"AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..."

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

STEPHANIE ENYART: I think we're going to go ahead and get started now. Hopefully you all have handouts. We put four stacks on the comers and we also have electronic versions if you would like us to send you an electronic version. You can either start a sheet or just bring us your contact information at the end of the presentation. So I'll go ahead and start off. My name is Stephanie Enyart and this panel is very, very exciting for us. The National Association of Law Students with Disabilities is really happy to share the floor at a conference like this. It's something that we hope we will do in the future as well. To start things off, I think that we're just going to briefly introduce ourselves. Unfortunately, one of our panelists had a personal emergency which made her unavailable to come today, so we're going to be filling in as best we can with what she would have shared. If we're looking at our notes a little more than usual, that may be why. I'm going to go ahead and start with myself. My name is Stephanie Enyart. I have a visual disability. It's a form of macular degeneration that starts very early; for me, when I was fifteen. So I have transitioned from being a visual learner to being more of a blend of an auditory and visual learner. I use an accessible laptop that magnifies and reads everything aloud to me, from books to the Internet. I recently graduated from UCLA School of Law and I was part of the steering committee that launched the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities; I served as the first president of the organization and now I'm working on starting a lawyers with disabilities organization.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: My name is Rebecca Williford and I'm a third year at the University of North Carolina. I am also the current president of the National Association of Law Students with Disabilities, which we fondly call NALSWD for short. So from here on out we're going to be using that acronym. I have a chronic neurological and cardiovascular disorder called dysautonomia that started when I was fourteen. It was 104 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 hidden for four years and then I had to start using a wheelchair when I was eighteen. The process of becoming a person with a disability is an interesting one, but it's one that absolutely shook me to my core and set me on a path for a career as a disability rights lawyer that I would not be on otherwise. Before this, I was a competitive year-round swimmer, but I'm passionate about the path I'm on now and look forward to sharing more later. Thanks once again to Dean Jaffe for letting us be here today. Stephanie and I were actually both on the steering committee that started NALSWD and it started right here at the Washington College of Law when we had our first meeting.

TREVOR FINNEMAN: Hello all. I hope you guys enjoyed lunch. That cake looked pretty good. I'm Trevor Finneman. I'm a second year at UCLA School of Law. I'm currently NALSWD Chair of the Advocacy Committee. I have a severe bilateral hearing loss that began at age three.

STEPHANIE ENYART: So I know we mentioned that this is where NALSWD officially got its launch, but the American Bar Association Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities really was the reason why we even launched to begin with. They saw a need for students to be able to connect and have a student space similar to many of the other identity organizations for under-represented, or traditionally under- represented, communities within the legal profession. They raised money, they put together a conference to launch the organization, and they handed us the reins in moment one. I mean, literally, at the launch meeting, they got us together and said, "go forward, figure it out." So we had some seed money and we took it. We took the seed money to the initial meeting, which had about thirty students from across the country, to form a steering committee. This led to us planning and holding our first national conference in San Francisco in the fall of 2007. We adopted constitutional documents, a mission statement, and elected officers. We then launched several advocacy campaigns because we saw a need to have more students with disabilities get through the gates in terms of the LSAT since so many of us had faced similar barriers. Other advocacy projects grew out of the conversations we had about accommodations, how well some schools were doing in accommodating students with disabilities and that there seemed to be some big differences in what was happening across the board. One of the projects we've taken on is crafting a Best Practices for Accommodating Law Students with Disabilities guide. That's going to be available soon on our website. What this guide is hopefully going to do is show the high-water mark for schools to look to in creating systems that 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..."

