By Angela F. Schultz, Assistant Dean for Public Service, Marquette Law School
Many of us came to law school, at least in part, because we believed law could be used to help people navigate hard things. We wanted to solve problems, advocate for fairness, and advance justice.
One of the harder lessons of becoming a lawyer may be learning that law and justice are not the same thing. For law students in pro bono settings, that education can begin early. They meet clients facing eviction, consumer debt, family instability, loss of income, or victimization. They learn to interview clients, identify and analyze legal issues, communicate difficult information, and work alongside lawyers. And they learn that sometimes the law comes up short.
In our pro bono clinics, we might negotiate a debt that a client incurred when they took out a payday loan to cover the rent. The negotiation may avoid a small claims judgment against the client. But rent is due again next month. The client’s wages have not increased. Food, transportation, utilities, and childcare still cost too much. Sometimes the problem that brought the client through our doors is far bigger than the legal problem we can help resolve.
For a student encountering this kind of debt for the first time, the legal questions may be accompanied by a more basic one: Is this fair? Those of us who have practiced longer may know that fairness is not always the question the law asks. But the student’s question is worth holding onto.
The tension is not simply that we wish we could do more. What we are seeing may conflict with our own sense of fairness. Our legal tools can address the resulting debt without addressing the instability that produced it. We may have done our job well and achieved a meaningful result while still confronting circumstances that feel profoundly unjust.
That collision between the work we can do and the justice we believe people deserve can become a source of moral injury. A recent State Bar of Wisconsin article describes moral injury as the distress that occurs when our moral or ethical values are compromised or violated.[1] For lawyers, the author identifies one potential source: seeing an imperfect legal system fall short of our expectations.[2] Those expectations do not come only from us. The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct describe a lawyer as “an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.”[3]
What happens when a developing lawyer recognizes the distance between those aspirations and the justice our system actually delivers? Will they become cynical, gradually stop noticing, or decide that the smaller thing they can do does not matter? Or can they learn to hold two things as true at once: What I did for this client mattered. And it was not enough.
How a developing lawyer makes sense of that tension helps shape the lawyer they become. And those of us who work alongside them can help shape that understanding.
What Is a Lawyer For?
A successful family law attorney once told me about the case that changed the direction of her practice. She had represented one party in an intensely contentious divorce involving custody, placement, finances, and property. After a difficult trial, the court ruled largely in her client’s favor. Feeling the satisfaction that follows a hard-fought case, she turned to her client and said, “We won!”
Her client did not look victorious. Instead, she pointed to what the judgment could not fix: her child would spend the rest of childhood moving between two parents who could barely speak civilly to one another.
That response changed the lawyer’s understanding of what it meant to “win.” She eventually reshaped her practice around divorce mediation and helping couples reach agreements. She now connects clients with counseling resources and helps them learn better ways to communicate, particularly when children are involved.
Recently, a law student told me she’d had a different kind of “win.” During a pro bono shift, a client arrived with a fussy baby. The student offered to hold the baby, giving the mother a little respite and the space to focus on the complicated adult matters, including legal questions, that had brought her to the clinic.
Holding a fussy baby is not a legal service. But the student noticed what was making it difficult for the client to participate in the consultation, and she responded. The law could address only some of what this mother was carrying. The student’s understanding of what it meant to serve the client did not have to be similarly confined. This student’s professional identity included the Jesuit ideal of being a person for and with others, recognizing the human need sitting alongside the legal one.
These are very different stories, but they raise the same question about professional identity: What is a lawyer for when the law cannot give a client everything the client needs?
The answer cannot be that lawyers should take responsibility for fixing every problem they encounter. We cannot repair a family’s relationships, eliminate poverty, provide safe housing, erase trauma, or make an unjust circumstance just simply because a client has come to us for legal help. Trying to assume responsibility for all of those things would be impossible and might become another path toward the moral injury we hope to avoid.
But the conclusion need not be that anything outside the legal issue is someone else’s problem. Perhaps part of developing a professional identity is learning to occupy that space: seeing the whole problem while remaining clear about the part we can responsibly address.
Working in the Space Between Law and Justice
In our pro bono clinics, one simple framework we use when working with client is: Listen, Acknowledge, Advise, and What now? (A handy acronym: LAAW.)
We listen for more than the legally relevant facts: What does the client want, and why does it matter? We acknowledge what we have heard without promising that the law can provide a remedy. And we advise candidly. Sometimes that advice is hopeful. Sometimes it means explaining that the remedy the client wants does not exist, that a deadline has passed, or that the evidence is insufficient. Then comes “What now?”
The Model Rules describe a lawyer’s role as advisor as helping a client understand not only legal rights and obligations but also their “practical implications.”[4] Lawyers are trained to identify the next legal move. But sometimes there is no useful legal move.
“What now?” asks a broader but still professionally grounded question: Given the advice, what does the client do now? Perhaps there is a practical step the client can take or a community resource that can address something the law cannot. Maybe the lawyer can help the client distinguish what is within their control from what is not. And sometimes “what now?” means helping the client understand that there simply is no productive legal next step.
The point is not that LAAW, or any framework, resolves the distance between law and justice. The point is learning how to remain useful and human in that space without pretending that we can fix everything we see.
The Lawyers We Are Still Becoming
Pro bono clinics give students a place to encounter these tensions while their professional identities are taking shape. They learn skills, certainly. But they are also learning what kind of lawyers they want to be when the answer is not found in a statute, a case, or the next procedural step.
They can learn that a good lawyer takes the client’s problem seriously even when the law cannot solve it. That candor and empathy are not opposites. That recognizing an injustice does not require pretending to have a remedy for it. And that doing something meaningful for one person still matters even when the larger problem remains.
There is another side to professional identity formation, too. Those of us who have practiced for decades need students who encounter some of the law’s shortcomings with fresher eyes. Their willingness to ask Is this fair? Why is it this way? Is this just? can make us look again at things we may have simply started to accept.
The students in our clinics are becoming lawyers, but the rest of us are still becoming lawyers, too. As we help them learn to live with the distance between law and justice without becoming indifferent to it, their questions can help keep us from becoming indifferent ourselves.
[1] Peter Kraemer, Moral Injury: When Doing Your Job Feels Wrong, State Bar of Wisconsin, InsideTrack (Nov. 19, 2025), discussing Jennifer Lee Edmondson’s presentation on moral injury and the legal profession. https://www.wisbar.org/NewsPublications/InsideTrack/Pages/Article.aspx?Volume=17&ArticleID=31322.
[2] Id.
[3] American Bar Association, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Preamble & Scope, 1. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibility/publications/model_rules_of_professional_conduct/model_rules_of_professional_conduct_preamble_scope/.
[4] Id. at 2.
Angela Schultz serves as Assistant Dean for Public Service at Marquette University Law School, where she works with a team to oversee the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinics and other pro bono initiatives. She previously practiced elder and disability law and spent more than a decade working with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. She supervises legal clinics, mentors law students and volunteer lawyers, and has a particular interest in access to justice and the ethical and human dimensions of brief legal advice.
