A local man in his 50s was facing serious challenges.

Issues with physical health, mental health and immigration had all contributed to him owing $12,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. The debt prevented him from obtaining U.S. citizenship and even paying living expenses. 

The man, “S.R.,” worked fairly regularly, but mostly on a contract basis, making repayment next to impossible. Living in a friend’s garage, he turned for help to the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic at the Law School. 

Richard Cantoral — who chose Michigan Law in part because of its strong clinical program — worked as a student-attorney for S.R. After negotiating with the government, Cantoral got the outstanding debt reduced to $100, enabling S.R. to start getting his life back on track. 

“I think his situation is very common, which is the crazy part,” Cantoral said. “When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, it’s very hard to make room for your taxes, especially when you’re not a full-time employee and there’s no withholding.”

Every academic year, several hundred clients like S.R. benefit from no-cost legal assistance from student-attorneys working in one of Michigan Law’s legal clinics — while the students gain priceless real-world experience.

“The clinics at Michigan Law teach how to interact with clients and be of service to them, as well as the collaborative nature of legal work,” Cantoral said. “Just as important, the clinics do a lot of good work for people who need it.”

The clinical philosophy 

The 17 clinics at Michigan Law operate like a law firm with specialized practices. Clinics connect student-attorneys with clients who can’t afford their own representation.

Student-attorneys work directly for their clients with close guidance from a faculty member who is licensed to practice law. The students do hands-on legal work, including drawing up motions, preparing briefs and appearing in court.

“Our purpose is to teach law students how to be excellent lawyers through the high-quality representation of clients,” said Debra Chopp, associate dean for experiential education. “It’s a dual mission of teaching the students and serving the community.”

Depending on the clinic, clients may be referred by a court, recommended by an outside agency or they may approach the clinic directly. In many clinics, students work as “first chair” — the lead attorney — under a faculty member’s supervision. 

“There are things that you really can’t learn in a theoretical way, like how to counsel somebody who’s in distress, how to negotiate with an opposing counsel, how to engage in oral advocacy to a judge,” Chopp said. “It’s like reading about sports and thinking you can play sports; you need to actually play.”

Clinics work in many different areas of law, including advocacy in civil and criminal matters; appeals; administrative and regulatory work; and different forms of transactional law, such as entity formation and contracts. It’s real-world lawyering, working with clients in need.

“As a public law school, we exist not only to educate students, but to advance the public good. Our legal clinics are one of the most direct and powerful ways we fulfill that mission,” Chopp said. 

“The clinics do not compete with the private bar. But that carves out a gigantic space, because there are so many people who cannot access legal services. It gives us the privilege of being able to work with people who would otherwise not have representation.”

Michigan Law launched its clinic program in 1969 with what is now called the Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic. The Law School’s clinical offerings have grown steadily over the decades, adding additional specialties like the Veterans Legal Clinic, which aids military veterans, and the Human Trafficking and Immigration Clinic, which assists trafficking survivors in various ways. 

The newest addition, the AI Law and Policy Clinic, will enroll its first students next term. Students will employ artificial intelligence tools to improve access to justice, streamline legal processes, and find solutions to systemic issues.

“Clinics are not required, but because the program is so strong, we have many options for students to represent different populations, to engage in different types of legal work,” said Chopp, who also directs the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic. “It’s an opportunity for students to develop a really close relationship with faculty and to do deeply meaningful work.”

Serving the community

The clinics provide several different forms of benefits to the broader public. The Michigan Innocence Clinic, for example, works to exonerate people in prison who were wrongfully convicted. 

While not as high-profile, other clinics also provide critical legal assistance to individuals — on landlord-tenant disputes, discrimination claims, tax problems and countless other issues that might otherwise go unresolved. 

The Low Income Taxpayer Clinic helps individuals like S.R., but it also presents educational sessions on taxes to other units around campus and in the broader community. Nicole Appleberry, clinic director and clinical professor of law— who took a child advocacy clinic while she was a Law School student — said the work of her 12 or so clinic students makes a huge difference in their clients’ lives. 