work really well for students. Hopefully this will help schools that maybe haven't figured out how to strategically run certain programs - or if you're tired of trying to create the wheel - this can be a spot that people can turn to. It's a place where a dialogue between pre-law students, as they're just getting ready to start school, law students, and administrators can take place about different ways to accommodate and support students. So we will have much more information within our guide, but much of our comments today will kind of flow from the fact that we've been working on this guide. We also held a national conference in DC last August, our second one. At that conference, we partnered with the Impact Career Fair for Law Students and Lawyers with Disabilities, and we plan to do the same again this August. Where Impact is on Friday, our conference will be on Saturday and Sunday. We did that so students that wanted to take advantage of the interviews would be able to, and then they could work with us and come and connect with many of the mentors, speakers, and the community that we offer. So, in terms of NALSWD, we have many, many projects, many ideas, and we're always looking for new energy. This is why we're especially happy to be here today because oftentimes it can be an administrator that can say to a student, "hey, maybe this is the way you can make your law school experience a little bit more livable. Get connected with this organization." So that's a bit of a nutshell in terms of what our organization does and where it started. I also just wanted to mention that there is a link on your handout as well. Many of the students that are already law students and have disabilities had trouble with the LSAT. One of the things that we're trying to work on is to get more information out there for pre-law students to understand what accommodations are available and how they need to document their disabilities in order to get those accommodations. There is a survey online, which is where the link comes in handy, and we're looking for help from people that have already taken the test, either with all their accommodations or with some accommodations. Ultimately, this is a partnership through the Burton Blatt Institute, which is at Syracuse and also in DC. I think Eve Hill is somewhere here with Burton Blatt and the Association of Disability Rights Counsel ("ADRC"). Those two have partnered up with some of the student advocacy that NALSWD has pushed forward, and they're working toward making law school a bit more accessible for students that are applying with disabilities. So, I'll go ahead and turn it over to Rebecca.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: We wanted to first lay a quick foundation about what it means to be a youngish person with a disability in the twenty- 106 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 first century, and in particular, a law student. From the morning and from lunch, we all know that in terms of disability, we are not in Kansas anymore. We are banking online. All kinds of opportunities for access are everywhere and so we're to claim disability as diversity. Hopefully that's a message that is out in the schools and, if it's not there, let's do a better job of getting it there, getting it to law firms, and just across the board. We're going to talk about this later, but first and foremost, disability is diversity. There are the absolutely wonderful, Yoshiko Dart and Justin Dart, and the whole self-empowerment movement. There is a beautiful movement of young people with disabilities. There is disability culture and there is disability pride. It's music and it's art. Every field you can imagine: crip culture, crip-hop music. It's everywhere and a lot of us are coming from this background. We are, I guess, the ADA generation in that we have gone through most of our schooling with the ADA in place, and even though the Act entitled us to accommodations and services in school, just having the ADA in place shifted the mindset of the country. So this is a group of students that knows that they are entitled to their accommodations in school and they know when they are not getting them. They know how to step up and advocate. This ADA generation is of the mindset that accommodations are not charity. They are the law and we all know this, but it's about moving past that model. It's moving past the model of disability as something that should be pitied or something that needs to be cured. Disability is just a part of the tapestry of who we are. But at the same time, all of us here today must recognize that when it comes to law students with disabilities, we talk about them as if they are sort of one clump of humans that always agree on everything. Just like any other community, there is absolutely diversity within our own community and when we talk about it, we are talking about all kinds of disabilities. NALSWD includes students with learning disabilities, physical and mental disabilities, and psychological disabilities. We want to connect with every student out there, especially those with hidden disabilities that feel like they cannot be out in their law schools, because it's so important for there to be a place for community to connect with others and to connect with mentors and folks that have been there in the past. Law students are at different points in recognizing the accommodations that they need and sometimes need a little nudge from perhaps a peer like Trevor or someone else in the organization that can say, "hey, I am severely Hard-of-Hearing and this is how I made trial team work for me. Maybe this can work for you. Maybe you should tweak it a little bit." So that's what we mean when we say that connection is necessary. Also, we've made a very concerted effort to make this an organization consisting 'of law students with disabilities, not simply 'for' them. It's student-run 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." and we're just absolutely committed to providing a community, because if it doesn't exist at the national level, populations are so transient within law schools that it's hard to keep up student leadership from year to year. So that's it for the background. Now Stephanie is going to talk a little bit about your role and what you can do in terms of building a welcoming environment for law students with disabilities.

