UDC Law Clinical Ranking Enters the Top 5
The University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law (UDC Law) was the first in the nation to require comprehensive legal education when the school launched as Antioch School of Law in 1972. Today, the majority of American law schools offer – or require – clinical training.
UDC Law has continued to take great pride in its legal clinics, often ranking in the top 10 of the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings. Students, clients, partners and clinical faculty alike speak highly of the transformative nature of the school’s clinical work. Each year, clinicians around the country vote for the top programs, and they receive voting solicitations from dozens of schools. Thus, it’s important for a school like UDC Law to find creative ways to stand out among its competitors.
Complicating the creation of successful campaigns is an ongoing critique of the rankings process at U.S. News. In fact, going into the 2023-2024 rankings season, a number of top programs chose to sit out the USNWR rankings until their methodology received an overhaul.
While I have no impact on the curriculum, clients or case outcomes, I was able to successfully convince the administration that Communications should be responsible for telling the powerful, often life-changing stories that come out of the clinical program. It took time and often small victories, but the campaign went from a disjointed, reactive, last-minute approach to a regular, curated strategy aimed at keeping the program in the legal education spotlight throughout the year rather than only at voting time. That was a big step toward alleviating some of the concern clinicians held about “shilling for votes.”
In the time I managed the clinical rankings project, I brought the program’s storytelling into the digital age, and UDC Law’s clinical program moved from No. 13 to No. 5 by 2023, tying with Yale Law.
Some of the advances and assets I spearheaded are presented in this section.
Note: Rankings are time-shifted to the upcoming year. For example, assets that cover 2018-2019 inform the 2019-2020 U.S. News list.
2019-2020
In the first year I was in charge of the materials to promote the UDC Law clinic, the writer and I decided to take an incremental step toward a more modern format. We presented four options to the clinicians: a video diary, a brief postcard, an email and the newsletter you see on this page.
Despite strong pitches from myself and our writer for a digital campaign, the newsletter won. It may not seem like a monumental shift, but previous years had involved written letters protesting the unpopular approach taken by U.S. News & World Report when deciding how schools are ranked.
Internally, we successfully argued that, while there were certainly problems with the methodology, clinic rankings were vital to UDC Law’s ability to compete with the half dozen other law schools nearby and as a testament to our pioneering history.
The newsletter you see here was mailed to voting clinicians and emailed as a .pdf. Certainly, that was not our preferred method of distribution, but we recognized the complexity of getting everyone on board with a new approach to rankings campaigns. If my writer and I had had our way, we’d have pushed the technology significantly further into the current century, but this was when I learned the power of incremental change.
This small victory set up a bigger shift, as we moved to No. 8 in the rankings for 2019-2020.
2020-2021
From late 2018 until early 2019, UDC Law was in transition. The dean who had served for two decades retired, and the law school hired a former clinician to take her place.
Naturally, we were certain bringing in an expert in clinical legal education, one whose work had been transformative at other schools, would lead to a jump in rankings.
Moreover, the new dean was supportive of my recommendations to elevate our rankings materials, especially when she saw the upward momentum in the previous year. This time when I presented video stories as an option once again, she was on board.
The challenge was that the clinicians were not as excited about video stories or stories in any format throughout the year, so the new dean and I were stuck sourcing material at the last minute (again) rather than collecting stories from throughout the year – something she and I vowed to do differently going forward.
Again, small victories in a challenging environment feel much larger. Having a single video in our email newsletter felt like a seismic shift.
Unfortunately, the school fell from No. 8 to No. 13, but that’s to be expected in transitional years. We were determined to climb back into the top 10 for 2021-2022.
2021-2022
And then COVID hit. We had to create 2021-2022 rankings materials while in lockdown, and needless to say, it was a whole new ballgame.
The up side was that forward-thinking leadership meant many of the previously difficult-to-enact ideas were finally put into motion. We had a handful of written stories from throughout the year that we included, and I was able to source some video material from a few students and faculty members – albeit shot on their own in their COVID-safe spaces.
I did what I could without access to high-quality equipment (including providing the voiceovers for the video intros), and the new, fully multimedia version of the email newsletter was a home run with the students, faculty, staff – and voters.
UDC Law leapt back into the top 10, coming in at No. 6 for the 2021-2022 rankings.
2022-2023
2022 was another challenging year, as everyone was just beginning to return to in-person life – slowly.
But the success of the previous year’s newsletter made this one much easier to source than previous years. I was able to gain cooperation among several clinicians for regular updates, and we shared them on our website and social media throughout the year. We were finally top-of-mind for more than just the two-week to one-month voting period in October/November.
That certainly allowed for faster turnaround on the stories we needed to complete the email, but there was a new obstacle to overcome this time. Every clinic wanted representation, but every clinic didn’t want to provide students or clinicians to tell their stories.
Their objections were not entirely objectionable. The ranking system is notoriously obtuse, and clinicians understandably hate campaigning for their work when they should be on doing the work and preparing the students.
Once again, supportive leadership from our dean, clinic dean and director of development helped me overcome those obstacles and gather enough material for a great mix of new stories and recaps from earlier in the year.