“For some clients, it might mean being able to buy their insulin, having food to eat, making their rent payments,” Appleberry said. “Sometimes it can be a little more ephemeral. Tax debt can be so scary. They don’t know what’s going to happen, and that filters out into the rest of their life. Achieving some kind of resolution is a great weight off of their minds.”

Meanwhile, some clinics primarily focus on organizations, such as startup businesses and community groups. 

In the Zell Entrepreneurship Clinic, around 30 students each term help their clients — largely current U-M students — with legal aspects of startup business ventures. Like several of the clinics, they collaborate with other schools and colleges across the university to offer their assistance. A subset of the clinic works with U-M student-athletes on navigating name, image and likeness deals.

“We’re here to support the University of Michigan entrepreneurial ecosystem,” said Tifani Sadek, clinic co-director and clinical professor of law . “A company comes to us and they have a great idea. They’re starting to put it together, but they don’t have an entity formed. So we help them figure that out: Do you need an LLC or a corporation? Maybe a nonprofit? 

“We write all the bylaws or operating agreements, all the governance documents to set the company up. We’ll assess their intellectual property, because usually that’s all a startup has; they don’t own a lot of things. It’s all ideas, it’s all trade secrets, and we’ll do what we need to, to protect that.”

Similarly, the 16-20 students in the Community Enterprise Clinic provide legal services to community groups and neighborhood-based small businesses, primarily in Detroit and other disinvested urban areas. The clinic also hosts workshops to discuss common legal issues, and it publishes a blog, Community Empowerment Matters, that addresses legal and policy matters impacting small businesses and nonprofits.

“We’re providing a need for legal services that are not provided by the private bar in Michigan, or not provided in the amount that’s necessary,” said clinic Director Dana Thompson, who is also a clinical professor of law; director of the Transactional Law Clinics Program; founding director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Clinic; and U-M alumna. 

“There are so many small businesses and nonprofits that need legal services, and a lot of times they just go without.”

The Rev. Joan Ross, who runs the North End Woodward Community Coalition in Detroit, has worked with the Community Enterprise Clinic for years on issues like property sales, tax questions and setting up a neighborhood solar energy program. 

“The clinic’s support was invaluable,” she said. “As the work nonprofits shoulder in our community becomes more complex, we at the coalition have been truly grateful for the support of the Law School students over the years. 

“And from my heart, I hope that the students have come to feel the heartbeat of this community — our struggles, our strength, and our deep capacity for hope.”

Another type of community benefit occurs when clinics take on public policy matters. For example, the Environmental Law and Sustainability Clinic has worked for several years with the Water Equals Life coalition to draft language for a water affordability legislative package, which was recently introduced in the Michigan House of Representatives. The bills would create protections against water shutoffs and liens for people who can’t afford to pay their water bills. 

Denise Poloyac, a Michigan Law alum who took a clinic as a student, now works as associate director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center, a founding partner of Water Equals Life. She said the students provided critical work — analyzing the issues, crafting model legislation and advising the coalition.

“The model language that they drafted builds on ideas that have been tried in other places, but never at a statewide level,” she said. “They didn’t draft a bill for Michigan; they drafted model language of how this could work — and then analyzed legal issues specific to Michigan. I don’t know that we could have ever gotten to the point that we are at if it weren’t for the work that the legal clinic has done.”

Finally, the community benefits of clinic work sometimes extend into professional practice. Andrew VanEgmond participated in the Pediatric Advocacy Clinic as a student, and now he’s carrying that work forward as a lawyer at Dykema.  

A former teacher, VanEgmond was drawn to the clinic’s work on behalf of low-income children. He worked as a student-attorney on several cases representing parents of special-education students, and that led him to establish a pro bono practice at his firm. 

“I learned how to do those cases at the clinic,” he said. “I wanted to keep doing what I was doing at Michigan Law. Students may be struggling in school, but the answer is not to exclude them from school.” 

