A Systematic Review of Literature on Clinical Legal Education: A Tool for Researchers in Responding to an Explosion of Clinical Scholarship

Identifying where my research, on influential factors to consider in the establishment and sustainability of clinical legal education programmes, fitted within the existing clinical scholarship was by no means an easy task hence the decision to undertake a systematic review of literature. The current explosion of clinical scholarship seem to have been influenced by Jerome Frank’s call for reform in legal education when in 1933, he asked “Why not a Clinical-Lawyer School?” (Frank, 1933) A constant construction of clinical scholarship is critical in understanding many of the facets of clinical legal education so as to sustain clinical programmes and foster new ones. Yet a ‘boom’ in literature scares the life out of many a scholar and novice researchers when attempting to find articles that specifically answer research questions. This paper therefore offers guidance in conducting a systematic literature review on clinical legal education through the use of a Grounded Theory methodology. Through a five- stage process that involved the formulation of a research question and protocol; the use of systematic methods to identify, select and critically appraise relevant journal articles, this paper outlines each formal methodological step in identifying and selecting journal articles for inclusion in answering the following research question: [What factors are influential in the establishment and sustainability of clinical legal education programmes in Zimbabwe?] . The numbers of selected articles were presented in a PRISMA flow diagram. A final selection of 91 journal articles was juxtaposed; integrated and tabulated to produce an overarching explanation which attempts to account for the range of findings (Mays et al., 2005a) of the review. Through the process of synthesis, I endeavoured to contribute significant added value to my review through an examination of the composite evidence base for similarities of the articles, whether related to the homogeneity or indeed their relatedness of findings. The type of epistemology I favour for my research has also been influenced (Carter and Little, 2007) partly by the methods and findings undertaken in this review. The paper concludes by suggesting that a systematic review method, rather than a narrative review, should be a researcher’s tool in responding to an explosion of clinical scholarship. Keywords – Boolean logic; Boolean operators; database selection; record keeping; clinical legal education; systematic review of literature; narrative review; Zimbabwe


INTRODUCTION
Knowing what information already exists before answering a research question is as important as successfully completing a given research project, hence the need for a literature review of the area under research. Different types of literature reviews exist but two are commonly used in research, i.e. narrative reviews and systematic reviews. According to Kirkevold (1997), a Narrative Review summarises different primary studies from which conclusions may be drawn into a holistic interpretation contributed by the reviewer's own experience, existing theories and models. On the other hand, a Systematic Review of literature is a type of literature review that is designed to methodologically locate, appraise and synthesise the best available literature that can be used to answer a specific research question (Boland et al., 2014).
The main purpose for undertaking a Systematic Review of literature for my research on influential factors to consider in the establishment and sustainability of clinical programmes within law, schools was to investigate the terrain and assess the positive and negative aspects of the Zimbabwean context in relation to clinical programmes.

WHY A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF LITERATURE?
While I accept that Narrative Reviews have an important role in research because they provide readers with an up to-date knowledge to answer specific topic or theme, they do not describe the methodological approach that would permit the minimisation of the risk of bias in selecting journal articles that answer a research question. The freedom to unsystematically pick and choose papers that support one's view is clearly a biased approach and using a review that has any kind of bias can lead to inconclusive findings. Situating the research project in the literature was by no means an easy task and more often than not, as doctoral researchers, we are more likely to fall into the trap of reading and reading without writing, especially where a lot of material has been written on the area of research. In order that I As descriptive as they seem to be in their various responses to Frank's question, clinical researchers constantly argue that every law school should have a clinical component within its legal education curriculum, staffed by clinicians with the experience in the practice of law for the purpose of producing lawyers fit for practice. Almost 82 years on, the debate by the legal profession, the law faculty, the law students and society rages on. Stakeholders are now forced to question with greater intensity whether or not the training of future lawyers prepares them adequately for the future practice of law. As such, I ended up having to deal with a large volume of literature that made keeping up with research evidence in this area of law an impossible feat. It is not unusual for the number of published papers in clinical legal education to run into several thousands. It is, therefore, this explosion in clinical legal education publishing that made me decide to undertake a Systematic Review of literature in order to keep up with research evidence.

Systematic Review Aims
The Systematic Review process I undertook aimed at: 1. establishing whether or not there has been any research on clinical legal education from a Zimbabwean context to avoid reinventing the wheel;

Systematic Review Method
In order to locate literature relevant in answering my research question, I adopted a search strategy that involved a five-stage iterative process; DEFINE; SEARCH; SELECT; ANALYSE and PRESENT, using a Grounded Theory method that aids understanding of the place of a Systematic Review in research (Webster and Watson, 2002). The first three stages were part of a search strategy that followed a specific method in locating existing studies; in selecting and evaluating articles in such a way that "allows reasonably clear conclusions to be reached about what is and is not known." (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009: 671). The ANALYSE and PRESENT stages are discussed in a separate paper that describes a process of analysis and synthesis of the selected journal articles by reporting and discussing findings of the review using a Grounded Theory approach (Mkwebu, 2016, in preparation).

