by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
On the fifth floor of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid’s Adams Street building, you will find a dozen law students tapping away at their computers or engrossed in a stack of thick legal books. Most are rising second and third-year students from Florida Coastal School of Law but these aren’t your average interns.
You won’t find them answering the phones or fetching Starbucks and dry cleaning for the senior attorneys. You also won’t find them doing hours upon hours of endless research with no idea how the case turned out.
These interns are really learning how to be attorneys and they are doing it for free.
Early this spring, JALA consumer law attorney April Charney sent out an e-mail to Florida Coastal students via the school’s career services office. The e-mail advertised a dire need for summer interns at the legal aid office. Little did the students know that when they showed up for their interviews they would be put to work the same day.
“Usually in an interview you think that you will go away and they will let you know,” Charney said.
Not so for Charney. She had other plans for her new interns. Charney said during the interviews she would ask the incoming intern how long they were able to work that day and then would give them their first case to work on.
Charney went on a hiring spree and now has 12 volunteer and three paid interns all working on cases under her supervision. She said she would have hired more but ran out of desk and office space.
While many law firms’ interns never leave their desk and mainly do only research the entire summer, Charney’s interns are researching as well as writing memos and preparing motions. And when Charney goes to court to argue a motion, the interns are right there in the front row watching their hard work in action.
Charney said she wants her interns to see the entire process of their cases.
For intern John Owens, a Florida Coastal student heading into his second year, his volunteer time at JALA has already paid off in knowledge gained. Owens is working on a Chapter 13 bankruptcy case, a topic he hasn’t covered much of yet in school.
“I have actually learned more about this topic in the 15 hours that I have been here than I have in two semesters at law school,” he said.
Taylor Speer, another second-year student at Florida Coastal, said he has also found his interning experience at JALA to be a huge learning experience.
“I think that April has given me a lot of opportunities to do things that will really make me a better candidate for a job in the future,” he said.
Speer said he has interned at other law firms where he acted as a “runner,” an experience he said was less than educational or thrilling.
“Anything can be better than running,” said Speer. “I got zero experience running for a law firm. I got to see how hard they worked so at least I got an understanding of what kind of commitment I was going to have to commit in the future.”
At JALA, he is working on real cases that he was given during his job interview a few weeks ago. He said this internship is completely opposite of his days as a runner because he feels like an integral part of what he is working on.
“I recently wrote a memo regarding a discovery issue and with April’s help it is going to be turned into a motion to develop discovery and we are going for a hearing with the judge based on what I wrote,” he said. “I got to see something from start to finish. I got to see an issue, I got to write about it and now I am going to hear April argue it. For me that is totally awesome and I am very excited about it.”
For many lawyers, having a dozen or so interns under their direct supervision might seem like a disaster waiting to happen. But it seems that Charney has the patience of a Saint when it comes to her young legal team. Charney said this is a win-win situation. It is a chance for her to get help with her mountainous caseload and an opportunity to give the students a chance to gain real world legal experience.
“I have high hopes that this will turn into a regular program,” she said. “There is a limit to how many I
can actively supervise but I am easily managing this number.”
Though much of her day is now taken up with answering the interns’ e-mails and inquisitive office visits, Charney said “the benefits far outweigh
the hassle.”
“I welcome the hassle because I feed off of their energy and enthusiasm and in return I get a good product,” she said.
Though Charney’s interns are working without pay or class credits, she said she hopes that the program can be extended in the future to offer both.