Examining Ethical Issues in Expansion of Legal Services to Low-Income Older Adults

As someone who developed and led an Elder Protection Clinic staffed by law students for more than a decade, I was interested to see that the latest issue of ABA’s Bifocal publication includes an article titled “Ethical Challenges of Using Law Student Interns/Externs to Expand Services to Low-Income Older Adults.” The article was earlier used as presentation materials for the 2015 National Law and Aging Conference in Washington, D.C., in October of 2015.  

The writers outline the potential for students and recent graduates to serve identified legal service needs and use the experience of Elder Law of Michigan,Inc. to demonstrate how one model, with a Legal Hotline, has evolved over time: 

In 2013, we switched to a model that placed the law students directly on the front lines answering calls to the legal hotline. In 2014, almost 25% of the calls handled by the hotline were done by either a law student or recent college graduate. This means that without this resource, almost 1,500 seniors would not have received service in 2014.

 

At first glance, you would wonder why we didn’t just use more law students to help more clients. After all, if 25% of the cases is great, wouldn’t 50% of the cases be better? Not really. Here are a few of the unintended consequences that resulted from our increased use of law students.

 

• The amount of staff time needed to train and supervise law students increases considerably. For each student who works on the legal hotline, we need a third of a full-time employee’s time for supervision. There was a diminishing need for more supervision once we had three students working at the same time. So, for us to minimize the additional staff time needed, we scheduled at least three law students at the same time.

• Client donations dropped. After careful research, we found that clients who called and were assisted by a law student didn’t feel the need to donate to the organization because ELM was getting free help and the service provided was part of the law school experience. So clients were less likely to donate to us if they were assisted by a law student.

• More staff wanted to be involved with the law students. We found that as our law student program grew, more of our staff wanted to be involved with the program. They liked the energy that was created by this group each day. (We had 11 law students each semester, so there was always a lot of activity.) Not everyone can work with the law students every day. They have to share!