And the production value was far better with a majority of people back on campus.
For the first time in its history, UDC Law finished in the top 5 clinical programs in the country, landing at No. 5 and tying with Yale!
It was a big story for the school and a big victory for moving communications solidly into the 21st century! From then on, gathering stories became (somewhat) easier than it had ever been, and we were able to keep the clinical program in the conversation all year long.
Even better, it gave us the opportunity to take a deep breath and have a little fun after two very taxing years. So we did so in the best way possible – with a cheesy, fun and community-building video shoot announcing the great news.
2023-2024
My time at UDC Law came to a close in February of 2023 but not before I worked on the USNWR rankings one last time – in the depths of a controversy over the long-loathed methodology.
The dean of the school and dean of the clinical program also left the law school before the most recent rankings were released. Paired with the controversy that erupted over USNWR methodology in late 2022 (around the time of campaigning), we were against the wall for sure going into this newsletter.
There was significant debate over whether we should participate or withhold like many of our fellow top-ten programs, and in the end, the interim dean chose to keep our program in the running. From a communications standpoint, I was able to see both sides of it, but I would have preferred we not participate. As a largely unranked school and one of only six HBCU law schools, a great deal of our recruiting hinged on the niche we’d carved out as a clinical leader, especially for underrepresented student populations. On the other hand, being largely unranked means UDC Law doesn’t have the power of a Harvard, Georgetown or other school that publicly declared abstention from the 2023-2024 campaign. My position was that we had just recently overcome a bar passage crisis and were teetering on another one, which could make our staying in the rankings look opportunistic rather than celebratory. We briefly considered partnering with the other HBCUs to collectively boycott, but the decision ultimately came down to concerns over the impact on recruiting.
Thus, we stayed in.
And came in tied at 13th.
Oof. Schools that had elected to stay out of the rankings came in higher than UDC Law, but other schools that usually rank highly also fell significantly.
There were any number of reasons for the drop – deans leaving, an overall less intensive year of clinic work, controversy fatigue, which stories we were able to tell, USNWR’s decision to keep schools who had chosen not to participate, etc.
What I can’t blame, though, is our newsletter. No, I’m not stroking my own ego here. In fact, it was largely due to the partnership of the outgoing clinic dean and the supervising attorney that this newsletter turned out to be one of the best pieces I’d created at UDC Law.
We still encountered sourcing issues, often related to confidentiality concerns from some of our more cautious clinicians, but we created a piece that highlighted each clinic equitably and included a good mix of video and written stories.
Had I been there when the new numbers came out, I’d have advised leadership to refrain from dwelling on the drop, avoid making excuses or being defensive and focus instead on reminding our target audiences that UDC Law is the only public law school in the District of Columbia and one of only six HBCU law schools whose mission is to provide access to students who would not otherwise be able to attend law school and to conduct life-changing work through our clinics.
Seeing Both Sides
In an email exchange with the clinic dean and supervising attorney, I offered my “both sides” perspective. I was hoping to have an opportunity to share my thoughts with the dean as well, but they had that conversation and made the call in a faculty meeting.
Boycotting: This could work for us because we were in the top 5 last year and because we put so much time and effort into the Clinical Program's prestige. If we'd been out of the top 20 – even top 10 – last year, I'd say we would just look opportunistic ("We didn't rank high enough so let's jump on the bandwagon with the big boys"). However, we are a top-5 program, and we made a huge public deal out of it so there is an ethos-based appeal to us boycotting. On the flip side, it would be easy for someone to see it as us taking the easy way out just to avoid the possibility of falling from our highest rank ever.
Participating: The dark side: opportunism. Less competition means a better chance of a high rank, and as a – yes, I know no one likes to hear this, but it's true – lower-tier school with bar passage issues, we have to ask ourselves if we want to create a message (albeit implicit) of us jumping on the chance to augment our bragging rights because our competition is gone. So if we come in #1 or #2, it's not a stretch for target audiences to say, "Well, yeah, they're the only top 5 school still in this," and not take the ranking as seriously. Conversely, staying in shows we're confident in our program and not throwing a tantrum (I don't think the other schools are, but I have been seeing that argument).
The communications role – my role – in helping UDC Law maintain its clinical ranking is rather small. It’s the clinicians and students, clients and partners whose lives are changed by being part of a leading program like that at UDC Law.
For my own professional journey, the wins and losses presented in this section had less to do with where the program landed each year and more to do with learning the fine art of working within official and unofficial constraints of a particular atmosphere.
This multi-year project taught me more than I could recount about patience, empathy, strategy, creativity and overall working with people whose perspectives on a project do not come from communications or media but have strong opinions nonetheless.
Further complicating the project was an ever-shifting organizational structure that required me to sell my ideas to a whole new supervisor and/or leadership team every year. A plan can be changed to fit new circumstances, but starting from nothing every year was not optimal. I’ve always appreciated consistency and advance planning even before this project, but this journey further cemented my philosophy that it’s better to be proactive and on offense than to be reactive and on defense.