Clinical Assistant Professor Sam Heppell is excited to join Utah Law and serve as the first director of its new Mental Health Legal Clinic. He has been passionate about clinical teaching since his own experiences as a student at Harvard Law School.
“I spent the entirety of my 2L and 3L years at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, working with low-income clients on an array of housing law and public benefits issues. That was the cornerstone of my own law school experience,” he recalls. “It helped sharpen my understanding of public interest lawyering and gave me an appreciation for the value of clinical teaching. Over those two years I forged close relationships with clinical instructors who straddled the worlds between being talented practitioners in their field and skilled teachers working with students.”
After finishing law school and a judicial clerkship, Heppell worked at civil rights law firm Loevy + Loevy in Chicago, focusing his practice on police misconduct and prisoners’ rights cases. He then transitioned to his most recent position as a clinical teaching fellow at the University of Chicago Law School’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic. In that role, he supervised students working on a wide range of environmental law matters ranging from Clean Water Act enforcement to Endangered Species Act litigation to environmental justice advocacy.
A British Columbia native who spent the past 10 years in Chicago, Heppell says he did not expect to end up in Utah. Ultimately, the faculty and students he met through the interviewing process made a compelling case that this was an opportunity too good to pass up.
“The folks I met from Utah Law stood out to me as being very generous with their time and engaging on a deep and meaningful level with my background and vision for the new Mental Health Legal Clinic,” he recalls. “I was impressed to meet so many people who were clearly interested in the work the clinic would do, even those who were not part of the clinical faculty. Everyone was kind, warm and welcoming and shared what a wonderful community Utah Law is.”
Pioneering a brand-new Mental Health Legal Clinic
Heppell is eager to start building the new Mental Health Legal Clinic, a medical-legal partnership with the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, and to begin teaching the clinic’s first cohort of law students when it launches in January. Through their work in this new legal clinic, Utah Law students will work with clients who are patients at the Kem and Carolyn Gardner Mental Health Crisis Center in South Salt Lake, which opened in March.
“The Crisis Care Center is filling a critical unmet need in the Salt Lake City community by providing an alternative to the emergency room—or worse, the criminal legal system—for people experiencing a mental health crisis,” he explains. “The new Mental Health Legal Clinic will enhance this vital mission by targeting the social determinants of poor mental health and helping patients to address their health-harming legal needs.”
Working towards the clinic’s launch, in the coming months Heppell will build the clinic curriculum and plan its initial practice areas based on the patient population’s legal needs.
“There are an array of legal issues that may be impacting people experiencing an acute mental health crisis, whether they are facing housing instability, have been improperly denied public benefits, are facing employment discrimination, or need help resolving family law issues,” Heppell explains. “Understanding these patient needs is going to inform how we structure the clinic and what substantive areas of legal practice students will focus on.”
Students will have regular supervision meetings with him to plan their case strategy and approach in addition to working directly with clients on their cases.
“We will also have a classroom component where we will discuss legal ethics issues that arise from our work, learn substantive law relevant to the projects students are working on, and develop practice skills like client interviewing and counseling,” Heppell says. “Students will also have many opportunities to hone advanced legal writing skills through their clinic work.”
Encouraging collaboration between care center staff and clients
The Mental Health Legal Clinic also offers students the unique opportunity to both learn from and help to train the crisis care center staff.
“One great advantage of the medical-legal partnership model is that information sharing and training goes both ways. We can help train healthcare providers to identify patients’ legal issues and refer them to us, and we will need providers to train us to understand what they’re seeing while working with their patient population. There will be many opportunities for rich interdisciplinary collaboration,” he says.
Heppell wants students in the clinic to learn client-centered lawyering approaches as well.
“Our clients are going to know their own lives better than we as their lawyers ever could,” he says. “An important part of this clinic will be teaching students about client counseling in ways that are empowering for our clients. The work is as much about gathering information and working through problems together as it is about researching legal issues and providing legal advice. I’m also eager for our students to learn a lot from our clients in addition to the service provision aspect of their work.”
Ultimately, the clinic aims to prepare students for real-world legal practice by modeling professional excellence and following the same best practices for client service that their future employers will expect.
“A core value of clinical legal education is that students, working under the supervision of their clinical instructor, are providing high-quality legal services to their clients,” he says. “The expectation is that our clients will receive the same level of thoughtful advice and talented advocacy that they would get working with licensed attorneys from a legal aid office or private law firm.”
Kevin Curtis, LCSW, who serves as director of operations at the Crisis Care Center, looks forward to having both Heppell and clinic students in the building soon.
“We’re grateful to our community partners for the time and expertise they’ll be providing to individuals in our center. With their help, we can create an experience for our guests that validates the struggles they face and helps them get started on a path towards resolution,” he says. “For people who feel overwhelmed by all the big and little things, these on-site connections are critical.”
Looking for potential growth opportunities
Heppell hopes that the Mental Health Legal Clinic can grow over time, and he is looking forward to working with the Huntsman Mental Health Institute team and Utah Law clinical faculty to start building it.
“Once we launch this initial iteration of the clinic, I’m interested in exploring other partnerships to expand the clinic’s role. I think there are opportunities for partnering with other schools within the university, like finding ways to include social work students or public health students in our work. And there’s a significant value in partnering with other organizations in the community as well,” he says. “The law clinic is not going to be able to meet all of the legal needs of every patient who comes through the doors of the crisis care center, so building capacity through those kinds of partnerships is something that can magnify the impact of our work.”
And the clinic isn’t the only aspect of Utah Heppell is enthusiastic about.
“My wife and I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old, so I’m really looking forward to getting outside and going on some fun adventures with them,” he says. “The move from Chicago to Salt Lake City will be a big change, and I’m excited to explore everything that this great community has to offer. And, after growing up near Vancouver but spending the past 10 years in the Midwest, I’m excited to finally be close to the mountains again!”