The More We Get Together: Improving Collaboration between Educators and Their Lawyers

Abstract

Effective collaboration between educators and their lawyers increasingly influences such central educational matters as school governance, school reform, equality of educational opportunity, school leadership, and allocation of scarce resources. In this article, Jay Heubert demonstrates the growing need for such collaboration. Examining scholarship on professional education, interprofessional collaboration, preventive law, alternative dispute resolution, and client education, he identifies many factors that can promote or impede close, ongoing educator-lawyer interaction. Heubert argues that lawyers, educators, and the schools that train them can do a great deal to improve collaboration, and offers many specific recommendations. He concludes by calling for more balance in school law research in order to focus less on how courts treat education cases and more on how good lawyer-educator collaboration can improve education and reduce the need for litigation in the first place.