We work as a trainee and a solicitor in a free legal clinic in London. The clinic is attached to a large university. It serves three main functions: to provide legal advice to the local community, to collect data that can feed into research, and to provide law students with practical (as opposed to academic) experience of working in law.

The clinic primarily offers advice on welfare benefits, housing and other related matters. People facing these kinds of legal problems are generally working class, often migrants or disabled. Students at the clinic tend to be (but are not always) drawn from the more privileged parts of society. Many students who study at the university are also migrants, but migrants whose parents can afford to pay around £30,000 a year for their tuition. There is a significant minority of students at the university who commute from inner city and outer London and surrounding counties. They are more likely to be from working class backgrounds. Working class students are more likely to volunteer at the clinic, although there are obvious limitations to their involvement. Students who need to work for pay have less time to pay to work.

Most students are motivated to study law for two reasons: wanting to make a positive difference in the world and wanting money and status. The students’ latter motivation quickly overtakes the former. The university’s law faculty is a pipeline for new lawyers into the City of London. The big firms have a heavy presence on campus, and recruitment begins early. A consensus logic forms among the students, in which prestige is bound up with salary expectation (six figures on qualification) and how late you will have to stay at the office (the later, the more rarified).

The role of the law clinic

The clinic acts as a small and limited counterweight, introducing students to social welfare law. It draws a connection between the law they study and political decision-making, encouraging them to consider work outside of pure service to capital accumulation. Clinic staff encourage students to read around issues of access to justice and legal developments, as well as encouraging them to participate in related initiatives, like the recent Review of Civil Legal Aid (RoCLA). In part, the aim is to inspire them to consider social welfare law in the future, but also to introduce them to the challenges that the sector faces in general.

There is an appetite for this among students. Most who volunteer with us want to feel as though they are doing something helpful, and most are very keen to learn as much as possible in the short time that they are in the clinic. But ultimately, the principal aim for many is to get a line added to their CV that will impress a future boss. Volunteering with the clinic provides students with the chance to distinguish themselves from other job applicants, increasing their opportunities to get recruited by ‘prestigious’ firms. In some respects, the clinic works to facilitate the transition from law school to City firm. There is a tension between the clinic’s objective of promoting social justice and the business case for the clinic based on enhancing the university’s reputation amongst prospective students, who are treated as consumers.

Day-to-day work

Many universities now have their own free legal advice clinic, but there is no standardised way of operating or managing them. Some are mostly student led, others led by faculty, others still by legal practitioners employed by the university. Some run discrete clinics limited to particular legal issues (e.g. filling in homeless applications or benefit forms) while others act more like mini law firms. Some clinics are part of the university’s legal structure (with all the bureaucracy that entails) while others are separate legal entities funded by the university. Our clinic is practitioner led, incorporated into the university, but closer to the law firm model.

Every day at our clinic is different, much like most legal aid law firms. Alongside the legal aid casework that the clinic undertakes, there is also a variety of pro bono projects run in collaboration with corporate law firms who provide volunteers. Some local charities also bring potential clients to be given mostly one-off advice or support. Sometimes these one-off clients develop into a full case. Projects with corporate partners build capacity within the clinic and allow staff to take on more cases. But this is only after a decent amount of training has taken place to get pro bono volunteers up to speed with the relevant areas of law.

What is unique about the clinic where we work is that we can do both legal aid and non-legal aid work, a bit like a law centre. We can help clients who are not eligible for legal aid because they don’t meet the restrictive legal aid income or capital thresholds. As the clinic is mostly funded by the university and does not rely solely on legal aid funds, it does not have the same financial pressures to keep the lights on. This means that the clinic can take on a wider variety of cases within our practice areas. The cases we help with are not limited to those within scope for legal aid or those that are more likely to turn a profit.

Through years of work and practice in the local community, the clinic has built a healthy amount of trust among the client base, and it is fairly common for clients to return again for other issues they may have, long after their original case has been closed. It is also common for family members and friends of old clients to call and make new enquiries for the same reason. This, coupled with the variety of interlinking areas of law that the clinic practices in, means that a client with a welfare benefits issue can later return for housing advice knowing that their caseworker will already be familiar with the background to their problems.

