They gain experience handling criminal, civil, and administrative cases. The types of civil cases include landlord-tenant, consumer, and prisoner civil rights. Criminal cases involve misdemeanors such as drunk driving, domestic violence, and assault. Students represent clients in administrative hearings on Social Security problems. Third-year students have the special opportunity to be certified as legal interns by the Supreme Court of Ohio.
Interns assist staff attorneys in presenting cases in court.
These students are required to participate in the Clinical Seminar class. Although not all of our cases go to trial, students nonetheless gain valuable experience with pre-trial litigation skills, skills that are becoming all the more important in this age of crowded court dockets. Students have primary responsibility for preparing briefs to be filed in Ohio and federal trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. This work further develops the skills students have obtained in writing and research courses. Over the past decade, attorneys from the Appellate Review Office have argued more than 10 cases, civil and criminal, before the Supreme Court of Ohio.