APPLICATIONS ACCEPTED BEGINNING 1/1/12
Law Student Summer Internship Program 2012
Pittsburgh Office
May 29-August 3, 2012
Neighborhood Legal Services Association (NLSA) is a private, non-profit Pennsylvania corporation established in 1966 to provide free legal services in civil cases to low-income people. The program serves the residents of four counties in Western Pennsylvania. The program's mission is to meet the civil legal needs of the poor and vulnerable in our community through effective legal representation and education.
Intern program:
We want to help you learn how to be a lawyer. Our goal is to provide an intensive hands-on experience which exposes aspiring lawyers to a range of legal issues and remedies. The most significant tasks:
● Students will participate in a summer Magisterial District Judge project in which they will interview and advise clients with Landlord Tenant problems who call in to the NLSA Helpline. Students will help prepare the clients for Landlord Tenant hearings and if the student is certified, he/she may represent clients at those hearings and at motions and arbitration hearings in Common Pleas court.
● In addition to those housing-related cases, the students will:
– assist at the evening clinics on consumer and family law, and
– observe the wide range of NLSA services by accompanying NLSA attorneys to court.
● Students will help to plan and carry out NLSA’s participation in the downtown
Gallery Crawl on July 13, 2012. This is an opportunity to use your creative talents and expand your ideas about how to look at the legal system and inform and engage the public.
The educational aspects of the program include three days of orientation during which students are introduced to the legal fundamentals of landlord tenant, evidentiary matters and client interviewing and negotiation. At weekly meetings, discussion of the cases and issues handled the previous week furthers the intern’s education in both substantive and procedural law. There are occasional "lunch and learn" meetings featuring speakers on a variety of legal topics. In 2011, the Lunch and Learn sessions included a meeting with Federal District Court judge Donetta Ambrose, a Q&A session with Dennis Lauria from the Allegheny County Health Department, and Professor Sheila Martinez-Velez from Pitt Law School discussing immigration issues.
At all times interns will be trained and supervised by staff attorneys at NLSA. This training will include interviewing, counseling, fact gathering, drafting, witness preparation, case analysis, and litigation. The students will learn about poverty law issues, lawyering skills, ethics, and professional conduct by working side by side with attorneys who have dedicated their professional careers to serving others.
Some comments from interns in previous years:
● “This definitely turned out to be a beneficial and intense learning experience. The best experience I have had during law school.”
● “I was very impressed with this intern program. Expectations were very clear and the orientation covered materials effectively. Staff was very helpful and accessible, and it was nice to be given real clients and responsibility.”
● “This summer was bursting with first times. The first time I saw a Landlord Tenant complaint. The first time I witnessed a trial. The first time I met with a client. The first time I gave advice without hesitation. The first time I gave a client bad news. The first time that I gave a client good news. These new experiences made this internship exciting and adrenaline packed, but what made this internship valuable and not just memorable was the fact that for every first time there was a second time and a third and a fourth. We were allowed to practice, to fix our mistakes, and to make some more!”
● “My first week here I got a case and was at the district judge a few days later....I used my new found lawyer voice to object to hearsay in the landlord’s case, my client paid the rent she did owe and stayed in the apartment. When we walked out of court she gave me an excited hug, and I knew that I was going to like working here.”
● “The attorneys (and staff and students) I worked with were incredibly helpful and created a nurturing, but demanding, work environment. I learned much more, and more quickly, than in the classroom, and feel I will be a much more effective advocate and complete lawyer due to my time here.”
● “The summer has been a great experience–not only because I learned a lot about the law, but because it allowed me to build confidence and actually impact people’s lives. I can’t think of another internship program I could have done after my first year of law school that could compare with the experience I got at NLSA this summer. Thank you!”
Will you be paid for working here?
The NLSA interns have always been volunteers, some of whom have received funding from other sources.
Fellowships:
If we are not able to obtain funding to pay all the summer interns, NLSA will continue, as we have in past years, to actively seek fellowships and grants for its summer students, and we will cooperate with any student accepted into the summer intern program to help him or her apply for funding to work here.
Some possible sources of funding include:
●Martin Luther King, Jr. Summer Intern Program:
http://www.palegalservices.org/mlk_program.htm
●K& L Gates
http://www.klgates.com/lawstudents/studentspublicservice/fellowship
●Equal Justice Works:
http://www.equaljusticeworks.org/programs/summercorps/general
●Equal Justice America:
http://www.equaljusticeamerica.org/ApplyForFellowship.htm
●Site listing many summer grant programs:
http://pslawnet.org/
●University of Pittsburgh Law School:
http://students.law.pitt.edu/plisf/
●Duquesne Law School:
http://www.duq.edu/law/student-services/organizations/pila.cfm
●The public interest program at your law school
How to apply:
Applications may be submitted after January 1, 2012. There is no deadline to apply but offers will be made on a rolling basis. Interviews will be offered to suitable applicants and may be conducted in person or over the phone. Preference is given to law students who are eligible to appear in court pursuant to Pa. Bar Admission Rule 321.
For more information contact Attorney Catherine Martin at martinc@nlsa.us.
To apply, email her a cover letter, unofficial transcript and resume. We will send you a brief writing project to complete and return to us. This project should take you no more than one hour from start to finish, and is designed to take the place of a writing sample.
