Earn Valuable Experience as an Intern With the ABA

The opportunity to do interesting law-related work in a dynamic setting is available through internships with the American Bar Association’s Washington, D.C., and Chicago offices.

Internships with ABA entities are open to law students throughout the summer or school year and provide students with substantial experience and exposure to interesting areas of law.

Alexandra Lewis, a second-year student at the Georgetown University Law Center, spent last summer in Washington as an intern for the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI), which advises emerging democracies that are developing new Western-based legal systems.

Lewis’ role, which she describes as "policy heavy," was twofold. First, legislators from Central European countries often provided CEELI’s liaison offices with proposed legislation. After the legislation was translated into English and arrived in the ABA’s Washington office, she distributed it to lawyers, judges, and law professors who volunteer for CEELI. She was then responsible for putting together a final report encompassing their comments.

In addition to proposed legislation, Lewis helped create reports on issues that had not yet been brought forth for legislation. She worked mainly on family law issues, including a draft amendment in Macedonia proposing to eliminate private prosecution for domestic violence. Lewis says that private prosecution, a procedure where an individual pays the government to prosecute the case, deterred victims from bringing their cases to court and resulted in only one domestic violence prosecution in the country last year.

"It was intimidating to realize that I got to play a role, however tiny, in something that will never happen again," Lewis says of her work with countries that are entirely recreating their legal codes. "To be able to participate in that after one year of law school is amazing."

The opportunity to do substantive work is something that separates ABA internships from some others. "A lot of Capitol Hill internships sound glamorous, but you end up making copies and deliveries," says R. Larson Frisby, internship coordinator for the ABA’s Governmental Affairs Office. "Here, the work is as mutually beneficial as possible."

Although some internships include a stipend or partial funding, they are largely unpaid. Students, however, may be able to get academic credit for their experience or a stipend through their law school.

Though the work may be unpaid, the experience is both substantive and a résumé builder, helping some students get interviews for paying positions the following summer. Participating in on-campus recruiting this fall, Lewis found that many employers were interested in her summer experience at CEELI. One senior partner at a firm she interviewed with may even become involved with the program as a volunteer attorney.

"I haven’t had an interview yet where [employers] haven’t asked about it," Lewis says.

Check out the available internships listed here, or log onto the ABA’s web site at www.abanet. org/hr/interns/home.html. •

Kurt Mullen

Kurt Mullen is a second-year student at Boston College Law School.