Some in-house law departments assume that hosting a summer intern program for any law students, much less diverse law students, is a daunting task. Some of the perceived hurdles are a lack of dedicated resources, infrastructure, time and recruitment know-how for a diverse pool of candidates. Given these challenges, it is easy to see why an in-house department may forgo a summer program. However, if you have one individual who has the interest and is willing to champion for and take on the responsibility of initiating the program, your company can have a sustainable diverse summer program. Here are some tips for creating a diverse summer program:

• Leverage alignment. A vital step is to develop a program that fits your department. In the current business environment, it will be rare for a company/law department not to have a written diversity and inclusion statement. Therefore, a preliminary step is to review your law department's/company's written diversity statement. This review will give you an understanding of your law department's commitment to diversity, as well as help you identify whether a diversity summer program aligns with that diversity position. If your department has articulated a goal of increasing the diversity of its staff, then you can easily make the case that the implementation of a diverse summer program is a valuable opportunity for your department to expand its diversity efforts at the pipeline level.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]