Although the clinic does not specifically provide any drop-in services, it is not uncommon for new enquirers to attend our clinic to see if we have capacity to take on a case. From our experience of working for private legal aid providers, we have seen that this happens very rarely in commercial settings. But because our clinic is relatively well embedded in the local community and within the local advice sector, we see this frequently. When this does happen, a student will take a new enquiry and sometimes will be able to pass on some one-off advice from a caseworker. Other times, if the issue is urgent, like a young single mum who is homeless attending our clinic to request housing support for that evening, a solicitor will do the requisite urgent work on a one-off basis before seeing if there is a need to open a proper file and provide ongoing casework.

Student volunteers are plugged into this process from start to finish. They undertake crucial administrative work which allows the clinic’s casework to run smoothly, albeit under close supervision from staff. Staff members spend a considerable amount of time on a daily basis supervising students, as well as answering questions and ensuring that the students are happy with the work they are doing and that their tasks are understood. The students in turn bring enthusiasm to the role and are happy to be doing productive work in service of the local community.

Beyond the casework, student supervision, and new enquiries, caseworkers at the clinic have various case management systems to keep up to date to ensure the data brought in is properly recorded so that it can be looked at closely for research purposes. Moreover, there are opportunities to discuss the strategic and bigger direction of the clinic and the research that is undertaken, and often we will be encouraged to suggest ideas for research projects based on shortcomings within the justice system that we have encountered or noticed. In this sense, there is scope to be more involved with the rest of the law faculty at the university.

There are 100s of new enquiries each month, but only a small amount can be taken on as full cases due to the size of the staff team at the clinic. We are able to take on a decent amount of new clients, many of which are brand new to the clinic, and others who are returning clients who require continuing support. Students play a significant part in the new enquiries process, and are trained in depth on the substantive law before beginning their role. They also learn the kinds of questions to ask to identify the help a client needs. Speaking with potential new clients can be quite a difficult process for students, as the people calling are often vulnerable or in a difficult situation.

Of the two of us writing this piece, one is a junior solicitor only a few years qualified and the other is a trainee completing a training contract. The junior solicitor has conduct of a variety of cases across the clinic’s practice areas. This is not unusual in the clinic due to the fact that colleagues work together across the interlinked legal areas. This is more unusual in some legal aid law firms, which often have highly specialised teams and departments for specific areas of law. The trainee is training in all practice areas. The trainee also has more responsibilities to do with new enquiries and assisting students with the administrative operations, whereas the solicitor has a more focused relationship with curricular students, assigning, supervising, and feeding back on casework.

Most UK universities now have a legal clinic attached to their law faculty and clinical legal education is becoming more and more common across the country (it has a much longer history in the US). In 2015, there were 62 university law clinics in the UK. That number is likely to be far higher now, with almost all universities with a law programme offering some form of clinical legal education. In 2018, LawWorks estimated that 40% of pro bono clinics in the UK were run by universities. Again, that percentage is likely to be higher today. While university clinics have become more prevalent, traditional advice centres have suffered huge cuts to their local authority core funding. These cuts came on top of the collapse of legal aid income.

The legal aid sector was teetering around the time of the 2008-09 financial crisis, but since the implementation of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) legal aid has been gutted. Half of all law centres and not-for-profit advice centres closed between 2013 and 2019. There has been no change to Westminster’s attitude to free legal advice (or local authority funding) in the intervening years. University legal clinics and corporate pro bono schemes (often running in conjunction with one another) are increasingly stepping in to paper over the cracks left by 15 years of austerity, providing a limited, patchwork response to the unmet legal need created by LASPO.

University law clinics are also growing to give universities an edge over their rivals in a crowded university sector with student numbers falling and some universities on the brink of bankruptcy. A well resourced and well respected legal clinic, offering hands-on experience of legal practice, can set two universities apart in the eyes of an undecided student looking to enter a tight labour market with as much work experience as possible.

Student labour

There are two classes of student volunteers at the clinic. Students who are there on a curricular placement shadow advisers and get more experience of casework – drafting, advocacy, research, etc. They come in for half a day each week for 13 or 14 weeks of the year. Students who do extracurricular volunteering can come in more frequently and (depending on their interest) might come in for much more of the academic year. The extracurricular students are principally there to help with the administration of the office and to sit at the front of house to deal with incoming calls and visitors. Their work is supervised by the office manager, but they tend to be placed in pairs out of earshot. The job is in some ways more social – there is more free time for them to muck about and there’s less pressure because none of the work they are doing feeds into an assessment.

