Karen C. Burke is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. This semester she is teaching Corporate Tax II and Federal Tax Research in the Graduate Tax Program. Before joining the USD faculty, she was the Dorsey & Whitney Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota. She received her JD from Stanford Law School and her LL.M. in Taxation from Boston University School of Law. She clerked for Judge Robert E. Keeton on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and practiced law with Sullivan & Worcester in Boston. Burke teaches and writes primarily in the area of federal income taxation.

In teams of two, the eight students enrolled in the Gator TeamChild Juvenile Law Clinic and the four advance students are assigned cases ranging from juvenile delinquency to family dependency.

“There’s a whole gamut of things that we’re asked to do in our representation of children,” said the clinic’s director, Legal Skills Professor Meshon Rawls.

Many of the clinic’s clients are referred from professionals in the delinquency and dependency systems when the client has special needs that span beyond what the courts alone can provide, such as mental health, social and educational needs, Rawls said.

As certified legal interns, these 12 students have the authority to fully represent their clients in all cases under Rawls’ supervision.

“I came into law school never wanting to do litigation,” said Caitlin Mitchell (3L). “Through this clinic, I had the opportunity to be before the court without assistance, and it helped me discover what I want to do.”

Students in the clinic, which opened in 1998, are assigned about four cases and are required to attend hearings and depositions, meet with clients in detention centers and file motions.

“We know where to stand, we know how to deal with a judge and we know how to write and file motions,” Mitchell said.

Rawls teaches them how to implement what they learned in their substantive courses leading up to their enrollment in the clinic.

“I want students to learn to practice law on purpose,” Rawls said. “If they are having issues in their cases, I will sit down with them and help them realize what they are doing to miss the mark.”

In many situations, cases will carry on through multiple semesters. Students currently assigned to cases keep detailed logs so that the transition to a new team of students does not interfere with the progress of these cases. After the completion of their first semester in the juvenile law clinic, some students may elect to enroll in the advance clinic to act as mentors to the new students and continue their work.

“A lot of our responsibilities include helping the newer students prepare for court and editing their documents and motions,” said Mitchell, a second-semester advance student.

As part of a nationwide network of TeamChild clinics, the clinic has the goal of advocating holistically for youth, which is what distinguishes it from the other clinics offered through the UF Law clinical program.

“We are aligned with the theory behind the unified family court because we are one entity representing a child so that the best decisions can be made in any and all of the child’s cases,” Rawls said. “Our motto is one child, one advocate, one voice.”

It’s no secret that the legal profession is a rapidly changing field, with factors such as technology and globalization reshaping the landscape in ways previously unimagined. At the same time, expectations of the skills new graduates should possess before entering the legal world continue to evolve.

The University of Florida Levin College of Law has always been a state leader in education, and in keeping with that tradition, Dean Robert Jerry, the UF Law strategic planning committee, faculty and staff are looking closely at how the college can best prepare students for this new legal world.

Prepared, practiced, professional

Pascale Bishop, UF Law’s new assistant dean for career development said that at her previous school, the slogan “Prepared, practiced, professional” expressed what legal employers like to see in young law school graduates these days.

Bishop said employers are looking for “students and graduates who have already received practical experience, who are prepared to take a file and run with it, and who know how to interact with clients, other attorneys, judges, support staff and the professional world at large.”

This might seem like a common sense goal, but it hasn’t always been like that in the legal world. Although students in the past received practical experience through internships, externships and clinics, the main thrust of their legal education focused on the theoretical and academic study of legal theories, not hands-on experience.

“The critique is that students can leave law school without really having a deep understanding of what the practice of law is like,” Jerry said. “In the past, I think many graduates of law schools nationally have acquired understanding in their first practice years.”

So on-the-job-training was the traditional expectation for legal educators and employers alike. Not anymore.

In the last few years, economic pressures combined with a more competitive legal marketplace have led to new normal.

“There is definitely more pressure to be ready to practice from day one with little training or hand-holding, in order to prove (new employees’) value to the law firms,” Bishop said.

And to meet those expectations, UF Law is looking to the future and staying ahead of the curve by evolving its curriculum to produce graduates equipped to compete in this still-changing legal field.

New Mission guides curriculum

UF Law recently adopted an updated academic mission statement proposed by the College of Law Faculty Senate’s strategic planning committee to focus curriculum so students will be optimally equipped to meet the expectations of employers.

The statement hinges on five core competencies: Legal analysis, legal research and writing, fundamentals of client services, fundamentals of dispute processing and legal problem solving, and fundamentals of professional responsibility and identity.

