New England Experiential Conference

New England Experiential Conference (NEEC)
Building on Our Strengths, Evolving for Tomorrow
November 12 (evening reception) – 13 (conference), 2026
Suffolk University Law School, Boston, MA

The deadline to register is Friday, November 6, 2026.

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Our discounted hotel blocks are now closed, but you can view other preferred rates.

Getting to the Conference

Suffolk University Law School is conveniently located near MBTA transit stops and nearby parking garages. For detailed instructions for getting t the conference, view Directions and Parking for Conference Attendees [PDF].

This NEEC is made possible in part through the support of the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education.

New England Experiential Conference: Enduring Strengths of Experiential Education

This year’s conference theme centers on the enduring strengths of experiential education as a foundation for preparing students to meet evolving challenges of clients and communities by integrating new resources in an ever-changing profession.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, changes in the delivery of legal services, the implementation of the NextGen Bar Exam, and broader developments in higher education are transforming expectations about how lawyers are trained, assessed, and prepared for practice. Notably, many of the competencies emphasized by the NextGen Bar Exam, including problem-solving, client-centeredness, professional judgment, and integrated legal analysis, have long been hallmarks of experiential education.

At the same time, legal educators and the profession face pressing societal challenges. Persistent barriers to justice, increasing polarization, threats to the rule of law, and attacks on academic freedom raise fundamental questions about the role of lawyers and legal education in a democratic society. Moreover, these challenges often fall most heavily on underserved communities, deepening inequities and creating new obstacles to meaningful access to justice.

Experiential education is uniquely positioned to respond to these developments. Through clinics, externships, simulations, and other experiential learning opportunities, students engage directly with clients, communities, institutions, and real-world legal problems. They practice pivoting during unexpected changes, confronting asymmetrical power distribution, solving complex problems with multiple stakeholders, and centering clients at each juncture of representation. In doing so, students can develop the skills, values, adaptability, and professional identity needed not only to succeed in an evolving profession but also to serve effectively and ethically in a rapidly changing world.

This conference will explore two interconnected themes: 1) the future of experiential legal education and practice, including how artificial intelligence and other technologies, the NextGen Bar Exam, and other emerging developments are reshaping the legal profession and our pedagogy; 2) the role of legal education and the profession in promoting justice, strengthening democracy, advancing the rule of law, and fostering meaningful community engagement.

Throughout these conversations, participants will consider how experiential education can remain grounded in its core commitments while continuing to innovate, adapt, and benefit society.

Agenda

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

5:30pm – 7:30pm
Welcome Reception, Carrie Nation Restaurant & Cocktail Club, 11 Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

8:00am – 9:00am
Registration, Suffolk University Law School, Great Hall Foyer
Works in Progress Sessions, Rooms 305, 325, 375
New Experiential & Clinical Faculty Meetup, Room 335
Program Administrator Meetup, Room 315

8:00am – 9:15am
Breakfast, Keches First Floor Function Room

9:15am – 10:15am
Welcome Plenary, Keches First Floor Function Room
Case Studies and Ethics in AI Use
Ana M. Rivera, Boston College Law School
Darrell Mottley, Suffolk University Law School
Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School

10:25am – 11:25am
Concurrent Sessions #1, Rooms 265, 235, 275, 205

11:35am – 12:00pm
Lightning Sessions #1, Rooms 265, 235, 275, 205

12:00pm – 1:30pm
Lunch, Keches First Floor Function Room
You’re Already Teaching It: Clinical Education and the NextGen Bar Exam
Sabrina Defabritiis, Suffolk University Law School
Lisa Freudenheim, Boston University School of Law

1:40pm – 2:40pm
Concurrent Sessions #2, Rooms 265, 235, 275, 205

2:40pm – 3:00pm
Coffee Break, 2nd Floor Rotunda

3:00pm – 3:25pm
Lightning Sessions #2, Rooms 265, 235, 275

3:30pm – 6:00pm
Farewell Reception, Great Hall Foyer

The Ethical Reveal: Teaching Gen AI Competence as Professional Judgment in Experiential Legal Education

