Following the success of its Children’s Justice Clinic in Lancaster County, the University of Nebraska College of Law is expanding its reach with a new fellowship program aimed at lawyers in rural Nebraska.

The Children’s Justice Attorney Education Fellowship Program was created in 2021 after an attorney services survey found that 40% of juvenile court judges said it was difficult to find quality attorneys in child welfare cases, particularly in rural communities.

“What the judges were saying in the survey was, ‘It’s not that the attorneys practicing in front of us aren’t high quality, it’s we don’t have enough,’” Nebraska Law Professor Michelle Paxton said. “We need more attorneys to do this work and we need to recruit attorneys. Our goal is to help reduce that gap for our rural communities by increasing the number of attorneys that are available to serve in these cases.”

Paxton has served as director of the Children’s Justice Clinic since its formation in 2017. After she read the results of the survey, she began thinking of ways to help these underserved communities.

“We started the Children’s Justice Clinic in 2017 to provide a holistic approach to educating law students on how to represent children as guardians ad litem and we were exploring ways to expand that approach to benefit other attorneys interested in working at juvenile court,” she said. “When we saw that study, we realized that the area that we wanted to provide support to were our rural attorneys.”

Paxton said that the fellowship program has two goals: to graduate fellows with the knowledge and skills necessary to be advocates in juvenile court, and to increase interest and commitment from attorneys in rural Nebraska to work at juvenile court.

“We have 12 Nebraska counties that have no lawyers at all,” Paxton said.

The fellowship will include training based on the needs of the fellows, Paxton said. Training will also cover areas that are not generally taught in law school.

“(Training) will include an in-depth understanding of state and federal laws that apply to child welfare and youth justice, as well as an enhanced understanding of many of the topic areas that you traditionally do not learn in law school,” Paxton said. “That includes understanding trauma, domestic violence, substance use, psychotropic drugs and poverty. Those types of topic areas, many attorneys do not have a preexisting knowledge of and they need to have a working understanding of those areas when working in juvenile law.”

The Children’s Justice Attorney Education Fellowship Program is open to lawyers who practice in rural Nebraska. Lawyers from Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy counties are ineligible for the fellowship.

Applications for the fellowship will be accepted through noon on March 15, and selections will be announced no later than April 15. The first session will take place May 17-18 at a location that will be determined by where the selected fellows will be coming from, followed by additional sessions later in the year.

The fellowship will require a time commitment of about eight hours per month. Fellows will be compensated for their time and all fellowship sessions are eligible for continuing legal education credit.

For more information about the fellowship program, visit law.unl.edu/aboutCJAE. To apply for the fellowship, visit law.unl.edu/node/3758.