The extracurricular students do, however, get landed with the worst job. There are only a small number of advisers at the clinic and the demand from clients far outstrips what we are able to help with. The result is that only about 10% of new enquiries get opened up as cases. The remaining 90% get sent on the signposting merry-go-round to other advice services who are more likely than not to send them on again. It’s the extracurricular students’ job to give people the bad news that we are not able to help. It can be miserable work, but paid staff (both of us included) are generally content to place the burden onto them.

That points to a system of seniority within the office. Both of us started in workplaces where the shit jobs were given to the most junior staff – this is a tradition that seems prevalent in law, but one that is shared by every other sector we have both worked in. There’s a balance to be struck between making the most of the students so that we can get on with the parts of the job that they are not qualified to carry out, and keeping their placements enjoyable enough to encourage an interest in the work we do.

The students are bright and enthusiastic. But with a number of notable exceptions in every cohort, they are also incredibly unreliable. The fact that they are, on the one hand, volunteers and, on the other, volunteers who are paying our wages, means that there is never any sanction imposed on students for missing sessions. The office management will let late appearances, incomplete work, and unfulfilled promises slide.

By the end of the second term, the students have got to grips with the way the clinic operates and the many, many different systems that are in place to manage cases, record data, appease regulators, protect client data, etc. This knack for the work takes time to develop because the students are generally only in for a few hours a week, and their aptitude usually becomes apparent right before exam time, when most of them leave.

As a way of producing legal services, this annual cycle of student intake-discharge is wildly inefficient. But as a way of producing labour power, it works admirably. The students pay huge sums of money for their degrees, which includes the experience of legal work at the clinic, but through that experience they also commodify their own labour.

Barriers of the law

There are many problems with the idea that the law can be used to produce social justice, let alone used as a tool for class struggle. However, there are further barriers to finding work outside of commercial or corporate law for the students who adopt or retain (hopefully critical) support for such a project. Jobs in legal aid and the free legal advice sector pay at a fraction of the rates commercial firms pay. The vast majority of jobs in the sector are in London or other major cities. Because of very high housing costs, training in public interest law generally means having to access support from family to make up for relatively low wages, or to rely on a combination of (limited) scholarships, overdrafts, and private loans. This might happen by staying with parents while training, or by accessing family wealth, and is a state of affairs borne out by looking at the social composition of our office. Those from outside of London are white, middle class, and have parents with professional backgrounds. Those who grew up in London are working class, second-generation migrants. Students without this support are by necessity funnelled towards corporate and commercial work that is far more likely to cover the costs of postgraduate training and living expenses.

A second barrier for students is immigration status. Of the several hundred remaining legal aid providers in England and Wales, only two sponsor visas. As a university with a large intake of overseas students, many end up volunteering at the clinic, develop a taste for the work, but are then barred from pursuing their interest any further by hostile immigration rules. The Ministry of Justice’s most recent consultation on the future of legal aid prompted one respondent to suggest a softening of visa requirements for young lawyers wanting to work in the sector—but any hope that the British state will take steps to help lefty lawyers who are also immigrants seems a little misplaced.

Many students who we talk to are resigned to going to work in the City. It is not uncommon for students to speak about this move as a necessary two, three, or four years, with the plan to qualify into practice before escaping to less morally compromised work. The extent to which this actually happens is difficult to assess. We spoke with one former student who is counting down the days until she could apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain and quit the US firm that trained her. A colleague qualified into a ‘Silver Circle’ firm and spent two years there as an associate before growing sick of the work and leaving (the Silver Circle is made up of some of the most profitable firms in the country that are not part of the even more elite ‘Magic Circle’.) But the suspicion is that, for most, culture, status and—above all—exorbitant pay bind young people to these jobs as ideological representatives and spokespeople for capital. There is a stronger argument that lawyers doing public interest work should be classed as workers. But much of that stems from the de-professionalisation of legal aid lawyers and their increasing alienation, neither of which are keen adverts for recruitment into social welfare law. Telling other ‘proper’ lawyers that we do benefits work is inevitably met by a searching pause and then, ‘it must be so rewarding to help people.’