Now, he supervises several Dykema attorneys who represent parents of students with disabilities in due process complaints challenging suspensions and expulsions, in partnership with the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan in Ypsilanti. 

Learning real-world law

VanEgmond said his clinic work gave him direct experience with clients — something that’s much less common for a new hire at a law firm. 

“The clinic provides supervisors, teaching you how to do the work,” he said. “But you have a client, you talk to the client, you talk to opposing counsel. To have had some experience with that was very helpful.”

Clinic students perform a variety of legal work, including court appearances. In one recent case, two second-year law students in the Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic, King Deas and Abby Flynn, took on a landlord-tenant dispute for a single mother of 12 who was living in a badly rundown house with lead paint flaking off the walls.

The student-attorneys filed a complaint about the condition of the house against the owner and the management company, which is still pending. But they also filed for a temporary restraining order for the defendants to provide alternative housing for the family. 

That issue went to court, where such motions are usually not opposed. However, in this case a prominent landlord attorney did oppose the motion — but the students argued and won their case, and the family is now living in a hotel under much improved conditions. 

“This is a great example of the typically unsexy, but vital core legal services that our students deliver,” said David Santacroce, longtime clinic director and clinical professor of law . “It’s in the trenches, doing the hard work of keeping people housed.”

Both Deas and Flynn believe their clinic experience will serve them well in their careers. 

“We have been lawyers this semester, which is not an experience that you can get outside of the clinic,” Deas said. “Actually going to the house, collecting evidence, arguing in court. We know how to litigate a case; I think that’s invaluable.”

“We both came to law school straight from undergrad, so we didn’t have a lot of other work experience,” Flynn added. “Now going into future jobs, I can say, I’ve stood up in court and argued, I’ve filed briefings, I’ve built a relationship with a client. Every aspect of it will be helpful.”

Clinic experience has proven useful for Jacob Abudaram, a recent alum now working for the ACLU on disability rights. 

“Joining the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative as a student was really formative for me, giving me a sense of what it’s like to actually be a civil rights lawyer,” he said. “When I think back to the experiences in law school that I still draw upon, it’s the entirety of my experience in CRLI. Developing relationships, talking about what’s happening in disability rights, and being in the ACLU universe, I draw a lot from what I learned in the clinic — as well as the actual litigation, getting ready for depositions, writing briefs. 

“My experience in CRLI is the foundation of all the work that I get to do now.”. 

Now, every semester since he joined the clinic, he has returned to teach a class about disability rights. 

Important as it is, however, the benefits of clinical work go beyond learning specific skills. Mira Edmonds, clinical professor of law and director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic, believes there’s a deeper value. 

“It reminds students why they came to law school,” she said. “Thinking like a lawyer is rather different from what most of them have done before. It can be a really hard transition. 

“Clinic work is often invigorating for them, to remember that they want to work with clients, that they want to make a difference for people. They realize how much more there is to being a lawyer and practicing law than what they’ve been focusing on in other classes.” 

Santacroce, the CCLC director, also formerly served as the school’s associate dean for experiential education, during which time he worked to expand the clinic program. He now has a national perspective as the president of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education, and he sees the Michigan Law program as a major differentiator from peer schools. 

An unusually high 80% of students take a clinic during their time at Michigan Law, and in addition, the school is one of just a handful nationwide that offers a clinic for first-year students.

“Our high intensity sets us apart. We’re way on the top end of the national scale,” he said. “We’re also the only top-tier law school to guarantee a clinic to students who want one. The guarantee, the saturation rate, and the first-year experience really make us different.”

Chopp, the associate dean, said the passion and intellect of the students is a key part of the success. 

“One of the most powerful aspects of clinical legal education at the University of Michigan Law School is that we have this incredibly high-achieving student body,” Chopp said. “When they come to the clinic and they dedicate all that intellectual firepower plus their emotional intelligence to the work, they are doing a tremendous service. It is beautiful to watch them help people and learn along the way.”