Internships Change Lives

• Date: 01 July 2023

Bifocal July - August 2023 Vol. 44, No. 6

121

Internships Change Lives

By David Godfrey, JD., Director ABA

Commission on Law and Aging

three law student interns for the summer who

The Commission on Law and Aging has welcomed

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 work I 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.

The next thing I knew it was the end of the summer,

and I had completed 120 hours, four times the required

30 hours. I learned two important things that summer.

That I was not cut out to practice family law. And I fell

in love with elder law. The office had an elder law

attorney, funded by the local Area Agency on Aging

under the Older Americans Act. Karen Jones provided

direct legal assistance to clients aged 60 and older.

Karen took me under her wing and gave me interesting

things to do. I enjoyed working with the clients. Older

adults had long been a part of my life with

grandparents and a great-grandmother around the

corner when I was growing up. I had been a family

caregiver and had studied the ethical issues of health

care decision making in modern health care in

undergrad.

I was hooked, the second summer of law school CKLS

hired me as a paid intern. By mid-summer I was doing

client intake interviews. I helped out on the family law

practice, but my interest was clearly in aging. In

January of my third and final year of Law School,

Karen emailed asking me to send a resume and cover

letter to the Access to Justice Foundation. I did, and by

the end of February I had a firm job offer to start in

May. I was there over nine years, before moving onto

the Commission on Law and Aging. I will mark 15

years here in December.

That summer internship 26 years ago changed the

course of my life. The work was about helping