You provide clinical consultation to hospitals and health systems. As a Clinical Consultant, you're reviewing cases, advising on protocols, and helping organizations improve patient outcomes through better clinical practices. It's advisory work that requires deep expertise.
Clinical law professors run law school clinics where students represent real clients under faculty supervision—the educational equivalent of a teaching hospital. You're managing active casework while also supervising students, teaching legal skills, and often handling the administrative complexity of running a functioning legal practice within an academic institution.
The dual obligation to clients and to students creates genuine tension. Clients need competent representation; students need learning opportunities that sometimes involve supervised mistakes. Calibrating when to step in and when to let a student navigate is a constant judgment call that experienced clinical faculty develop over years.
People who tend to thrive have deep commitment to experiential legal education and genuine satisfaction in developing new lawyers. If you're a practicing attorney who finds mentorship as rewarding as litigation or counseling, and if you care about the specific populations your clinic serves—immigrants, prisoners, small businesses, environmental justice communities—clinical teaching tends to be an unusually rich integration of practice and education. The academic service component (committees, scholarship expectations) varies by institution.
Where this role sits in the broader career landscape — and where it can take you.
Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
You provide clinical consultation to hospitals and health systems. As a Clinical Consultant, you're reviewing cases, advising on protocols, and helping organizations improve patient outcomes through better clinical practices. It's advisory work that requires deep expertise.
Median pay for a Clinical Law Professor is about $127K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $58K to $208K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Speaking, Reading Comprehension, Learning Strategies, Active Listening, and Instructing.
Most people in this role hold a doctoral degree.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 2.2% through 2034, with roughly 22,800 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Law Lecturer, Law Professor, and Law Instructor.
Truest gives you tools to understand your strengths, explore roles that fit, and plan your next move.
Explore Truest career tools