Future lawyers experience helping low-income clients gain access to justice

After graduating with a music degree from Grant MacEwan University, Chris Wiebe took on a full-time job at Hope Mission’s Rapid Exit program, which provides support and followup to help people stay housed.

Wiebe was responsible for facilitating relations between about 40 clients and their landlords, social workers and medical providers. Some of his clients would be evicted, and he would have to find a way to re-house them.

“Even experiencing second-hand the stress of an eviction or a benefits termination was overwhelming,” he says. “The lives that people in poverty live are very foreign to people like me, who grew up middle-class.”

That job left a profound impression on Wiebe, leaving him with the desire to devote his career to providing legal services to those who are most vulnerable and marginalized.

He entered the Faculty of Law in 2017 and in second year discovered an experiential learning opportunity that reaffirmed his commitment to those who “experience poverty and face systemic barriers to accessing justice.”

The program, called “Low-Income Individuals and the Law,” equips law students with the skills they need to assist low-income and marginalized people with their biggest legal challenges. Through classroom sessions and clinical placements, the students acquire a critical understanding of the social, economic and cultural context of their clients’ lives.

Some of the more common issues low-income people confront involve housing and homelessness, human rights, intimate partner violence, the use of public spaces, social benefits and immigration.

Beginning with pre-clinical orientation the first week in September, the program includes a seminar course that introduces the students to theory and research relating to poverty, the impact of the law on low-income and marginalized persons, and underlying systemic issues. It also includes a placement at one of the program’s four partner organizations: the Edmonton Community Legal Centre, Legal Aid Alberta, the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta and the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights. 

The placement courses take place during both the fall and winter terms, for a total of 196 hours. The program was designed to help the students build on their classroom experiences and develop the practical legal skills that come from working with clients.

When helping these clients, says co-developer and co-teacher Katherine Weaver, “We don’t act as social workers, but we should have the empathy and understanding to realize what our clients need and help them to get that so they can make the best decisions for themselves.”

Throughout their placements, students meet with faculty advisers to debrief on their caseloads. In their second term, they are required to take a weekly, three-hour seminar. A critical component of the clinical placement is a personal journal, which they can use to reflect on their relationships with clients and how the experience is affecting them emotionally.

“It’s an amazing tool for helping them debrief and decompress,” Weaver says. “We talk a lot about the trauma that our clients have gone through. But we also help the students understand things like vicarious trauma and the importance of a work-life balance.”

Now in its 15th year, the program was created by Weaver (then vice-president of policy and research with Legal Aid Alberta), professor emeritus Catherine Bell and Debbie Klein, executive director of the Edmonton Community Legal Centre. It contained the law faculty’s first credit-based clinical courses. 

Weaver and Bell ran and co-taught the program until Bell’s retirement at the end of the 2021-22 academic year. Since then, Weaver and professor Anna Lund run and co-teach the program.

In 2009, says Weaver, there were no credit-based opportunities for law students to deal directly with clients beyond the odd volunteer placement at a community service like the local food bank.

“The clinical experience is something that had been missing,” she says. “We could teach the theory and research around poverty law, but how do you make it real for students so they develop their own approach and philosophy?”

For Wiebe, the program did just that, giving him the “foundational skills for representing individuals at the raw end of a power imbalance between them and the state.

“In the placement we got more than one positive outcome for a client, and that feeling is unbeatable,” he says. “If that isn’t what being a lawyer is about, I don’t know what is.” 

Wiebe now works for Engel Law, representing plaintiffs who have been injured by police or in prisons.

“Some of the students end up either working or volunteering in this field, and others are doing policy work,” says Weaver.

“I’ve had a few who’ve gone on to do graduate work or who are teaching, and others who have a more traditional practice. But they all support the need for these kinds of services.”

If you are interested in supporting experiential learning, like this course, at the Faculty of Law please contact Ellen Doty, Assistant Dean, Development, at edoty@ualberta.ca.