Jerry said UF Law has led the way in legal skills training — pointing out how many law schools today are touting newly added legal drafting programs to their curriculum, a mainstay of the UF Law curriculum for years. But to align with the core competencies outlined in the mission statement, some practical skill areas will gain emphasis.

“We’re looking at how we can make what we’re doing even better,” he said.

Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Alyson Flournoy said UF Law is ready to implement a few changes in the curriculum.

“The faculty has approved a new one-credit legal research course that will be taught by the law librarians to all first-year students beginning next year,” Flournoy said. “Also beginning next fall, all first-year students will take a new Introduction to Lawyering course which will provide an introduction to the profession, a segment on professionalism and developing a professional identity and an introduction to the skills lawyers use.”

She said this course will provide students with a grounding to understand the legal profession better and help inform the choices they make in their academic program and other career development decisions.

“The strategic planning committee has now turned to focus on developing skills in the upper level curriculum and is looking at an array of options to achieve the goals set out in the mission statement,” Flournoy added. “This will build on some recent changes we’ve made to further strengthen the skills curriculum, including the recently developed Interviewing, Counseling and Negotiation course.”

The course will offer a significant number of students the chance to learn these core skills each semester and will serve as a gateway course for all the litigation clinics.

The Center for Career Development is also implementing new and innovative ways to help students succeed after graduation.

“We are incorporating professionalism into all of our programming and making sure that our counseling includes a discussion of how to handle their own professional development,” Bishop said, “including taking on new challenges like publishing or participating in bar associations, extracurricular activities or CLEs even as a student.”

Bishop encourages students to accumulate practical experience through internships, externships, volunteering, working as a law clerk or even classroom situations involving client problems and simulations.

A memorial service for Van Alstyne, who died at 89, was held Jan. 20 at Haven Hospice in Gainesville. And the occasion elicited kind words and fond memories from some of his former colleagues at UF Law.

Emeritus Professor Joseph Little formed a bond with Van Alstyne during their time together at UF Law and delivered a eulogy during his memorial service.

“I think it was because his attributes as a true — though imported — Midwesterner and mine as a true Southerner melded,” Little said during the eulogy. “Many true Midwesterners and true Southerners are imbued with a non-political conservatism that fosters a kindred spirit.”

The day before the service, Professor Winston Nagan, who met Van Alstyne in 1975, the year Nagan began teaching at UF Law, wrote an email to faculty and staff at the law school recounting some fond memories of Van Alstyne.

Nagan pointed out Van Alstyne’s persistent thirst for knowledge, which was evident in some of their first meetings.

“He was a gregarious and a very congenial colleague,” Nagan wrote. “He was also quite curious. In one of our lunchings he expressed an interest in some research that I was doing, and showed that he had a wide ranging level of intellectual curiosity. At this time I inquired about his current projects. As it turned out he had began working on an article on the idea of the private attorney general in the state administrative law system of Wisconsin.”

Nagan explained that he was able to offer some advice to Van Alstyne as he was writing the article, which was eventually published in the Wisconsin Law Review.

“Our communication on this cemented our friendship over the years,” he wrote.

Van Alstyne’s intellectual curiosity was also apparent in his life before UF Law.

After serving in World War II, Van Alstyne pursued his higher education, a goal which had been interrupted by the war. He earned his B.A. in history from the University of Buffalo in 1948. He then moved on to the University of Wisconsin where he would receive an M.A. in history, an LL.B. and S.J.D. While in law school he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Order of the Coif, and served as executive editor of the Wisconsin Law Review.

Van Alstyne went into private practice after law school before teaching law at the University of Nebraska. He returned to Wisconsin after two years and continued to teach law as an adjunct at the University of Wisconsin, while maintaining a private practice, advising government agencies, serving as a member of the Wisconsin Bar Board of Governors and authoring “numerous scholarly articles and two book-length studies,” according to his obituary in The Gainesville Sun.

Nagan pointed out that Van Alstyne was a popular teacher during his time at UF Law, basing his style of teaching on a combination of his experiences during his years in private practice with social scientists and historians who “sought to locate the dynamism of law within the context of historic and sociological forces.”

Both Nagan and Little, touched on how they believed his little-talked-about experiences in World War II helped shape his approach to his political beliefs and the legal profession throughout his life and also spoke of his deep knowledge of history.

“As time wore on Scott and I frequently discussed history, law and politics both in the law school and elsewhere,” Little said at the memorial service. “In the last few years, these sessions have been focused around box luncheons in his and Marion’s fine new home. In me, Scott found a good listener and sometime critic. In him, I found an ardent, erudite, earnest and always voluble teacher.”