It’s been a year since Queen’s Law brought together all five of its legal clinics in one central location and there are plenty of reasons to celebrate. Students, who are supervised by full-time directors and duty counsel, continue to serve hundreds of local clients. For the past 12 months, they have done this in a law office setting, where the benefits to the school and local community continue to grow.

“Students thrive as caseworkers in the professional atmosphere that Queen’s Law Clinics offers,” says Jana Mills, Law ’92, Review Counsel for Queen’s Legal Aid (QLA), one of the co-located pro bono clinics.

A significant advantage of the space is that students can now collaborate on client files with their peers involved with legal aid and the elder, business, prison and family clinics. Thompson Hamilton, Law ’16, a student involved in the clinics for all three years of his law degree, finds the student workroom to be one of his favourite parts of the clinical experience. “People are always asking questions, talking through problems out loud, and developing arguments,” he says. “The co-location means these discussions are more vibrant.”

This interdisciplinary approach offers an awareness of how core areas of the law affect the lives of their clientele, and how the resolution of legal problems requires consideration of the law’s interconnectedness.

Moreover, last fall, QLA embarked on a partnership with Queen’s School of Nursing with a view to providing caseworkers an opportunity to develop insight into clients’ health issues that intersect with their legal problems, while at the same time providing a unique community placement for nursing students in the mental health practicum. This initiative has been a wonderful interdisciplinary learning experience that greatly improves Queen’s service to clients.

The new clinic space, which features bright and sizable interview rooms overlooking historic Kingston, also led to extended office hours in the evenings. Taking advantage of this new time slot, Queen’s Law has developed an “advocacy club” evening that meets once monthly. At these meetings, a review counsel facilitates moot hearings from which students working for academic credit or for volunteer experience can improve their advocacy skills through practice and feedback from their peers.

The downtown location on main transit routes makes it much easier for clients to get to appointments than it was finding clinics on campus. “Being received in a simulated law office environment gives a certain reassurance to clients at a time they are worrying about the legal problems they need help with,” says Mills, noting that this can be especially meaningful for low-income recipients of legal services who don’t have ready access to such professional services.

For Hamilton, he appreciates being close to the courts students most frequently appear in, which is one way they can get out of textbooks and into a real practical setting. “We generally feel more plugged in to the Kingston community as a whole.”

Space isn’t the only update to the clinics. They now share Time Matters, a new database that will not only greatly enhance efficiencies as the clinics move to a less paper-intensive operation, but also better prepare students for the technology used in modern law offices.

“My clinical experience has been the best part of law school for me,” says Hamilton. “When the problem is access to justice, as it is for so many, the co-located Queen's Law Clinics is an important part of the solution.

For more information on Queen’s Law Clinics, visit their website.