The Greatest Professor

Professor The Greatest

by LI HELPLI G

I go to an amazing law school and am incredibly blessed to be surrounded by faculty who are the best in their field. They are scholars and practitioners, widely published and widely respected, who are just as captivating one-onone as they are in front of a crowded classroom. They are, in turns, demanding and compassionate.

They are brilliant, experienced and eloquent. Every semester, I send my parents and my fiancé a “First Day of School” report, including hyperlinks to the university bio pages for each of my professors. Every semester, they are shocked and amazed by the caliber of the people I am lucky enough to have teach me law.

But the most important professor I have had thus far in law school has been a woman from Southwest Detroit

working tirelessly to help her community, a woman who bore no label of “Professor” nor was employed by my law school. Her name is Sandra, i and she was my client.

I signed up for one of the law school’s clinics after Thanksgiving of my 2L year. The first semester of my second year of law school was brutal. I overloaded on credits to take as many classes as possible. I took four doctrinal classes and one business class, served as a

STUDENT SECTION

teaching assistant for the Legal Writing and Practice program, and worked over twenty hours a week as a research assistant for a professor I admired and feared too much to tell her how stressed I was. Despite how much and how hard I was working, I felt purposeless. I was taking these classes and learning case law and legal principles, but I missed being able to do something. I missed working. I missed going home at the end of the day feeling like I had accomplished something and made a difference in someone’s day. When the Community Enterprise Clinic announced that they had one open spot left for the spring semester, I signed up without a second thought.

My clinic partner and I had two clients, both nonprofits located in Southwest Detroit. One matter focused on entity formation, and the other on contract drafting. The day after Michigan had its first “snow day” in several decades, my partner and I traveled to Detroit to visit

My clinic experience reminded me of these things: there is a world beyond law school, and there are people beyond my ivory tower. It reminded me that diligence, professionalism and empathy were skills that I had to practice just as much as I had to practice briefing cases and Bluebooking.

Sandra and learn more about her organization and what she needed in terms of entity formation. From her file, we knew she was interested in exploring a community land trust, and I had looked up her neighborhood on Google Maps and on the Wayne County property records in order to get some idea what we were getting ourselves into. But when we parked on the side of the street in her neighborhood, the skeletal houses looked nothing like the pictures we had seen on the internet, and the snow and ice piled on the street chilled the enthusiasm that had been building in the car the entire drive over.

My partner and I zigzagged through the ice and snow from the car up to our client’s front door. We barely had a chance to knock before our client swung open the door. She beamed at us from inside a tattered screen door and graciously welcomed us inside, invited us to sit and asked if she could get us tea or coffee.

The next hour, without a doubt, changed my life. I heard our client speak with fire and passion in her voice about her neighborhood and her neighbors. She wanted to protect and preserve the history and relationships that grew up around her in that neighborhood. The house in which we met—her house—served triple duty as a makeshift shelter, community kitchen and tutoring center. Sandra gave up her own bed for those who needed one, provided warmth for those coming in out of the cold and gave a sense of home for those whose homes had been taken by the City of Detroit. She was heartfelt, energetic and unbreakable. She leaned on a cane to walk, but when she spoke, her voice filled all the corners of the room. Sandra told us about growing up in her neighborhood, watching her neighbors lose their homes to foreclosure and eminent domain and going to community meetings to protect her home as the City’s gentrification circled her neighborhood like a shark. She wanted a community land trust to buy and hold the lots on her street. She wanted to protect her neighborhood. She wanted to protect Ms. Amelia, who lived next door and who kept a closet full of clothes for people who needed them. She wanted to buy the lot next to her to start a community garden so that children living down the street could have fresh vegetables. She

We had no idea how to help her, but we knew we would try. We only had one semester with Sandra, and we wanted to do as much as we could with it. We spent that semester researching community land trusts and other land-holding entities, calling city workers and officials and making the drive from Ann Arbor to Detroit to visit Sandra and her neighbors. We counseled her on possible entity structures and strategized with her about who in and around her neighborhood could help her with her goal. “If you could make Sandra into a battery,” I told my partner, “she could power the world.” We did our best to match her (unmatchable) energy with our own.

This semester in clinic taught me more than any other class about how to actually be a lawyer. I learned about client-centered lawyering. The consistent focus on serving our client reminded us that lawyers don’t always know better, and that we owe our clients deference to their experience and wishes. More than once, I caught myself thinking about what I thought my client’s goals should be rather than actually listening to her. I also practiced giving: time, energy, attention. Detroit was 45 minutes away without traffic. Every time I thought about making the trip, my mind inevitably went to all the class reading or journal work I could be doing instead of driving. But each trip made me feel stronger, more active and more involved as a lawyer. I practiced being the kind of lawyer who makes the trip out, who I learned about frustration, the kind of frustration when the answer isn’t on LexisNexis or Westlaw or Google. I learned to pick up the phone and call people who might have the answers to my questions, and I learned how to talk to them as a lawyer and not just as a law student. I learned how the words “and I represent” sounded when they came out of my mouth.

I learned that lawyers are not immune from sorrow. My client, a black woman in Detroit, fought ferociously against eminent domain and gentrification. She gave her money, her time, her energy, even her own home to help her neighbors. But the forces working against her were too strong. The City held the rest of the lots in her neighborhood and took them off the market so she couldn’t save them. When she showed up at community meetings to plead her case, they told her she was too late and that the redevelopment plans for her neighborhood had already been approved. It broke my heart to know that, no matter how much research we did and how many times we met with her and how much we tried to help her, the City would probably— inevitably—win.

I learned about frustration, the kind of frustration when the answer isn’t on LexisNexis or Westlaw or Google. I learned to pick up the phone and call people who might have the answers to my questions, and I learned how to talk to them as a lawyer and not just as a law student.

It is easy to become isolated in law school. It is too easy to go to school and to go home, to do readings for class and cite check for journal, to write a Note or research for a professor, to squirrel away GPA-boosting credits and seminars, to focus on surviving law school and then getting out. There is immense pressure to succeed in class, to do well and impress your professors and classmates. It is hard to remember how to be a person. It is harder still to remember that, at the end of the day, the goal of this whole experience is to turn us into someone’s lawyer.

My clinic experience reminded me of these things: there is a world beyond law school, and there are people beyond my ivory tower. It reminded me that diligence, professionalism and empathy were skills that I had to practice just as much as I had to practice briefing cases and Bluebooking. It reminded me that the legal profession is, first and foremost, one of service. Working in a clinic allowed me to practice being a lawyer in every respect, especially developing the ability to put my client first.

Kohr Royer Griffith

Commercial Real Estate Services

Since 1914

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1480 Dublin Road, Columbus, Ohio 43215 614.228.2471 - 614.228.1919 FAX www.krgre.com

KRG Associates hold individual memberships in –Appraisal Institute

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I have learned so much from my professors, who constantly amaze and inspire me with their minds and their energy and their willingness to share with me. I am truly lucky to learn from them and from my amazing classmates. But the moment that changed me the most, the moment that reinvigorated my passion for the profession that I am preparing to enter, the moment that made me feel, for the first time since my first day of 1L, like I was more than just a student, was that first moment when Sandra opened the door, shook my hand and called me her lawyer. Because in that moment, I was.

i Names and identifying information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.

Liz Helpling

University of Michigan