taylor Yocum: Yeah, and what types of work assistance do you envision the clinic providing or what are you providing already and what… And what type of work will the students do day-to-day?

Cormack Smith: So initially, we’re focusing on discharge upgrades and correction of military records, especially that latter component or that latter category can encompass a lot of different types of things. For the discharge characterization, there are a number of different types of characterizations that someone can receive whenever they end their military service. Those range from honorable down to dishonorable or dismissal for officers. And depending on the characterization of service, that can have a drastic impact on the types of rights and, I’m sorry, the types of benefits that a veteran is eligible for.

In addition to that, in terms of applying or assisting the clients to apply for discharge upgrades, we also can help with, you know, incorrect separation codes, reenlistment codes. If there’s a narrative for a discharge that a veteran believes is unjust or incorrect, we can assist with that. If there’s a question or if the veteran believes that their discharge was not properly handled, we can handle or assist with those challenges as well. And really, I would just say broadly, anything that a service member believes is incorrectly captured within their service records, they can come to us and we can, you know, give them legal guidance on that and potentially assist them in trying to get those corrected.

Taylor Yocum: Yeah, and so a lot of our students come into law school thinking they want to do one thing. They might test out a clinic to see if they like it. They might test out a clinic because they want to go into it in the future. What would, what type of benefits, educational benefits do our students get from participating in the Veterans Law Clinic?

Cormack Smith: I think that the type of things that they would focus on, you know, working with the client to establish a goal and representation, interviewing witnesses, taking statements from witnesses, collecting and assessing the significance of evidence, working on an evidentiary case file, researching laws, researching regulations that apply to a particular case, and then crafting legal arguments and potentially, you know, perfecting oral arguments as well. Those are things that, yes, we’re doing it within the, you know, the umbrella of of veteran issues or Department of Defense issues, but but really, I think those are just kind of the building block skills that anyone needs in any type of legal practice.

Taylor Yocum: Yeah, and what benefit do you see the community members getting out of this clinic?

Cormack Smith: I think in the best case scenario, you know, if we’re able to achieve our clients’ desired end state, hopefully for those veterans, we can potentially open doors for compensation or treatment, you know, award them eligibility or, you know, assist in another agency deciding that they should be eligible for benefits that they weren’t otherwise eligible for. For other veterans, you know, if it’s a corrections issue for some other aspect of their records, even if it doesn’t have a direct impact on their benefits, it could still be something that, you know, is a very real emotional issue for them in terms of having their service records capture and describe their military career accurately and fairly.

And, you know, for those cases that we’re not successful, I hope at a bare minimum that for the the veteran, they feel that they’re heard, that they’re heard by us, that they’re heard by the DOD or the VA wherever we’re petitioning for assistance. They feel that they had a voice in the process and, you know, that the advocacy team that we have at the Veterans Law Clinic fought for them, developed and articulated their position, and did everything they could to achieve their ends.

Taylor Yocum: Definitely. And is there anything else you would like to share about the clinic?

Cormack Smith: I think that covers most of it. I think the one thing that I would say is we are a new clinic, so we are looking at developing it. I mentioned and described a little bit about where we’re starting, but you know, over the next few semesters, I, I hope to expand on the types of things that we assist veterans with, and that will also change in terms of the, uh, the type of opportunities that students will have as well.

Taylor Yocum: And if someone is a veteran and looking for assistance, how do they find us?

Cormack Smith: I would encourage them to go to the website. The, uh, my phone number is listed there. Also, the main clinic line is listed there. If they give us a call, I will reach back out to them and just see what it is that they would like to, you know, get assistance with. And I’ll work with them. If it’s not something that we can help with, I would say there there is a pretty good network out there, uh whether it’s they’re not, you know, within what we would deem the St. Louis area, or if it’s that the subject matter that they’re interested in assistance with is, is kind of outside of our scope. I’ll try to work with them and find some other place that I can refer them to help.

Taylor Yocum: Thank you. And we do love to end our episode with the same question. What is your favorite place to go or thing to do in St. Louis?

Cormack Smith: I, I think I have a couple answers to that. I’m a lifelong Cardinal fan. That would usually be my number one. I say it still is, although it’s been, you know, kind of rough the past couple of years, at least we’re a 500 team this year. But, but going to a Cardinal game is, uh, is certainly up there.

I also really like going to Gioia’s Deli, which is a sandwich shop. They’ve actually opened up multiple other locations, but they’re based in The Hill, so I love going there and Guido’s as well on The Hill. So, those are my favorite stops in this area.

Taylor Yocum: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Cormac. For our listeners, you can learn more about the Veterans Law Clinic on our website, and you can reach out to us at applylaw@wustl.edu with any questions about the admissions process. Thank you for listening.