Room 265
Cecily Banks, Boston University School of Law

This presentation workshops a three-task GenAI exercise designed to teach “GenAI Competence” to law students in experiential and skills courses. In the exercise, students use GenAI for a real-world client problem – once with and once without client context – and then, in “The Ethical Reveal,” reckon in real time with how they handled their client’s information on the platform. Students internalize on the spot the consequences of judgment. This exercise reveals “GenAI Competence” as a teachable, assessable skill of judgment about when, how, and whether to use GenAI. It frames GenAI within a lawyer’s ethical responsibilities (of competence, candor, supervision, and confidentiality) to understand what tools they are using, protect their clients, supervise GenAI output, and never let its overwhelming capabilities substitute for their irreducible human accountability for their work. By elevating responsibility over know-how as their guiding star, students are better prepared to deploy this unprecedented, unbridled technology in a profession that has climbed aboard.

How Limits Encourage Creativity in a World of Endless Possibilities

Room 235
Rachel Reeves, UConn School of Law
Kate Devlin Joyce, Boston University School of Law

Can Limits Encourage Creativity in a World of Endless Possibilities? In an era of unlimited access to information and rapid technological advances that provide access to seemingly endless possibilities, how do we encourage and teach creativity as clinical faculty? Conversely, can this framework be useful to encourage students to think creatively in response to external limits in the face of regular challenges to the rule of law? This session will explore creativity as a critical lawyering skill and consider the effects of a profession facing both unlimited access to information and a changing legal landscape and will consider the ways in which clinical faculty might intentionally incorporate limits as a tool to encourage our students’ creativity.

Where Legal Education Meets Legal Innovation: An Experiential Approach to Access to Justice

Room 275
John Casey, Suffolk University Law School
Jacqueline Harvey, Suffolk University Law School

What happens when students bring their courthouse experiences and mediation training into the design of legal services? This presentation explores Suffolk University Law School’s Online Dispute Resolution Innovation Clinic, where students engage with self-represented litigants, complete mediation training, and help develop an online platform for uncontested divorce in Massachusetts. By connecting these experiences, students gain a deeper understanding of the challenges litigants face and use those insights to inform the design and delivery of legal services. The session highlights how this integrated approach strengthens experiential learning and offers practical strategies for incorporating community engagement and innovation into legal education.

Program Administrators Discussion: Systems & Processes

Room 205

This session brings together clinic and program administrators from law schools across New England to share practical approaches to the systems and processes that support effective clinical and experiential education. Participants will discuss the day-to-day administrative workflows that help programs operate efficiently, with a focus on student applications, data collection and management, legal technology platforms, evaluation processes, and intake and referral systems. Furthermore, administrators can discuss how they utilize AI to streamline these workflows. The conversation will provide an opportunity to compare practices, troubleshoot common challenges, and share tools and strategies that can be adapted across different institutional settings. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, examples, and solutions from their own programs for a collaborative, peer-driven discussion focused on improving administrative systems and processes.

Teaching About AI When You Wish You Didn't Have To

Room 265
Dana Montalto, Harvard Law School
Destini Aguero, Harvard Law School

Whether we’re excited or not, we have to teach our clinic students about AI: our clients are using AI; our students are using AI; courts, agencies, and opposing counsel are using AI. Come hear two tech-hesitant clinicians’ perspectives on what motivated them to start experimenting with AI, to teach about AI both practically and conceptually—and to enjoy doing so! We will offer actionable ideas and inspiration for using AI as a fresh lens through which to examine familiar topics like interviewing and counseling and to reinforce existing learning goals.

Flexible Professional Positionality: Preparing Our Students to Inhabit an Uncertain World

Room 235
Alex West, Roger Williams School of Law
Jessica Rubin, UConn School of Law
Tallulah Knopp, Harvard Legal Aid Bureau

This session will explore unique or unexpected roles that students can inhabit in experiential learning. Speakers will explain the diversity of professional and personal experiences that they have fostered to help students create and grow their professional identities, develop flexible skills sets, and gain comfort and confidence in inhabiting different roles so that they are able to contribute to community benefit. These skills will be especially important as community needs evolve and our students need to respond to an unpredictable political (and legal) environment. Speakers will highlight unique student positionalities that they have utilized in both traditional clinic settings and pro bono offerings. Speakers will share how they have challenged students to imagine different roles they could fill within the legal world, which ideally gives students a flexible framework as new challenges emerge.

