The full issue, in which this article as well as any footnotes and endnotes appears, can be found here.
The Commission on Law and Aging has welcomed three law student interns for the summer who will be introduced in this issue of BIFOCAL. COLA has a 30 plus year tradition of hosting interns. Erica Costello has taken on responsibility for recruiting interns, something I enjoyed doing for about a decade. The interns greatly expand our ability to get research done, creating new 50 state surveys on critical issues, and updating our resources. The resources help us to understand the big picture of the law across the country and are used by researchers and by states when looking at what other states have done in updating laws. We couldn’t do what we do without our student interns.
I am at the ABA doing what love because of a summer internship. The legal employment market was dismal the year I started law school. Despite a dozen interviews, I didn’t receive a paid offer for that summer. Few in my class did. The University of Louisville School of Law required 30 or more hours of pro-bono work to graduate, a rare requirement in 1997. I decided that summer would be a good time to fulfill that requirement.
I reached out to the Fayette County Public Defender’s office. I was living in Lexington, Kentucky at the time. The answer was, “we have more volunteer clerks than attorneys this summer, but Jerry Smith at Central Kentucky Legal Services (CKLS) is still looking.” Jerry invited me in for an interview. He was a civil legal aid legend, and he had been there when Legal Service Corporation was formed and first started funding civil legal aid programs. He was kind, polite and inspiring. He only had one condition, that I agree to come into the office two full days a week, until I decided I was done for the summer.
I figured I would knock out the hours I needed in 2-3 weeks and spend the rest of the summer at the pool. My goal in going to law school was to practice construction defects, planning, zoning, and land use law, this was just checking something off the list to get there. Little did I know a volunteer internship would change the course of my life.