STEPHANIE ENYART: So in terms of your role, I thought I'd start at a place of kind of unpacking what is challenging for someone with a disability in terms of law school. What makes the experience a challenging one, or especially challenging, in some circumstances? A lot of it could have to do with isolation. It was certainly something that I experienced at my school. Even though there were about eighty students with disabilities within my law school, I was the only person that was blind. And for many years, many of the professors and the faculty members had never had a blind student. In that amount of time, a lot of the technology changed. So as I entered, even though there might have been people that came before me and there was a potential disability community out there, I was definitely isolated. I was the only blind person in the building and there was only one other blind person on the entire UCLA campus. So in terms of isolation, there weren't a lot of people around that could show me, for instance, "this is how I figured out how to do X, Y, or Z. This is how I use the Bluebook because it's in paper form and you probably can't read the paper." In terms of isolation, it really played a big role in why I got involved in NALSWD. I knew that I needed to do something to change my own experience, and, to a certain extent, there was a limitation within my own school. Yet if I worked hard to create a community at my particular school, any given admissions cycle could wipe it out completely, so one of the things that I want to convey is that NALSWD exists on a national level, because it needs to be on a national level for now. We don't have critical mass enough to have large, healthy chapters at every school, like many of the identity organizations that are out there. For now, we have a national network and that national network won't ever go away if we continue to put people in touch with it. So in terms of your role, I'm hoping that you can take away from this that you can confront isolation issues among students by connecting them with the organization, which will connect them with peers that are similarly situated at other schools, mentors, and lawyers with disabilities. They will be able to explain and empower students to do the things that they need to do to be successful lawyers. In terms of other things, I just wanted to touch on challenges that can also come from 'the law school way.' When you start law school, it seems like there is a prescribed way to do everything. You know, you have to do 108 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1

IRAC [issue, rule, analysis, conclusion]. That's the way you do your final examinations. There's a right way to Bluebook everything. There's even a right way to brief a case. Something is prescribed everywhere we look. There are hornbooks to read. It seems like law school is a very defined path and, for people with disabilities, it can definitely be a challenge to look at this very prescribed path with your own particular disability and figure out how you need to tweak things. So in terms of the 'law school method,' I encourage you to connect your students with NALSWD because there are plenty of students who can help. That's another reason why we have started to create a Tips Guide which is offering peer-to-peer information like, "this is how I take care of X, Y, and Z issue." So the reason we exist is to kind of break down, on a student level, what students are facing in the classroom today and in the student experience today. Another really huge benefit to our organization, and something that I think is helpful to everyone, is that NALSWD helps fill the gap, or the misconception, that there really aren't a lot of lawyers with disabilities out there. If you look, there can be more, and more, and more, and more. I feel like mentorship has played such a big role in many of the leaders' lives within our organization that NALSWD wouldn't have happened otherwise. The national network of law schools that we have gives a list of every ABA accredited law school, and if you are not receiving any e-mails from us, we definitely want to connect with you and make sure that we have the proper address. But we have networks of lawyers, mentors, and students that are interested in connecting and I feel like it's the only way that we're going to be able to increase our numbers in every part of the field. I know that Commissioner Griffin and Andy Imparato have definitely changed my experience. There was nothing like being able to talk to fellow lawyers with disabilities when I was going through the recruitment and fellowship process and I talked to them about the person that I would be interviewing with, that they interviewed with. There's nothing like that, and essentially, that's something that this organization can offer and that you can connect your students to.

