General Litigation Clinic Closeup: Working for All, Free of Charge

Less than three weeks into my time with WVU Law’s General Litigation Clinic, I walked into the local courthouse for the first time, not to observe, but to work. My clinic partner and I had been appointed guardians ad litem, and we had to gather records before a trial one month away.

I had expected a warm-up. Instead, here was the work, and the work has been one of my best teachers during my three years in law school.

The General Litigation Clinic represents West Virginians who can’t afford a lawyer. That usually means meeting people on the worst day of a bad year. In a matter of weeks I’ve watched a marriage fall apart, seen debt outrun a family, and sat with a disability claim that couldn’t keep pace with the illness behind it.

Clients arrive at the clinic braced to be told nothing can be done. Instead, they get two students who have read every page of their file.

Early on, it clicked for me that the hardest part of this work wouldn’t be the legal part. It’s returning a call when you promised. It’s explaining the same thing three times without making someone feel small for asking. It’s telling someone the truth when a kinder answer would be easier.

Perhaps the most valuable thing the clinic has given me is someone who catches what I miss. Professor Jennifer Stephens, our clinic director, is the reason it all works. She teaches the whole arc of a case: intake, strategy, hard conversations, and what a client will need after we’re gone. She sees when a student is ready before the student does.

When she handed me and my partner that first courthouse assignment, she was so plainly unworried that I decided to trust her perception of me over my own.

Trial is two weeks away. I don’t know how it’ll turn out. What I know is that the person we were appointed to protect will not be without a voice, and that three weeks into my final year of law school, I was trusted to help them.

That’s what the clinic makes possible: it gives people facing the legal system an advocate, while giving students the responsibility, guidance, and experience to become lawyers.

K. Price Davis is a 3L at WVU Law and will graduate in May 2027.

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Andrew Marvin

Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing, WVU College of Law

andrew.marvin@mail.wvu.edu