Holistic Legal Representation: Building an Empirical Base for Effective Legal Defense

Background and Purpose: The Youth Advocacy Clinic (YAC) at the Duquesne University School of Law provides legal defense to young people in schools and juvenile court. YAC trains law, social work, and psychology students to provide holistic legal representation. The model employed by YAC focuses on meeting the needs young people through representation by inter-professional teams. YAC is driven to keep young people in schools with the supports they need and to limit their contact with the juvenile system.

In 2019, the YAC team received an Interdisciplinary Research Leaders grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a pilot research project examining the effectiveness of the holistic model. Data collection was to begin in March 2020 just as COVID-19 shut down schools and courts. Several months later, the murder of George Floyd increased calls for police reform. The ongoing pandemic meant that many students did not return to in-person school or only attended in-person for a few days a week, leading to substantial concern for their well-being.

Methods: This presentation describes how this community-driven research project responded to the impact of COVID and community concerns about the murder of George Floyd and the educational reality faced by many of YAC’s clients and other students. It describes the decisions made by the team and how we responded to community concerns and needs while adjusting our model to continue to provide holistic legal representation and pursue rigorous research.

Results: Shortly after the pandemic shut down courts and schools, we determined that the original research design was not feasible in the short-term and that our model needed to be modified. As we modified it and waited for courts and schools to resume, we pursued other forms of data, including building a dataset using administrative data and administering a survey to public defenders regarding holistic representation.

As this work was ongoing, we responded to concerns over the murder of George Floyd by becoming involved in efforts to reform policing. In particular, we partnered with other community groups to focus on school police. Further, we shifted efforts to developing a tutoring program, delivering PPE and school supplies to learning hubs, and administering a survey to assess parent perceptions of their children’s education experience during COVID. We are in the process of developing a CBPR project with young people that will be conducted over the summer.

Conclusions and Implications: Despite the pandemic delaying our project, the community-driven focus allowed us to both modify our approach and pursue other forms of data while maintaining rigor. We were also able to pivot and respond to the concerns of our community partners and the broader community. These efforts not only strengthened YAC and its relationship in the community but are allowing us to develop knowledge and be involved in policy and practice decisions. This is only possible because of the relationships developed as part of our community-driven approach and the willingness to adapt and address the concerns of the community.