TREVOR FINNEMAN: I'll expand a bit on what Stephanie said about how deans and law school administrators can make law school a more welcoming environment for law students with disabilities. One of the most basic things that I think is often overlooked is that as a law school administrator, I think that a student should be able to expect to be welcomed into your office in a friendly and warm manner. I think that's one thing that's often overlooked. I know that sometimes, that law student is the tenth person that you've seen that day, and it's 5 p.m. and you want to go home. Speaking from my own personal experience, you should still 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." welcome that person into your office in a warm and friendly manner. I will also speak about two other ways that you can make law school more welcoming for law students. The first is to be a resource for these law students with disabilities. The second is to be an advocate for them. Stephanie talked a bit about isolation and how so few law students with disabilities are on each campus and she's right. Often, you are the only person with your specific disability on campus. You might even be the only person with a disability in your law school. There is a sense of isolation among law students with disabilities. So what can you do about that? You can be a resource by connecting them to the larger community, to the larger disability community. You can provide that outlet for them to reach us. You can also hook them up with recent graduates or current students who have a similar disability. There is nothing more empowering than knowing that someone with your disability or a similar disability has succeeded in law school, or that someone with a similar disability has succeeded as a lawyer. If you connect them, they can get the ins and outs of getting through law school and through lawyering with that disability. Another word of caution though, about connecting students both to us and to their peers with similar disabilities, is that of confidentiality. As Rebecca said, students are at different points in accepting their identity as a person with a disability. They are also at different points in time in seeking out the disability community. I suggest that you reach out, as law school administrators, to some of these students and inquire whether or not they want to be put in contact with someone who has a similar disability or with a larger disability community. We've also mentioned NALSWD's Best Practices Guide. That's at the high-water mark for accommodations. We're also working on a second guide geared more toward law students themselves. This guide provides disability-specific strategies for handling what Stephanie referred to as 'the law school way.' For example, I found the Socratic method in law school classes to be very challenging compared to the lectures given in most undergraduate classes. In undergrad, you have one professor who does most of the speaking in a lecture format. I could sit in the front row and I could get most of what he or she said. With the Socratic method, you're trying to follow the discussion between the professor and a group of students scattered throughout the classroom. It's much more difficult. But if you were to put me in contact with a person with a hearing loss like mine, I would be able to provide them tips to help them out. I think that this would be an invaluable tool for law students with disabilities. Really quickly, I want to touch on your role as an advocate on behalf of law students with disabilities. I mentioned before, if they come into your office, you can advocate on behalf of them. If they have a housing issue, 110 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 for example, if a Hard-of-Hearing student needs some kind of flashing strobe light in their dorm room, you can at least respond to a complaint on their behalf or you can get in touch with the housing department to try to work out an issue. Same thing with accommodations. Finally, I want to highlight, and again going back to 'the law school way,' that the dean can point out that 'the law school way' is not the way that it has to be. For example, if a person with a chronic illness needs to take four years, so be it. Let them know that it's okay to be different. That it's okay to do things in a way that suits them.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: Now we want to talk a little bit about just encouraging a strong start to law school because we all know law school is this rat race in many regards. And if you don't get off on the right foot, so much is just going to fall out of place. It's such a time-pressured and time- sensitive experience. First off, I just wanted to mention that many students, as I'm sure many of you know, have faced major admissions hurdles. So while hopefully these students are contacting you well in advance of their first day of orientation, know that many have faced significant hurdles. I know if one particular NALSWD member were here, she'd talk about a mix-up in her paperwork for accommodations that delayed, for quite some time, the release of her scores, which threw a wrench into her whole plan for the admission cycle. Personally, I was unable to get the accommodations that I needed and had a very negative experience with the LSAT. In the end, I had to attach an addendum explaining why my score didn't reflect me. That's also why we're doing all this work with the ADRC and Burton Blatt.

STEPHANIE ENYART: My LSAT reader fell asleep during the examination and I have had a really hard time using readers that are not my own. For me, using readers is far inferior to using software that can magnify and read to me at the same time. So the backdrop upon which many students may be coming through the door is a tender issue. It can shake your confidence and it can surely make you wary of some of the accommodations battles that you may be facing ahead, if not in school, then maybe for upcoming bar exam or for other things, which we will talk about a little bit more as well.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: I wasn't allowed to drink water or sit on a cushion during the LSAT. And in addition, many students are relocating for law school and this is an issue of particular concern, especially for people with physical disabilities that all of a sudden have to figure out housing and transportation in a new place. Being able to connect students with local 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS. .. " organizations like paratransit and independent living centers, or with the state protection and advocacy agencies, is great, just to help them figure out where the resources are. There are many disability-specific organizations that are out there. So just being there as a resource for students is crucial, and hopefully the administrators are. As we said, you can connect them to an upper-class student. This could be really important. I'm talking about housing and transportation, and helping students that need assistance with personal care or need to find nursing help to come in. If those basic needs aren't met, the student doesn't have a prayer of surviving in class. So just being there to answer questions or to send them to NALSWD is vitally important. We know folks all over the country - we'll plug them in. Then the other thing is to check in early and often with your students, and not in a paternalistic way. But law school is such a unique experience. For instance, in your legal writing and research class your first year, you're doing a different thing each week. It's not easy for people with visual disabilities or learning disabilities, when one week you're researching federal cases; then you're finding statutes and needing electronic access to all kinds of written documents; and then, all of a sudden, you're in the courtroom, at the podium, and everyone else has paper notes. So just talking through these issues ... knowing the intricacies of all these programs and how they work, and then being able to talk through them with the student and just asking them the right questions, is key.

