WDA and Office of Ci...

WDA and Office of Civil Legal Aid’s CLE: Representing the Legal Interests of Preverbal Children
Professor Lisa Kelly and Alicia LeVezu will discuss the Legal Interest model for representing preverbal children, as outlined in their article, Until the Client Speaks, Reviving the Legal Interest Model for Preverbal Children, 50 Fam. L. Q. 383-426 (2016). In addition to describing the legal interest model and its limitations, the webinar will explore the history of the model, models used by other states, and the application of the model to various hypothetical scenarios. There will also be time to discuss questions and hypotheticals that are sent in advance.

About the Presenters:

Lisa Kelly joined the UW law school faculty in 2002. She directs the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic and teaches Family Law and Child Advocacy. She is the co-author, alongside Professor Kim Ambrose, of the forthcoming book, Representing Youth: Telling Stories, Imagining Change, Carolina Academic Press (2017). She is also the co-author of Adoption Law: Theory, Policy and Practice (2006). Professor Kelly chairs the Statewide Children’s Representation Workgroup established by the Washington Supreme Court Commission on Children in Foster Care and works closely with the Court Improvement Training Academy. She is the Bobbe and Jon Bridge Endowed Professor of Child Advocacy and served as Associate Dean at the UW Law School from 2007-2009.

Professor Kelly began her career practicing civil rights and family law in Arkansas, where she was local counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund for ten years. She began teaching at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and moved from there to West Virginia University College of Law, where she attained the status of tenured full professor. In 1996, she won the Association of American Law School’s National Scholarly Paper Prize for her work entitled Race and Place: Geographic and Transcendent Community in the Post-Shaw Era, published in the Vanderbilt Law Review.

Alicia LeVezu is an Acting Instructor with the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law. Alicia manages the Access to Counsel Systemic Advocacy Project (ASAP) where law students work to tackle legal issues through various forms of systemic advocacy, including litigation and legislative reform efforts. This position is a continuation of her prior role as an Equal Justice Works Fellow with UW Law, where she conducted research and provided individual representation in connection with increasing access to counsel for children across Washington State. Alicia also serves as a Project Coordinator with Washington’s Court Improvement Training Academy, where she coordinates attorney training on quality children’s representation across the state.

Alicia is a graduate of Yale Law School, where she spent two years representing children in the dependency system through the school’s Advocacy for Children and Youth Clinic. Alicia is a Washington native, who received her Bachelors in Political Science from the University of Washington. Before attending law school, Alicia spent time working at The Mockingbird Society, a Seattle-area non-profit advocating for foster youth, and at the Washington State House of Representatives.

This webinar will take place on September 29, 2017 between 12:00 PM and 1:00 PM. 1.0 Law and Legal Procedure credit has been requested with the WSBA. To register, email wda@defensenet.org with “Preverbal Children” in the subject line.