Research question formulation
I found out that most structures for formulating questions use the health services research question formulation framework, patient-intervention-comparison-outcome (PICO). I considered this framework. I decided against the use of PICO for two reasons. First, PICO is mostly used in health services research. My research on law clinics is purely social scientific in nature. Secondly, there is an alternative structure within the social sciences, i.e. the SPICE framework (Booth, 2006). I chose the SPICE framework because clinical legal education is a social science subject. The SPICE mnemonic was a suitable framework because it recognises that evaluations within social science areas of research are typically subjective and require definition of the specific stakeholder view (Booth, 2006  My research question was therefore defined in terms of its components according to five common features as set out in the SPICE framework.

Reputable data sources and search tools
My research on legal education and professional skills considers law in the context of broader social and economic issues; hence it is a socio-legal study. From that perspective, it is interdisciplinary and equally a human and social science study that reflects a multidisciplinary research approach on law, on education and on professional skills. It is this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach in my research that justified the selection of legal and non-legal databases suitable to retrieve clinical scholarship that would be relevant in answering my research question. Besides the online legal databases such as Hein Online, LexisNexis, Lawtel and Westlaw, other databases outside of law that provide reputable sources proved difficult to find. The non-legal database, Web of Knowledge (Web of Science) proved valuable as a premier research platform for information in the social sciences, arts and humanities and provided valuable information on clinical legal education.

Performing the search
The search conducted for this particular review was rigorous, time consuming and extremely episodic. At first, I was tempted to type into the databases, the whole research question as it was. The databases returned no results because they could not make sense of the whole sentence. It was only when I decided to break down my research question into key words and turn them into searchable terms and phrases that I began to retrieve journal articles from the databases.

Identifying key words
Clinical legal education is referred to by different terms that essentially mean one and the same thing such as law clinic, clinical programme, student law office, clinical legal education programme, legal aid clinic and clinic. To find out more about that one programme called clinical legal education there had to be at least a further five terms or phrases that I had to use. This was the most challenging aspect of the first stage of the Systematic Review until I decided to seek help. Apart from the regular support and suggestions by my PhD supervisor, I benefited immensely from the support of the members of the library team at the University of Northumbria's City Campus library who offered guidance on planning the review process. An example of a key phrase I coined for the review following a one to one session with a librarian was clinical legal education.