Carving Out a Non-Carceral Survivor Advocacy Clinic

Room 275
Julia Devanthery, Harvard Law School

Survivors of gender-based violence have complex needs like safety, space to heal, and the right to self-determination. They also need economic resources to rebuild their lives. Many survivors find that neither the criminal legal system nor traditional civil legal services meet these needs. The Project grew out of a housing practice that centered on high volume eviction defense representation. There, students and instructors advocating for tenants in crisis identified an unmet need among survivors facing eviction: they were being evicted at alarming rates for reasons directly related to their experience of abuse. Students and instructors got to work building a practice devoted to the housing needs of survivors. The result was a new practice rooted in the tenant-advocacy tradition. The Project shows how building on existing strengths can produce innovative clinical programs. These programs meet clients where they are and train students to reimagine the systems that shape clients’ lives.

Expanding Opportunities for Students to Shine: Portfolio-Based and Alternative Approaches to Summative Assessment in Clinical Education

Room 205
Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School
Carwina Weng, Suffolk University Law School

Clinical teachers may rely on a limited number of tools to evaluate student performance at the end of a semester. At the same time, clinical work generates rich evidence of learning, professional judgment, growth, and reflection. Traditional assessments can struggle to capture and effectively evaluate this kind of work. This session explores an ongoing experiment with portfolio-based assessment in a law clinic. Attendees will then discuss alternative approaches to summative assessment. They will also explore ways to help students shine through more authentic demonstrations of their learning and strengths. The session shares a work in progress and invites collaboration.

Building Resilient Transactional Lawyers Through Addressing Secondary Trauma

Room 265
Darryl Walton, Northeastern University School of Law

A growing awareness of secondary trauma in the legal profession has prompted urgent conversations about supporting the well-being of law students, attorneys, and clients. Secondary trauma is often associated with litigation and criminal law. Yet it can also arise in transactional law clinics. There, students may work with marginalized communities and struggling businesses in emotionally charged situations. They face high client expectations. They also navigate ethical challenges when clients’ decisions are tied to financial instability, economic disparities, or personal hardship. This underexplored area calls for transactional lawyers with both technical skills and emotional intelligence. This session examines how to integrate doctrine, practice, and pedagogy to help students understand, manage, and mitigate secondary trauma. It offers actionable recommendations for law schools, clinicians, and practitioners to develop self-awareness, promote mental health, address ethical dilemmas, and cultivate compassionate practice.

One Toolbox, Many Clinics: Facilitating Skill Development Across Experiential Programs

Room 235
Christina Miller, Suffolk University Law
Emma Scott, Vermont Law and Graduate School
Christopher Worth, Vermont Law and Graduate School

Experiential faculty generally agree that skill development is a core objective of their programs. Yet it is often left to individual clinics, through seminars and one-on-one supervision, to achieve this goal. This panel will discuss ways to tackle shared learning objectives together. We will share two schools' approaches to teaching foundational skills across experiential programs. One school piloted a day-long, cross-clinic orientation, covering topics of ethics, professional identity, mental health, and collaboration. Another school is building on its day-long orientation by adding skill development into its curriculum across 16 programs. That work focuses on trust, sustainable practice, and core "soft skills." A 20-minute open forum follows where we invite others to share challenges and compare approaches. We will facilitate the collection of adaptable tools for folks to take home from the session.

