What our students do

King’s Legal Clinic has two central aims; to provide our students with the opportunity to work on live cases thereby developing their skills and understanding of law in context; and to provide opportunities for students to serve their community promoting social and economic justice.

King’s Legal Clinic has four main strands of activity:

Legal Advice Clinic providing free legal advice to members of the community;

Collaborative community projects;

Research and legal activism; and

Supporting our Streetlaw society. 

The Legal Advice Clinic

The Legal Advice Clinic is a free first tier advice service based in The Dickson Poon School of Law on the Strand Campus. Students working under the supervision of qualified lawyers will interview clients, analyse their problem, research the issues and send them a letter of advice normally within two weeks of their appointment. The purpose of the advice letter is to provide the client with an understanding of the legal issues in their case, details on any relevant processes and practical advice on the available options. Where the Clinic is unable to provide advice, we aim to signpost clients to organisations which may be able to assist.

The Clinic offers legal advice in a range of specialist areas, working with leading law firms to run clinics focused on:

Immigration & Asylum (with Duncan Lewis Solicitors)

Employment (with PwC and other employment law specialists)

Housing 

Intellectual Property (with Briffa)

Family (with Stowe Family Law and Wilsons Solicitors LLP)

Human Rights and Environment

We also run research projects and work in collaboration with other organisations to provide services to the community including:

Providing tribunal representation, via The Zacchaeus 2000 Trust ('Z2K'), to people across London appealing decisions about their disability benefit.

The Protea Clinic providing immigration advice to vulnerable migrant women and is a collaboration between King’s Legal Clinic, Hibiscus Initiatives and Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre.

The Client Appointment 

Client appointments are conducted face to face in the Clinic, on-line or over the telephone.  

On the day of the appointment, our students will meet and greet the client, accompany them to the interview room, and then conduct the interview. The students will use the interview to find out more about the facts relating to the client's issue; no legal advice is given during the interview.

Normally, the Supervising Solicitor will not take part in the interview but will be available to help with any queries and may sit in on the appointment.

Over the next two weeks, the students will analyse the client’s problem, identify and research the key issues, and draft a letter of advice. The letter of advice will then normally be sent to the client two weeks after the date of their initial appointment. 

What our Students Gain

There are so many reasons why working in the Clinic is beneficial for students. The most important being it shows students that legal problems do not exist in a vacuum. Legal issues do not come neatly labelled as a contract problem or a family law issue, for example. Sometimes the client’s problem is not actually legal but calls for intervention and support from other agencies. Other times, the client can struggle to explain what their problem is, and it becomes the student's job to help the client articulate their questions.

As a result, students will have to develop a whole range of skills which are different to those learnt on the traditional academic law programme:

• Problem solving
• Active listening
• Legal research and accurate note taking
• Demonstrating empathy whilst at the same time maintaining professionalism.

We also know that employers value the experience students get from working on real life problems. Students develop what are known as 'soft skills' which employers are often looking for, exposing students to the difference between knowing the law and practicing the law. Many of the cases students will encounter involve people at the sharp end of political and legal decisions and involvement in the Clinic forces students to think about how laws are made, who makes the laws and what can be done where well intentioned policy results in bad law.