To: Internship Supervisor

To: Internship Supervisor

Fr: John O. Woodruff, Esq., Chair, Legal Studies Program

______

Thank you for agreeing to serve as an Internship Supervisor. In order to help you understand the nature of the American Bar Association’s requirements for internships for legal studies programs, I am providing the following which has been excerpted from ABA Approval: A Reference Manual for Legal Assistant Educators published by the ABA Standing Committee on Paralegal Education.

“Internships are a valuable part of most paralegal programs, especially for those students who have not worked in the legal environment. Internships give students practical work experience that enriches their paralegal education and demonstrates to them how their newly gained knowledge and skills are applied in real life. Internships build students’ confidence and enhance their qualifications for paralegal positions when they graduate.

The ABA encourages programs to offer internships and considers them a legalspecialty course if they … emphasize legal assistant skills, forms, documents, procedures, and legal principles and theories. Most well-designed and monitored internships meet these criteria. Student interns work in one or more specific areas of law practice, e.g., an intern in the public defender's office is gaining experience in criminal law, an intern in a plaintiff personal injury firm is working in civil tort litigation. Student interns that are handling basic entry-level paralegal work are meeting … the definition by learning skills, forms, document and procedures. And of course these skills are pertinent to the job market.

If interns are not placed specifically to do paralegal work or if they are not performing tasks that would normally be done by an entry-level or student paralegal, the internship does not qualify. For example, if the student is answering telephones, sorting mail and copying, the internship does not qualify. While some internships, and some paralegal positions, require legal assistants to perform these clerical tasks on occasion, they should not be the predominate work of the student intern.

The [program’s] internship advisor should also monitor each internship placement regularly throughout the course of the internship experience. Monitoring should consist of some or all of the following measures:

1. visiting internship sponsors on the level of work, supervision and the like;

2. calling intern sponsors periodically to discuss the intern's performance;

3. [reviewing written reports] by the intern of specific activities on the job and the amount of time spent;

4. [conducting] regular individual meetings with the intern to discuss the experience;

5. [conducting] a meeting of all interns to discuss their work and any issues they want help in resolving.

Evaluation of interns should also be part of the program. Sponsors should be required to evaluate student performance at the end of the experience. Sponsors should evaluate students' attendance, attitude, the quality of their work, their productivity, their willingness to take on new assignments and tasks, and their progress over the course of their internship experience….

[The Guidelines] also require that there be a clear understanding among the parties involved in the internship: the program, the student and the sponsor. The students must understand their obligation to attend their internships just as they would a paid position, to carry out all responsibilities to the best of their ability and to respect confidential and other tents of ethics. Sponsors must assign students relevant work and supervise and evaluate them properly. The program must monitor the placement to see that it is working effectively and must intervene if the needed to resolve problems. Sometimes students and sponsors are not well matched and the student has to be moved to another sponsorship. Sometimes students are not assigned relevant tasks that will help them to build their skills and confidence as a paralegal, and advisors have to work with the sponsors to rectify this situation.

[The Guidelines] also provide that interns must do work that emphasizes paralegal skills and competencies. Meeting this requirement can facilitated by the intern advisor making clear to their potential sponsor what is expected in terms of assignments given to the intern. Most good programs distribute a list of entry-level paralegal functions that interns can perform and state explicitly that interns should not be delegated purely clerical or secretarial work. Interns who spend a substantial amount of time answering telephones, coping long documents, and filing material in client files are not gaining the experience they need and are not doing work that merits the award of credit as a legal specialty class. Good communication, monitoring, intervention, if necessary, and post-internship evaluation provide some assurance that relevant work is being done.”