Conceptualising the research question
The research question was divided into 3 separate concepts: • Topic 1 (establishment/development/sustainability of clinical legal education) • Topic 2 (management of a law clinic) • Topic 3 (pedagogy of a law clinic) Synonyms were written down for each topic: • Topic 1 -establishment of clinical legal education (start, initiation, formation, inception, creation, construction, foundation); development of clinical legal education (growth, expansion, evolution, progress, spread); sustainability of clinical legal education (defendable, defensible, justifiable, maintainable, supportable, continuity, consistency, persistence, perseverance) • Topic 2 -management of a law clinic (administration, managing, running, organising) • Topic 3 -pedagogy of a law clinic (direction, indoctrination, guidance, teaching, education, enlightenment, learning, instruction, scholarship, tuition, training, tutoring, study, apprenticeship, coaching) This process allowed me to adopt a search strategy that involved the breaking down of the review question into searchable keywords and search terms; the application of an eligibility criteria and the adoption of an inclusion and exclusion process as follows: The journal articles were subjected to a de-duplication process in which duplicates were identified and removed. This stage was followed by a further two-stage process that included, firstly, the screening of titles and abstracts and secondly, the selection of full-text journal articles for inclusion in the review. The de-duplication process left 759 journal articles to be screened for inclusion. These journal articles were subjected to an analysis of their titles and abstracts for relevance in answering the research question. Through an examination of the titles and abstracts and a reading of the introductions and conclusions of this batch of papers, 503 journal articles were excluded. This is because their contents did not relate to my research area and their findings were not relevant to the aims and objectives of my review.
The screening stage resulted in 256 journal articles being obtained and subjected to further scrutiny in the second stage which involved obtaining full-texts of these journal articles. These articles were subjected to further scrutiny in the selection stage to determine the extent to which they addressed factors that are influential in the establishment and sustainability of clinical legal education programmes within law schools. The aim of this review was not to find articles that discuss the entire broader topic of experiential learning and teaching per se. It is accepted that clinical legal education literature can be viewed through the lens of major differences in theory and approach, this review did not specifically set to address those differences that form distinct poles on various continuums such as, among others, very specific learning objectives or more general learning objectives; classroom student learning or field placements student learning.
The review aimed at retrieving articles that have identified those crucial factors we ought to take into consideration when we plan to create clinical programmes or    As can be seen from the table above, the period from the 1950s up to about the beginning of the millennium, clinical scholarship has been about clinic outside of Asia and Africa but more so from the United States followed by Australia and Europe within the decade leading to the millennium. However, this trend seems to be changing with more clinics created globally. There is an interesting trend in the surge of evidence of clinical activity between 2001 and 2010 from all regions including Asia and Africa. As we all know, this was a period of an economic recession and it could be that as people were losing jobs, law firms closing offices and governments streamlining their spending budgets, the demand for free legal advice became higher than ever before and inevitably led to a surge in the creation of clinical programmes as an alternative avenue for legal services delivery. Even   Such an approach leads to citation bias. While we have to applaud colleagues from North America for undertaking research on the clinical movement and in the process riding high on the research treadmill, we need to encourage each other to publish more on the clinic where we are based and value such research.
There seems to be a growing interest in clinical legal education topics, particularly around the factors we should consider relevant in the establishment and sustainability of clinical programmes within law schools. A closer look at the table below is testimony to this assertion None of the articles reviewed were from members affiliated with the institution.
Again there seem to be no bias in the Clinical Law Review's selection of articles for publication. A further examination of the information from the table above has also revealed an interesting trend. While there is a presumption that law reviews publish more articles from colleagues at their own mother institutions than from academics and practitioners based in other law schools, the twelve articles published in the Clinical Law Review (three by one author and nine by others) have shown that all the ten authors whose work has been published by the review are from outside New York University but all are based in the United States. These highly cited authors include, among others, Peter A. Joy (1998,2004,2006); Peggy Maisel (2008) This Systematic Review did not aim solely to identify and merely bring together relevant clinical legal education papers that specifically identified and discussed those factors relevant in the establishment and sustainability of clinical programmes.
Selected journal articles from the five databases were juxtaposed through a process of synthesis to identify patterns and direction in findings. The selected articles were integrated and tabulated to produce an overarching explanation which attempts to account for the range of findings (Mays et al., 2005a). The example below of a categorised article is representative of all of the 91 articles selected for the review. The types of articles selected are qualitative in nature. They use a Case Study methodology and adopt an observational approach with a descriptive twist to their aims and their findings. In the process, they contributed to an added value of the Case Study methodology as a research strategy to be adopted for the completion of my research on clinical legal education, particularly, the identification of the factors that are influential in the establishment and sustainability of clinical programmes.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
Having gone through how being systematic and quantitative a Systematic Review process can be; having created and developed a personal review database; having put all the information about my selected clinical scholarship into the database and having used that information to create some tables, this paper has discussed, among other things, the various stages in which the method of searching and selecting relevant articles was conducted. The process involved dealing with actual numbers.
Relevant journal articles were counted and summary tables were constructed. As can be seen, the whole process involved a transition from the systematic to the quantitative and from the quantitative to the qualitative making it possible for me to notice patterns and to strategically position myself to map out the gaps in knowledge; identify exactly where those gaps are and suggest ways in which we can address those gaps now or indeed in the future. So based on the method discussed in this paper and the assessment of the selected journal articles relevant in answering the research question on the factors we ought to consider relevant in the establishment and sustainability of clinical legal education programmes, the next paper, Mkwebu (2016, in preparation) will describe how a Systematic Review process was combined with a Grounded Theory method to form a nexus that identified the following: • What is known (i.e. existing knowledge) • What is unknown (i.e. the knowledge gaps) • How I to contribute to knowledge (i.e. suggestions for filling in the knowledge gaps)

CONCLUSION
To aid my understanding of various worldviews on clinical legal education in general and on the influential factors in the establishment and sustainability of clinical legal education in particular, a Systematic Review of literature became a key method for "locating, appraising, synthesising and reporting best evidence" (Briner et al., 2009: 24). Besides, there is a general agreement that the right method is the one that will answer the research question (Holloway and Todres, 2003) even though it may not always be so obvious. Conducting a Systematic Review of literature was a mammoth task that required a focused effort to complete. Even though I endured months of laborious and tedious construction of the review, it later became apparent that Systematic Reviews are a wise investment of time when researching on clinical legal education as opposed to the more traditional Narrative Reviews that have the freedom to unsystematically pick and choose papers that support one's view; itself a clearly biased approach.