Migrant and working-class lawyers are more likely to have restricted options when moving from university into the labour market. These restrictions have only become more pronounced through the commodification of higher education, which loads students with debt and explicitly positions universities as factories for the labour market. The obvious danger is that the majority of lawyers working in the sector get drawn from backgrounds unrepresentative of their clients. It also means that working class lawyers are kept away from legal work that has a connection to campaigning or political activism. This undermines the possibility of ‘organic intellectuals’ emerging from the working class to actively participate in practical life as ‘constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader,”’ and helping to organise the working class for political action. For Gramsci, the organic intellectual retains a connection with the social class she has come from. University law faculties force the opposite, eroding that link, and drawing working class lawyers into the service of capital.

Access to justice

There is an awareness within the clinic, the university, and the sector more generally of the problems that this poses for ensuring that everyone can access their rights. But this concern is typically framed in liberal terms of equality, diversity, and inclusion. The clinic tries to address this problem by ‘encouraging applications from less represented backgrounds.’ Outside of term time, we offer some temporary paid positions over the summer holidays, and additional financial support is available to students from ‘widening participation’ backgrounds.

The ever-expanding regulation of everyday life has produced an ever-expanding army of lawyers. But for the majority with no legal education, the body of laws that govern day-to-day existence becomes more and more impenetrable. This builds in a disparity of power within the lawyer-client relationship, and one that tends towards a hierarchical or paternalistic relationship. The clinic, as an organisation within a university, reproduces this. It replicates the world of legal practice. Students are given exposure to real clients with real legal problems. Students tend to only observe, listen, and take notes in client appointments. They are physically present, but at a stage removed from what is happening in the room. Clients are there for help, but they are also there under observation. This might be the cost of receiving free advice at the clinic (or, more broadly, receiving advice within a legal services market that does not afford equal access to justice), but it draws another clear dividing line between, on the one hand, the client and, on the other, the (future) lawyer.

Union organisation

The clinic sits in a relatively autonomous position to the faculty, in a separate office in a different part of the city. Oversight is remote. This has benefits – there is little interference in what we get up to and much more freedom for paid staff to choose what work they want to do. There is no pressure to bill or take on more cases than we can sensibly manage. A small office means that colleagues know each other well and socialise outside of work. The boss works side by side with us, insulated from the rest of the university, and they are responsive to the things we ask for. This responsiveness is aided by the close-knit working environment and the social pressure that entails. The drawback of this relative isolation is the lack of involvement with labour organisation within the university as a whole.

Some of us are union members, though none of us are members of UCU. The office skews left and a healthy minority of us are socialists. During the last round of UCU strikes in universities, there was, initially, some success in encouraging colleagues to take industrial action. One of UCU’s demands was around casualisation in higher education, and following the strike the boss ensured that all members of staff were put on permanent contracts. But as the strikes wore on, the resolve quickly broke. The justification from colleagues for going back to work was both the detriment to students and (more forcefully) the detriment to clients. UCU’s tactic of pushing for all out for longer and longer periods of time came up against the responsibilities advisers had to their clients. There was a feeling that even if we went on strike indefinitely, the university would not even notice, but our clients would have to manage the consequences of casework getting suspended, homeless decisions going unchallenged, benefits going unpaid.

Some workers in higher education may be amused to hear the sector described as supportive, well remunerated, not over burdening. But this is our experience of our working conditions at the clinic, particularly in comparison with our colleagues working in legal aid. This might be because most UK universities have only recently begun developing their law clinics, and senior management are still uncertain about how low a bar they can set. But it might also reflect the fact that the clinic is part of a sector with a history of industrial activism and a relatively high level of trade union density.

Students are increasingly treated as consumers of higher education, while capital consumes the labour power that higher education produces. University law clinics help law faculties act more effectively as a conduit between these two demands. At the same time, the law clinic treats the symptoms of the political economy it helps to sustain. This isn’t meaningless work. Our clients secure outcomes that make a material difference to their lives: housing, care, money. And our students learn about the disciplinary bureaucracy of the state and the limited power of the law as a means of response. But at the end of the day, the clients will keep coming back and the students will move on.