Name of Organization: Korean Legal Clinic
Website of Organization: https://www.kcla.ca/
Organization’s Mandate: The Korean Legal Clinic (“KLC”) was founded by Korean-Canadian lawyers in Toronto. The KLC aims to improve access to justice for Korean-Canadians by providing culturally and linguistically appropriate legal services, education, and resources with our partner organizations.
Project Name: Research Project
Project Type: Public Legal Education (presentations, workshops, podcasts, brochures, blogs, etc.) & Research (memoranda used for internal purposes only) & Client services (court forms, shadowing, mock hearings, intake, legal clinic, etc.)
Project Delivery: Hybrid. The students’ activities may include in-person interactions. When students are matched with the organization in September, students and the organization will discuss expectations regarding whether work will be completed virtually, in person, or both.
Description of Project: The Korean Legal Clinic (the “Clinic”) seeks to address the specific legal needs of members of Toronto’s growing Korean community. The Clinic strives to improve access to justice by tackling the cultural, linguistic, and economic barriers. The Clinic provides referral services, organizes public legal education (“PLE”) seminars, and undertakes special projects to address specific issues.
Role of Student Volunteers: Students volunteering with the Clinic will support the clinic’s day-to-day operations and participateby conducting legal research and preparing PLE materials. The students’ work will not be more than 10% administrative. For the PLE project, students will help identify topics that is of interest to the low-income Korean community, communicate with guest lawyer speakers, conduct research on the topics that the guest speakers would like to cover, and synthesize research findings into a PowerPoint presentation.
Legal Research and PLE Materials: Students will research specific legal topics and prepare PLE presentation materials for lawyers who will deliver the information at seminars at the Clinic. The PLE presentations may be in-person or virtual. In the past, the clinic ran both in- person and virtual sessions. The students will not be speakers at the presentation; they will support the lawyer presenters, by conducting research, preparing presentation materials, and collaborating with the lawyer presenters before each session. Topics may include small claims, income tax law, bankruptcy, labour and employment, family law, immigration law and housing law. Students may also provide translation support.
Lawyer(s) will be available to supervise the students.
In the past, the clinic ran a PLE series where each session had two components: (1) guest speaker(s) would deliver a PowerPoint presentation; and (2) attendees could attend a one-on-one consultation with a lawyer to receive summary advice. Future PLEs will likely have a similar structure. Previous topics we covered include family, immigration, employment, business, tax, and housing law.
As KLC is moving towards providing more services in person, the clinic expects at least one student to be available to attend in person if guest speakers choose to have an in-person session. In the past, they have accommodated a student’s availability. We will do the same for this year’s students.
Role of Supervising Lawyer(s): The lawyer supervisor will review students’ client intake notes and specify the legal issues to be researched. The lawyer supervisor will also review and approve the materials prepared by students for PLE presentations and before it is used by the organization.
Type of Law: Immigration & Refugee, Family, Housing (landlord & tenant), Employment
Main Project Deliverable: Creating produced content (e.g. research memos, brochures, podcasts, etc.)
Number of Student Placements: 1-2 students
Hours per week the student volunteer(s) will be expected to work: 3-5 hours/week
Regular shifts or a flexible schedule: Flexible since work can be completed remotely (except for PLEs and client intakes, should either be necessary).
Is there a workspace provided for the student at the Organization: Most work is to be done remotely. PLEs would take place at partner organizations and client intake would take place at the clinic site as well as virtually (TBD).
*Depends on whether students will be presenting at the seminars and whether students will be doing client intake after seminars (assuming seminars are in person)
Devices and technologies the students will be required to have: Computer, internet access, Zoom, telephone.
Is there an expectation for the student(s) to be bilingual: Fluency in Korean is strongly preferred, however students who do not speak Korean will be considered as well.
Law School Pre-Requisites: None.
Other Requirements or Expectations: Familiarity with the Korean community’s culture is an asset.