Pleading Ignorance?: Navigating the Ethical Issues Among Use of AI by Students in Drafting Court Filings

Room 275
Brian Wilson, Boston University School of Law
Hayat Bearat, Northeastern University School of Law
Margaret Drew, UMass Law School
Courtney Beer, University of Maine School of Law

While law school faculty debate limiting students' generative AI use, experiential faculty face an added question: how, if it all, students should use AI in drafting court filings. AI raises ethical concerns involving confidentiality, competence, diligence, and candor to the court, given its tendency to misstate legal principles and cite fictitious caselaw. It may also stifle students' research, writing, and analytical development, strip their work of individuality, and impair their ability to explain, in their own words, a position a machine put on paper. Yet restricting AI entirely, even in the name of academic freedom, may leave students unprepared for a profession where employers, pro se litigants, and others use it freely. In this interactive session, we’ll explore how to navigate these issues, how to explain our reasoning for any limits to students, and which approaches suit different programs, drawing on the conference’s multidisciplinary perspective to help shape our policies.

Program Administrator Discussions: Student and Faculty Support

Room 205

This session focuses on the many ways program administrators support students and faculty and contribute to the overall success of clinical and experiential education programs. Participants will share strategies for supporting students’ personal wellbeing and professional growth, improving accessibility to resources, identifying professional development opportunities for administrators, and building effective working relationships with faculty. The discussion will explore both the practical and relational aspects of administrative work, with an emphasis on sharing approaches, navigating common challenges, and learning from colleagues at other law schools. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, experiences, and strategies for creating strong, responsive support systems for students, faculty, and administrators.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink: Shultz & Zedeck, SMART Goals, and GenAI Joining Forces to Enhance Learning Plans

Room 265
Beth Locker, Vermont Law School
Will Stocker, Vermont Law School

Externship learning plans are familiar tools, but they can become more powerful when they intentionally combine established professional identity frameworks, effective goal-setting practices, and emerging AI literacy. This presentation will describe a redesigned learning plan assignment that asks students to begin with Shultz and Zedeck’s 26 Lawyering Effectiveness Factors, translate their priorities into SMART goals, and then use generative AI to identify realistic, placement-specific benchmarks for measuring progress. Students are not asked to outsource their learning plans to AI; instead, they must critically evaluate, revise, and contextualize AI-generated suggestions so their final benchmarks reflect authentic lawyering tasks in their field placements.

Power Up Your Prompts: GenAI for Lawyers and Law Students

Room 235
Erin Cho, Harvard Law School

Generative Artificial Intelligence (“GenAI”) is now pervasive, dramatically transforming legal practice and education. But GenAI tools are only as effective as the instructions we give them. In this Lightning Session, I will be sharing practical insights, strategies, and tips for GenAI prompt engineering. The session will also invite audience participation, encouraging others to share their own AI success stories and learning/teaching moments. The goal of this session is to help both legal practitioners and students harness GenAI more effectively, while maintaining the critical thinking, professional judgment, and ethical awareness that remain essential to good lawyering.

Lex Ferenda in the Housing Policy Clinic: What the Law (and Legal Education) Should Be!

Room 275
Monica Teixeira de Sousa, Roger Williams School of Law

In this lightning round, a former legal services attorney and Property professor will share her journey from over 20 years of teaching lex lata, the law as it is, to creating a Housing Policy Clinic in which students focus almost exclusively on lex ferenda, the law as it should be! The case for a policy clinic will be made; clinic structure and project highlights shared; and attendees encouraged to elevate the critical work they are already doing in their clinics to reimagine our legal system. This will be a joyful session; dreamers and idealists are encouraged to attend!

Hands-on Skills: LMI Community Solar Readiness Survey

Room 205
Genevieve Byrne, Vermont Law School

The VLGS Energy Clinic’s ROC Solar Readiness Survey offers a replicable model for teaching land use, environmental, energy, and transactional law while serving low- and moderate-income resident-owned communities (ROCs) in New Hampshire. Students conduct site-specific solar-readiness assessments that synthesize zoning and permitting rules, wetlands and flood hazards, wildlife habitat, utility territory and interconnection considerations, net-metering policy, available acreage, soils, title issues, easements, and community governance processes. They translate that research into accessible, practical decision-support tools for resident leaders considering solar development. The project situates legal education within broader access-to-justice and equity concerns. Solar readiness can help resident-owned communities evaluate opportunities to reduce energy burdens, build community wealth, and participate meaningfully in the energy transition.