Hands-on advocacy

Professor Sheri Buske expands her courses beyond lectures to teach students about essential lawyering skills

By Jessica Rotter

Willamette Law is an emerging leader in experiential education. The faculty continue to think innovatively about how to incorporate experiential learning into existing classes and to create entirely new, simulation-based courses. Professor Sheri Buske, for instance, has seen the impact hands-on learning can have on students’ ability to hit the ground running after graduation and wanted to find a way to introduce a practical element into her courses.

As she settled into her role at Willamette Law in 2021, she considered how to expand her own skills and get involved in the local community. With that, she became a certified member of the Citizens Review Board (CRB), a program in the court system that reviews the cases of children in foster care. The informative and well-organized training prompted Buske to think about how she might incorporate the same concepts and skills into her curriculum.

At the same time, Kristina Elliott, CRB trainer and field manager, noticed the shortage of attorneys who were capable of taking on child dependency and welfare cases in Oregon. Families were experiencing long periods of time unrepresented because of the shortage of qualified attorneys. Elliott thought about how she could work with law students, in her capacity, to inspire them to consider this type of law.

From there, Buske and Elliott worked together to develop a course curriculum where students could attach the CRB training and certification process onto Buske’s Child Abuse and Neglect course. Students who added the CRB component would attend both the weekly lectures and the sessions required for CRB certification.

The CRB component included two Saturday training sessions, including a mock CRB review, a court and CRB observation, a variety of online homework modules, and a background check.

Adding this experiential learning component to her course was a dream come true for Buske.

“The students are up on their feet for most of the class learning, doing actual trial advocacy, and developing the soft skills this type of law requires,” she shares.

DEVELOPING SKILLS

This was notable to Buske as she recalls first going into legal practice and being handed a large stack of documents, without any background knowledge on what everything meant.

There was a significant amount of paperwork that was not, strictly speaking, legal documents — but was still vital to a case. She quickly realized she would need to understand all of these extra components about families in the foster care system before even diving into the legal issues.

“For many families, the problem isn’t a black and white legal issue,” Buske says. “There are other dynamics that led to the legal issue, and it’s important to understand that first and foremost. Something in the family isn’t working — that is what resulted in a legal response.”

Buske wanted her students to leave the class understanding the law — and equally crucial to her — to know how to interact with clients, how to conceptualize complicated issues and dynamics, and how to understand the “social work” component in each case. From her experience, students graduate and go into practice only to quickly discover that this specific area of the law requires soft skills that aren’t taught in the classroom.

“These skills take lawyers years to develop,” Elliott affirms. “There is no way to overstate the importance of legal advocacy and understanding complex family systems when lawyers approach a juvenile dependency case.”

Elliott was inspired to become a lawyer after serving on the CRB and seeing the role of advocacy in developing real solutions for complex legal issues. Including law students in the CRB can go a long way in supporting some of the most vulnerable people in the state, she says.

Adding the CRB certification to the course encouraged students to consider the non-legal side of practicing law, but it was also a benefit to the state as more qualified, compassionate and well-rounded lawyers will be admitted to the bar, Elliott explains.

“We are lucky, at the CRB, that we get the opportunity to have law students involved, because they are coming to this with eagerness, compassion and a long career ahead of them,” Elliott says. “These are the people who will make real change in our state and in the child welfare system, in particular.”

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Sarah Levin JD’23 took Buske’s course hoping to learn about the difference between juvenile dependency court and the traditional civil/criminal court system. The CRB component allowed her to delve even more into the role of advocacy in law and how citizens can be involved in making a larger impact on the community.

“We aren’t just sitting in a classroom hearing black letter law,” Levin says. “We get to truly consider the individual people involved in a system.”

In addition, Levin says she learned from the CRB lawyers that the work is hard, but it is some of the most rewarding and critical work for the community. Hearing from both Buske and Elliott encouraged her to be a creative thinker when it comes to the law.

“It’s looking at the totality of circumstances, differing viewpoints and other parties involved,” Levin says.

This course, with the addition of the CRB, was a perfect fit for Jana Baker JD’24, as well, since she was looking for an experiential learning opportunity.

“I am a hands-on learner, and being able to practice and role play, rather than sit in a lecture, helps me to learn [more quickly],” she says. The biggest thing that Baker took away from being immersed in the concepts and components of juvenile dependency work was, quite simply, the importance of it. What resonated most was learning the larger process as a whole and how things are handled — specifically the elements of a dependency case that one may not realize are notable right away.

“You may go into a case thinking it is just how to place a child for safety purposes,” Baker says, “but there are a significant number of other considerations that can carry equal weight.”

Both Levin and Baker planned to participate on the CRB after they became certified. They saw how transferable the skills they learned in class were to other areas of the law and other courses they took.

“I feel more prepared as an attorney, regardless of what area of law I end up practicing in, because I understand how the processes work and how to be more investigative while also considering the client first,” Baker says.

Buske hopes to continue offering the CRB training and certification as a part of her Child Abuse and Neglect course.

“Students are beginning to really see themselves as advocates, not just lawyers,” Buske says. “Advocates are what these clients really need.”

She is grateful that the CRB and Elliott agreed to participate, and that Dean Brian Gallini believed in her vision for the course.

“The stars aligned, and I believe our students, community and the legal profession in Oregon are better for it.”

EXPANDING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Willamette Law faculty members have spent recent years building up their experiential learning offerings. The school’s growing legacy of providing students with hands-on experience began, in part, thanks to Professor Emerita Valerie J. Vollmar JD’75, the first faculty member to introduce experiential learning into her curriculum after joining the law faculty in 1984.

Understanding the steep learning curve that law school graduates encounter as they begin their careers, despite having done well in school, Vollmar was inspired to approach teaching differently from traditional law school courses. Throughout her time at Willamette, she saw firsthand the impact that hands-on learning had on students’ understanding of what it means to truly be an attorney.

By introducing experiential learning at Willamette Law, Vollmar created a tradition of preparing practice-ready lawyers and leaders through practical learning. Her groundbreaking approach paved the way for Willamette Law’s place as an emerging leader in the space.