STEPHANIE ENYART: I like to think that part of the professor's role may be to hide the ball a little bit with the Socratic method, try to get students to think through the process and really gain the full force of the Socratic method. Well that's happening, but I think that accommodations should be pretty clear and proactive. In other words, you can see your role as making sure students do not have the ball hidden from them in terms of accommodations. What you know about what will probably be coming up in the program is great information to share early and often.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: Then there is also making students aware that the accommodations they had in their undergraduate years might not cut it for law school. For instance, someone with low vision might be able to struggle through and read and visualize with large print an undergrad text, but the volume of reading increases exponentially in law school and all of a sudden that just may not be possible. The student may need to use JAWS for Windows, which is screen reading software. Hopefully everyone knows about it, but if not, see Stephanie. Then, if you're working with a main campus - if you're not just an 112 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 independent law school and you're working with a main disability services office - just be sure to know if things are different at the law school. I know some students will come to us and say, "hey, the main campus is on a quarter system and my law school is on the semester system, and there is this two week blackout period where I can't get any of my documents converted." Losing two weeks in law school isn't something that anyone can afford. So just be sure that things are actually happening when they are outsourced to the main campus disabilities offices, if they are. So we wanted to share a little bit now about just succeeding in law school and the everyday, day-to-day routine in the classroom. I also have a vision issue and there is essentially one spot in the classroom where I can sit because it's all stairs, and we don't have ramps like these. I can sit in one spot in front and I had no idea, and I was meeting with my Dean of Students before law school started and she said, "hey, law students are really finicky about where they sit, and you're going to come in and wherever you sit the first day, you'll be stuck there." I was like, "oh my gosh! Really?" She said, "yeah, welcome to law school." I said, "but there is really only one spot where I'll be able to see," so we just reserved that spot. That's something I would have never thought of. So just being there to help students think through logistics is helpful. Then think about your school's emergency evacuation procedure. What is it and what provisions have you made for students with disabilities? All kinds of disabilities? Don't just have a flashing strobe light or an audible alarm. Think about what people are going to do that are stuck in the basement of the library. Will you even know that they're there? These are all really tough issues, but nonetheless, things that we need to think about. Now I will let Stephanie say a bit about technology.

STEPHANIE ENYART: I actually wanted to throw in a bit about exams as well. In terms of exams, obviously first year students are especially terrified and don't know what to expect. Often, there are many instances where people start looking at practice tests, or maybe professors will put a few practice tests on their website, or you can find them from another website. It is definitely something that would kind of calm nerves and it would be a good idea to encourage students with disabilities to have access to those resources. In other words, they should be in an accessible format, which may mean a variety of things for a given individual or it may mean that it's electronically available. But you should talk early in the semester, especially during orientation, about how the exam schedule will work, about how if you have someone that has a double-time allotment for their disability, which is relatively common for a variety of disabilities, about how that will work out if you have exams that are close together. Taking some of the pressure out of all of these unknowns, when everything 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..."

