NIU College of Law Health Advocacy Blog

NIU Law students participating in the Health Advocacy Clinic (HAC) typically spend one or two semesters at the clinic. One of HAC’s goals is to provide law students with practical legal experience during their time in law school. The high law student turnover means that the HAC Director must be creative to ensure that students have the opportunity to work on client cases as much as possible during their short time at the HAC. When students arrive at the beginning of the semester, client cases, usually involving the denial of Social Security disability benefits, are at various stages of development. Some cases are just beginning while others are weeks away from the long-awaited Social Security administrative law judge hearing. How is this high law student turn over and case development dilemma resolved? It is solved by assigning students to new, ongoing, or concluding client cases within days of arrival at the clinic and working to quickly prepare students to perform their assigned task

It was Friday morning and I was waiting for a client to come fill out her Power of Attorney (POA) for Health Care. I was really excited for this because I had not had the opportunity to do an initial client interview yet, and this would be my first time assisting a client with completing a POA. I was also grateful I was able to have the experience of doing one, since POA Day was Wednesday,and I am scheduled Fridays at the clinic. Going into the situation I was very nervous. I had never done a POA before and I reviewed the POA documents, but actually doing interviews is always different than preparing for them. I definitely have seen that play out a lot this semester. You can prepare all you want for client interactions, but often they go nothing like you planned. Going into this experience I expected the client to have a lot of questions. This document is for long- term planning, and the population we work with at the Health Advocacy Clinic often does not have a lot of long-term plans