As I said in this post, Equal Justice Works CEO David Stern will be blogging from China. Here is his first post.

I arrived in Beijing after a 14-hour flight from Washington, DC. Surprisingly, our flight flew over the North Pole instead of the Pacific Ocean.

I am joined here by other U.S. experts on fellowship programs – Susan Butler Plum, director of the Skadden Fellowship Program, and Ted Wang, a former Skadden Fellow. Our host is Ira Belkin of the Ford Foundation. Ira, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted white collar crime in New York and Rhode Island, is the local Ford Foundation Program Officer in China. Ira is fluent in Mandarin.

The lead organization that is facilitating the launch of a public interest fellowship program in China is the Public Interest Law Institute (PILI). PILI is an organization that has launched public interest legal programs, largely in Eastern Europe, but is now looking to launch a program here in China. Ed Rekosh, the executive director of PILI, and Rob Precht, the director of PILI’s Chinese program, are also here. Coincidentally, Rob is the former public interest advisor at Michigan, and so he was very familiar with Equal Justice Works.

Today we met with about 20 Chinese lawyers including clinical legal educators, public interest lawyers working for nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and the government-run legal aid program. The purpose of the meeting was to hear from us about various fellowship models so that the Chinese could see if any of those approaches might work in China.

There is a new but growing interest among students who want to pursue public interest law. Clinical legal education is a relatively new phenomenon, but it seems to be generating greater interest in legal aid. Roughly 5,000 students have now experienced clinical programs, and they are expressing a desire to go into public interest work after graduation. However, there are very few opportunities.

Thanks to a great PowerPoint presentation created by Equal Justice Works’ Sarah Mahoney, I was able to describe several different models, including our fellowship program, our AmeriCorps model, our disaster relief model and a program we ran years ago to place students in rural legal services programs for the summer.

The leader of our day-long session was one of the leading clinical legal professors, Chen Jianmin. She was a very effective and persuasive leader of the group. The Chinese clinical professors and public interest lawyers asked lots of questions, particularly around the fellow selection process. A well-designed process is necessary to ensure that the host organization and the fellow are a good match. They wondered what to do if the match turned out not to be a good one.  In China (unlike the U.S.), there are no summer internships, and because of this there is not the same opportunity to test a student’s skills within a host organization.

There was also a split of opinion about the selection process. How much of a role will the host organization play in selecting the fellow? Is it better to have the clinical professors make those decisions given that they have seen the students in action?

Attendees were also very concerned about the fundraising requirements for sustaining these positions beyond the fellowship. But there were others who felt confident they could raise some funds. Ira Belkin of the Ford Foundation made clear to everyone that Ford was not planning to provide sole support for this program – he wants an active partnership where the host organizations bring something to the table.

Most striking, however, was the enthusiasm among many regarding the concept of launching the careers of the next generation of public interest lawyers. While the pressure is enormous for law graduates to take higher paying jobs, there is a growing appetite among students who want to help those who are poor or who face injustice.

There was a lot of interest and discussion about training. How do we teach young lawyers skills so they can be successful? What are important skills to be taught – community education, advocacy, media, and negotiations.

We ended the day without a tremendous amount of consensus on these issues. But the conversation is supposed to continue tomorrow with the hopes of making some decisions.