is unknown as a first year, is something that I really hope a lot of deans are doing, and I hope they are making sure that there is equal access to these practice exams. This is also related to technology access... I'm going to define technology very, very broadly because that's really where it is. Right now we're using more and more technology in the classroom than we ever have before. We're having PowerPoint slides. We're having video clips in evidence or in other classes. We're having a variety of different websites that professors maintain and where they often post handouts, like cases that they wanted to add to the reading list, practice tests, or group assignments. All of these things are things that need to be accessible for the student at the same time that their non-disabled peers have access to the material. So you have your website, which needs to be accessible with all of its documents, that may be developing on a day-to- day basis. You have in-the-classroom stuff, like the PowerPoint presentations. Many of them can't be read with screen reading software, depending on how they were created. You have potentially uncaptioned video clips being shown for people that have hearing disabilities. Ultimately, you also have the physical building itself with technology. You have computer labs that may have some assistive technology, but again, they might not. In the end, all of these pieces of technology that are being used by non-disabled students and disabled students alike need to have equal access. There needs to be early warning of how the plan is going to work for disabled students with regards to equal access to materials when compared to their peers.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: I think it goes to what Andy said this morning about removing barriers. It's about leveling the playing field. There's a wonderful example, which I'll let Stephanie tell about, about writing onto law review. Another blind law student's experience was very different than Stephanie's. They were at different schools, on opposite sides of the country, and this student received an e-mail that said "are you interested in writing onto law review?" and she said "yes." And everything was just automatically provided to her in electronic format.

STEPHANIE ENYART: My experience was that I probably would have spent about twelve hours in meetings and I would have missed about a week of class to be able to do the double-time allotment that I would need to write-on. Ultimately, I would have had to sacrifice a huge chunk of academic time that no one else would have had to because they never really envisioned that there would be people that have disabilities that need accommodations to do write-on. None of the documents that were going to be used were actually going to be accessible to me. I would have had to 114 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 create all of these meetings and influence the law review board to consider making things accessible for the first time. Ultimately, these are student activities that should be open to all, and my experience was extremely different from this other student's. We both have relatively similar disabilities and similar disability needs. So this is within your power. You have so much power to change the opportunities available to people that are coming through your school because, ultimately, deans of students and administrators have the keys to streamlining and updating, and reforming systemic barriers. It's really hard as a student to try to take those things on in addition to being a law student with a disability.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: In the same vein, just remember that being a law student is about a lot more than just the classroom. There are so many extracurricular activities and there are accommodations that need to be thought through for all of those. If we're not already there, and I know we're not, then hopefully we're at a point where we are not surprised when a lawyer with a disability shows up at a Continuing Legal Education seminar or a law review symposium. I mean, there should be a question on every conference invitation that your law school hosts that says, "do you have a disability that you require disability accommodation for?" It's important that we are getting into that mindset. I think we would love to get to the point where when we meet strangers they don't say, "oh my gosh, you're in law school?" We want to take that surprise factor out and just say, "yeah, we are as a matter of fact." That kind of folds into employment issues, and I will let Stephanie talk a little bit about disclosure. I know we've talked about this a lot today, but ultimately we think that law students with disabilities, if they're interested in disclosing or considering whether they need to disclose, then we want to talk to them. Please send them to us. We will plug them in. It's such a complex and unique decision for each student, but Stephanie can talk about her experience with summer jobs.

