0:05.2  My name is Naomi gone I have been a lawyer at Canberra community law for the
0:10.0  past five years. I work in social security in housing law and I also
0:14.3  supervise students in the student clinic.
0:20.6  My name's Rosemary Budavari i'm a senior lawyer at Canberra Community La
0:27.1  I supervise students in our student clinic and I also work in the disability
0:32.7  discrimination law area. I've been in legal practice for around 30 years.
0:43.8  My name's Amelia McCormack I'm a lawyer here at Canberra Community Law and I also
0:47.5  supervise students for their case work during the clinical program.
0:51.5  I've been working here for about a year and a half.
1:00.9  I think one of the strengths of the clinic model is that students get a real-life experience of working with client
1:07.2  and solving real problems for them and they also get that through being supervised
1:14.0  by one lawyer on the advice line and also working intensively with another
1:21.8  lawyer in case work.
1:23.8  With our students rather than throwing them into the deep end we take an active role in monitoring them and in teaching them how to get the
1:32.3  story of the clients, how to figure out what the legal problem is and the way we
1:37.5  do that is by using speakerphone at first they listen to us getting the
1:43.1  stories from the clients on speakerphone and eventually we listen to them taking
1:47.9  the story from the clients on speakerphone and we're able to then give
1:52.2  immediate feedback as to how they are going with a goal at the end that they
1:59.5  are speaking to the clients directly on their own and without immediate supervision.
2:04.4  I supervise one to two students a semester
2:06.9  at the clinic and I work with them with their case way that generally involves
2:11.8  working with each student for about a day and a half per week. I give them
2:15.8  general work to do that can include research or just coming with me to
2:19.5  attend the tribunal to observe litigation and assist with anything that
2:23.8  comes out of that.
2:25.1  One of the challenges I find because I work in the Disability Discrimination area with a lot of clients with mental health disabilities
2:34.9  is finding appropriate cases for the students to work on that are not going
2:41.9  to be too confronting for them and raise too many issues that they might find difficult to deal with.
2:50.3  One of the challenges being a junior lawyer is
2:53.2  wanting to get things right all the time and wanting to have your work perfect
2:56.8  all the time, but sometimes a student will ask you a question and you just
3:01.1  won't know the answer but I think that that's a really important thing for
3:04.5  students to realise that when you first start practicing you're not expected to
3:08.1  know everything and your work isn't expected to be perfect.
3:11.7  so another challenge we face on the advice line is that we get students with a wide range
3:16.2  of experience and in the beginning there's a lot to teach them it is not a
3:20.3  simple thing to take the legal story from a client and to work out how it is
3:25.9  we can help them. In the beginning that involves very close one-on-one
3:29.9  supervision however by the end of the session they're giving back to us more
3:36.4  than we're giving to them.
3:38.5  I think when you're at Law School a lot of the time you deal with law in an abstract way but when you get to the clinic you see
3:45.3  how law operates day to day and you see how law that may not be discussed at
3:50.8  University that, might be tenancy law or social security law, that it really has a
3:55.0  huge impact on people's lives and the great thing about the clinic is that it
3:58.5  can show students how legal issues are resolved for real people and these legal
4:04.9  issues often have really big impacts on these people's lives.
4:07.9  One of the exciting things for me about this clinic is watching students go from just learning
4:16.0  to understand how to speak to clients right through to being able to
4:20.4  independently take instructions at the same time as being able to work as a
4:25.8  lawyer and be confident that the instructions I am receiving at the end
4:30.3  of that process are accurate.
4:32.4  I think one of the best features of the clinic is that it's been developed from within the community legal centre itself
4:40.3  in collaboration with the University.
4:44.6  I think the clinic's enjoyed for so long because we're unique in the ACT we have a two day a week clinical program that
4:50.1  really allows students to get up to speed quickly for the Centre that's
4:53.7  fantastic because it means students get on top of the areas of law really
4:57.3  quickly, but it also means that the students get to see how everything works
5:02.8  with a legal matter and they get to be involved in lots of different aspects of
5:05.9  the of cases which is why students keep coming back to do these courses.
5:10.9  The Clinic forms a really fundamental part of how Canberra Community Law operates
5:14.9  students are a really important part of our advice line and students are a
5:19.5  really important part of our case work. They're fully integrated into into our
5:24.3  centre so it's it's really great to see how they work with us and how they get a
5:28.9  lot of out of our course but we also benefit enormously from them being with us.
5:34.4  As a lawyer with over 30 years experience this clinic is one of the
5:38.5  best initiatives I've come across to help our students, our young lawyers
5:44.4  learn the skills that are going to assist them to contribute to the
5:50.5  betterment of our community in the future.