All posts tagged: Temple Legal Aid Office

The Community Lawyering Clinic: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

After I completed my first year at Temple Law, I wanted to experience different areas of the law to better understand my own career path. I spent my first summer in an internship doing policy work, after which I decided to also gain some experience providing direct services to clients. Being that my focus is on health law, I was immediately drawn to the Community Lawyering Clinic, operated from Temple’s Legal Aid Office. The clinic, taught by Professor Spencer Rand, serves individuals with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses seeking representation in Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability hearings. Clinic students also draft life-planning documents for clients, such as wills, standby guardianship forms, power of attorney forms, and more. During the clinic, students are matched with a community organization through which they can do outreach. Depending on the organization, this outreach can take on a number of different forms. My community outreach site was Community Living Room, an organization providing psychiatric rehabilitation services for individuals living with HIV and a mental health diagnosis. During my time …

The Family Law Clinic: A Student Advocate’s Perspective

Working within the Temple University Legal Aid Office, Family Law Clinic has been, without a doubt, my most rewarding experience in law school. Temple’s Family Law Clinic gives law students the opportunity to work as a legal advocate for clients under the supervision of an attorney and law professor. This gives a student, who may have no prior legal work experience, an opportunity to work within a law office, as a certified legal intern. A certified legal intern works along side the supervising attorney interviewing and counseling clients, drafting and filing documents, negotiating with opposing parties or opposing counsel, and going to court and arguing on behalf of the client. Clinical work is supplemented with an academic course, in which students are taught substantive family law, complete case rounds, and discuss any issues or interests that may come up as a result of working within the clinic. What sets the Family Law Clinic apart from a typical law school course, an internship, or an externship, is the combination of academic study and practical application. For …