STEPHANIE ENYART: In my first year of law school, I had a couple of accommodations hurdles, and ultimately I didn't have text books for quite a bit of the time that I was a first year. My grades definitely didn't look anything like the grades that I got later on in law school. Obviously, the first year grades are what really matter to employers, especially firms. I knew that if I didn't disclose, there would be no way that they would look at my transcript and say, "sure, we'll give this person an interview." I believe in choice in terms of disclosure and that people can make the choice that is right for them, but my career services office strongly, 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." strongly discouraged me from mentioning a thing and, you know, just said "see what happens." I knew that with my GPA, I was definitely not getting an interview, so I turned to a blind lawyer that was local in Los Angeles, working for a large firm. He helped me craft some language that basically said, in a very matter-of-fact way, that I had a disability, that there were a few hurdles that I faced, and that in the class where I did have my accommodations, I received an A. I put in a bit more information about some of the things that I'd done extracurricular-wise to try to round out my profile. I got interviews, I got call-backs, and I know I wouldn't have gotten either of those if I hadn't disclosed. But at the same time, knowing what to put, how to frame it, in that matter-of-fact, not whiny kind of way, is something that I probably couldn't find at my career service office. I love career services offices, but they can't know everything. So it's one of the reasons why I feel like this network of lawyers and law students with disabilities can really and truly help each other, because that lawyer in a large law firm had seen tons of these things come across his desk. He was able to help me steer away from putting out some red flags that I'm just a whiny person or something along those lines, that I was just making excuses for my grades. So disclosure can be done best with really good advice from someone that's been there and understands it personally.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: There is a lot to consider in the way that law school prepares people to be successful lawyers. In law school, law students are developing the self-advocacy skills that they are going to need in order to succeed on the job. So here's one more reason for students to plug in, if we haven't given you enough reasons why all you students should immediately go to www.nalswd.org and sign up to be a member tonight, here's one more. Students need to figure out things like Westlaw access. There's this one portal that's good for people that are using screen readers. People need to figure out LexisNexis. People might have summer jobs where they struggle to use Case Map if they're using screen readers, and they need to figure that out. When I'm in the courtroom, I typically cannot access the witness stand, the jury box, or the judge's bench. In addition to sending a pretty scary message, that's also something that's got to be worked out logistically. There are plenty of lawyers that function just fine and do really well in a courtroom in wheelchairs, but it's something that you're not born knowing. So figuring this stuff out in law school is important, and it's helpful to talk to other students that have been there - and NALSWD has certainly done that for me. In terms of testing ... and Trevor you look like you have a comment. 116 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1

TREVOR FINNEMAN: Just returning back to disclosing disability to potential employers for a minute... during my first firm interview, I chose not to disclose. So that when the interviewers asked me a question, and then they noticed, they pointed to their ear and had a puzzled look on their face. They asked whether or not I'd be able to use the phone as a lawyer. That's fine with me. It's a valid question eventually, but the way it was posed wasn't that great. So what I did was, I went to the career center after that and I asked them about disclosing. They said that they had never had a student ask that question and said they'll get back to me. So what they did was, they assembled a list of pros and cons of disclosing at different times in the employment process: in the cover letter, in the initial interview, or in not disclosing at all. For each of those time periods, it had, "these are the benefits, these might be the disadvantages." I thought that was really helpful to help me make my own decision. I think that is something you can consider making for people with disabilities. I understand that the pros and cons might shift a bit, depending on whether or not you have a physical disability that's eventually obvious once they meet you, or whether you have more of a hidden disability, like a learning disability. But I think that's a good thing to have at the career center - just breaking down the pros and cons of disclosing at each phase in the employment process. It comes in very handy for the student and allows them to make a more informed decision on their own.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: One thing to know if you're a career services office is that I think we've all gotten the very bad, inappropriate interviewer and sometimes the illegal questions like "how do you do this? Can you do this? Do you think you're going to be as effective because of your disability?" Ultimately, we want employers to stop asking those questions. So making firms accountable and saying, "hey, this is not acceptable and you're not coming back to interview if you continue" is really key. Also, the upshot is that students are going to have to deal with these questions and they catch you off guard and you don't really know what to say, but you don't want to ruin your chances for the job, unless you've already decided this is a place that you would never want to work. But talking to students and having them prepare answers for the oddball and inappropriate questions that come up is important. Now I think Stephanie and I are going to talk a little bit about those big standardized tests that are waiting at the end of law school. I took the MPRE in November, and Sue Lunbeck is hiding somewhere here, but because I'm moving to California after law school for work, it's been really helpful to be in touch with someone there who knows the system. I think without NALSWD, I would never know Sue because I would never know 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..."

Stephanie, who connected me to Sue. Anyway, the trick with the MPRE or any of these tests is talking to someone who has been through the process, because you don't know exactly what kinds of documentation to turn in. With the MPRE, I had to figure out what I was going to request. I will need identical accommodations for the bar anyway and I think helping students think through that process is very important. I think you can even design programming really early. Every fall, you could do an event that explains exactly what happens at the MPRE and at the bar exam without accommodations, and then students can begin to say, "okay, well I can't take a pillow in for my back problems, so I'm going to need to request that as an accommodation." I mean, typically in law school, we don't talk through the intricacies of these exams until very, very late in the game and that's not early enough for people that are going to have to assemble volumes of paperwork and go back to their doctors and their primary and secondary school counselors to get education plans. So you can design programming around that. Stephanie, do you want to jump in?

