DePaul
Law’s Program of Excellence in Family Law, supported by the
Schiller DuCanto & Fleck Family Law Center, helps students transform classroom learning into real advocacy. With a curriculum that spans legal and policy issues across the private and public sectors, the program combines academic rigor with experiential learning. Students benefit from opportunities such as the Center’s
1L Family Law Fellowship, the student-led
Child & Family Law Association (CFLA) and the yearlong
Family Law Field Clinic, where they gain direct, hands-on training working with real clients and cases.
Amanda Carlson (JD ’26) considers the family law program “influential for my law career,” commending the faculty for “building courses around teaching practical litigation skills and strategies to use in everyday practice.” She highlights her time as a 1L Family Law Fellow, which provided her with a practicing attorney as a mentor and financial support, allowing her to intern with a family law judge the summer after her 1L year. She further notes that networking events held by the CFLA and the Center “helped me connect to the law school and to the Chicago family law community.”
Joie Egizio (JD ’27) also was “welcomed with open arms into the family law community” as a 1L Family Law Fellow. Her fellowship provided access to areas of family law typically inaccessible to 1Ls, such as visiting the Circuit Court of Cook County Domestic Relations Division (which she calls her “most memorable experience”), joining the winter immersion program (a one-week, court-sponsored intensive introduction to family law proceedings) and receiving a summer internship with a judge. She admits that “I would not have gained this insight and knowledge without the fellowship.”
Still active with DePaul’s family law community, Egizio is the current CFLA vice president and is spending her 2L year working in the Family Law Field Clinic. The Clinic is a one-year program that provides students with practical, hands-on opportunities representing clients. It combines experiential and seminar learning, and students can receive a 711 license to perform legal services under the supervision of an attorney.
Kristen Sommerville (JD ’25), who participated in the Clinic last year, praises how it encourages collaboration and that there was a “great balance” in working independently, receiving guidance from instructors and seeing the actual impact of their work. She also appreciates how the Clinic helps students understand the human side of the law, recalling that “students were taught how to have uncomfortable conversations with clients regarding deeply personal matters and how to navigate communications with clients who had endured very difficult, sometimes traumatic, experiences.”
While with the Clinic, Sommerville and her classmates were assigned divorce and adoption cases and worked on them from start to finish. Their cases came from Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, so the clients were low-income individuals who might otherwise not be able to afford legal services, a factor that made it more “meaningful” for her. “I knew some Spanish," she notes, "so I worked on two special immigrant juvenile status cases, in which I helped obtain preliminary domestic relations judgments that allowed undocumented immigrant children who were abused, neglected or abandoned by one or both parents to seek lawful, permanent residency in the United States.”
From community networking to fellowships that let students begin exploring family law right after their first year of law school to the opportunity to represent real clients through the Family Law Field Clinic, DePaul’s Program of Excellence in Family Law prepares graduates to serve, advocate and lead in this essential field. In doing so, the program not only equips students with practical skills but also prepares them to make a meaningful impact in the lives of children and families.