About Clinic Talk Forum

1. Basic Concept for Clinic Talk Forum

The Clinic Talk Website forum was conceptualized as a forum to create opportunities for sharing information as well as promoting Clinical Legal Education (CLE) throughout the Southeast Asian countries and worldwide. The Clinic Talk Forum aims at inviting representatives from both legal communities and civil society sectors that express interest in the CLE methodology who are wanting to establish CLE programs, including Southeast Asian and international representatives that already run such programs.

The Clinic Talk Forum will introduce its members to utilize an interactive and exploratory model of CLE methodology as a way to:

• Educate legal studies and other students, via practical methods, as a means for them to become better trained, socially aware professionals
• Educate lawyers to become more socially aware and provide quality legal representation to socially marginalized and vulnerable individuals, groups and communities
• Promote general legal awareness
• Provide accessibility of law and justice
• Develop a long-term pro-bono culture in societies where access to lawyer’s are scarce

Beyond theoretical discussions about the CLE methodology, the Clinic Talk Forum aims to foster an environment in which all the members can exchange ideas and find solutions to many present and future challenges with the aim of exploring the possibilities to create a network of sustainable CLE programs throughout the diverse and unique Southeast Asian legal landscape.

2. The Clinic Talk Forum Objectives

• To survey and exchange information on the existing CLE initiatives in Southeast Asia and internationally.
• To provide an opportunity to exchange ideas, experiences and best practices in the field of CLE development.
• To identify and discuss most important issues to consider when establishing and operating university-based CLE programs.
• To explore existing opportunities and the need for effective CLE program cooperation and capacity-building in Southeast Asia.
• To identify and discuss key challenges of running clinical programs and develop strategies that address those challenges at domestic, regional, and international levels.

3. The Clinic Talk mission is to:

• Provide a progressive method of education which focuses on student’s learning and improving skills that they will utilize as attorneys and in other professions. These skills include those abilities needed to effectively represent clients through the use of ethical value based actions.
• Apply experiential learning methods with students to have them learn better and apply what they learned to actual realistic situations in a way that traditional teaching, through a lecture based system, can never do.
• To provide “back up” legal services for indigent and marginalized community members who may not have an alternative access to the legal system.
• To develop within students the idea of public interest service, with a contemporaneous goal of formulating and increasing an ethically aware, proactive legal community.
• Empower communities, whereby the students apply their legal knowledge, critical thinking and analytical legal skills to other members of the community, specifically including marginalized persons, so these members will more understand the meaning of rule of law, their rights, duties, and privileges, and how to access and protect these rights and privileges within society.
• Improve the delivery of legal aid and general legal awareness for the poor and vulnerable groups in society.
• Holding trainings and workshops to improve the capacity of legal education, sustainability, advocacy, social justice and proactive skills of new lawyers and professors in the Southeast Asia Region.
• Help and provide funding and technical assistance to the university that wants to create a Legal Clinic which is where the students can gain experiential working practice to improve their legal capacity.