STEPHANIE ENYART: I mean, it's to your benefit. I know that there's not a dean of a law school out there that would say they didn't care a lot about their school rank. What goes into school rank is passage rates for the bar. But who doesn't pass? Too often, it's the people that are under- accommodated or unaccommodated. So that pizza party that is out of your budget even in hard times, may really be worth it in the end. It's definitely something that I think UCLA did very, very well, so we have the highest bar passage rate in California I think, but I could be wrong about the most recent statistics. And we have a lot of students with disabilities.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: In terms of bar prep programs, Sue has good advice. She's the only person on the planet who reminded me that I needed to request accommodations for those, and that's something that students often forget as they are assembling heaps of paper work and submitting them to the testing agencies. Also there are bar applications for people with psychological disabilities and mental health issues. NALSWD is trying to create space to connect, a safe space to talk about these issues, and as a dean, you need to have the kind of relationship with your students where you can talk about state specific stuff. That is really amazing because it does vary state by state and it's a hard thing. The questions are difficult and put students in a hard spot. Do you have anything else on that?

STEPHANIE ENYART: So just to wrap up, you, as law school administrators, are in a unique role. I hope that you leave this energized and 118 JOURNAL OF GENDER, SOCIAL POLICY & THE LAW [Vol. 18:1 excited about how you can streamline the bureaucracies that students with disabilities have to face, even if it's just working more closely with your disability services office. There are so many things that you can do to make it a more seamless transition into legal education, and out of education and into practice. We hope that you feel excited about this role. We also really want to maintain our relationship with deans of students and law schools generally, so we look forward to connecting with you. If you have any questions and want to be on our mailing list, please, please approach us. We think that we have every ABA-accredited law school covered, but we might not have the proper address. And we wanted to open it up for questions, and we can also open the floor for personal questions; all three of us are fairly open about things if you want to go there.

REBECCA WILLIFORD: Also in your handout, you've got my e-mail address and please feel free to e-mail me. It's nalswd.president @gmail.com, so e-mail me. Tell your students to e-mail me. We totally understand the confidentiality issues, but we want to connect with every single law student with a disability in the country if they want to connect with us. You've got our newsletter as well, that we also have electronically and can send out in that format.

STEPHANIE ENYART: There is a newly launching lawyers with disabilities organization, as well. So if you have those wonderful alums that are trying to stay connected, especially in a tough job market, we're into strategizing about how we're going to launch this organization. We have a lot of the energy from this kind of first generation of NALSWD leaders, but we're looking for people that are also well-established in their careers to help shape the national organization for lawyers with disabilities. So if you're interested, or you know people, you can send them my way and I can give out my e-mail address: it's [email protected]. I think it's up here as well, or you can come and see me. I think with that, we'll just go ahead and open it up for questions. I don't know if...

REBECCA WILLIFORD: Yeah we have one.

MARIANNE HUGER: I'm the Assistant Director of Disabilities at Georgetown Law. I just had a comment on something that would be really helpful from the administrative end for you all to do. Students, as you said, really want that state-specific information, like what are rehabilitation services in the state? What do bars say about accommodations? What would their advice be? Georgetown has a lot of students, by comparison, with disabilities, ninety plus, but I'm still not able to make that kind of 2009] "AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR STUDENTS..." generalization about state-specific information because our students are from all over the country. So I think having a resource on your website - state by state - where students could blog about their experiences or what really helped in a certain state, would be a start. I know working with one of my students, she's given me great information about Virginia, but I don't know the next time I'll have a student who's living in Virginia, needing those services. So I think having one clearinghouse, state-by-state, could be really helpful. So thank you for all you're doing.

STEPHANIE ENYART: Thank you. Any other questions or comments? We also are giving Dean Jaffe a NALSWD mug.

DAVID JAFFE: All right. Gladly. We're actually going to turn over to the next panel. So you can stretch if you'd like, but we'll turn over the panel and we'll have a break in an hour before the last session. Otherwise, please stay here.

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