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When Anyiah Daniel signed up for Barnes & Thornburg’s internship program during her senior year as a John Adams High School student, she admits she didn’t know much about it.
“I decided to take the risk,” Daniel, now a sophomore at Howard University, said. “I was pretty nervous.”
Barnes & Thornburg hosts the internship program — now in its third year — in partnership with South Bend Community Schools/Clay High School Career and Technical Education to expose participants to the legal industry.
According to the firm, students spend one afternoon a month learning about different careers in the legal field, including attorneys, legal administrative assistants, paralegals, operations and marketing. They also take field trips to the St. Joseph County and federal courthouses and meet with judges, detectives and prosecutors. The program culminates with a mini graduation ceremony at the firm’s South Bend office.
Daniel was part of the CTE program, with an interest in criminal justice. A teacher in that program told her about the Barnes internship.
Daniel said her interest in law and criminal justice, and the possibility of becoming a defense attorney, was inspired in part by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
She said views attorneys as “counselors for the community.”
“I wanted to represent the community in the courtroom,” Daniel said.
Reaching students early
The program began when Tim Maher, a partner in Barnes & Thornburg’s South Bend office, spoke with St. Joseph Circuit Court Magistrate Judge Andre Gammage about finding diversity opportunities at the firm’s office. The two talked about how maybe the firm shouldn’t wait until law school to reach out to students.
“Basically, we built a program from scratch that we continue to refine,” Maher said.
Through the internship, Barnes & Thornburg attorneys and nonattorneys talk to students about their jobs. The idea, Maher said, is to give the students a sense of their experiences and let them know that the law and a legal career is accessible for everyone.
In the program’s first year, there were four students. Maher said that number grew to nine in the second year, with 13 this year. The firm has a target of about 10 students each year.
In last year’s program, Maher said many of the students showed a particular interest in law enforcement.
A lot of the students in the program are minorities, Maher added, so it’s important to for them to see someone in the legal or criminal justice field who looks like them.
Gammage said the goal is to expose students to things, like arraignment hearings, that they may not have known about the legal process.
The students get to see first-hand how due process works when they attend arraignments and talk to legal and criminal justice professionals about court proceedings.
“I thought it would be great to introduce students so that they had access to all the legal fields,” he said.
Asking questions
Before each field trip, students are provided with homework and are expected to have at least one question prepared for the people they meet, Maher explained.
“We try to just start a dialogue,” he said.
The program is fairly informal, Maher continued — not rigid, and spread out over eight separate weeks through the school year, running from September through April.
“We just try to normalize this system for them and help them understand how it works,” he said.
Maher’s hope, he said, is that other industries in the South Bend area can adopt similar programs to introduce students to their fields.
Gammage said some of the questions students have had for attorneys, prosecutors and other professionals include wanting to know how they arrived at their current jobs and where they attended school.
Also, students learn job interviewing skills.
Gammage’s own first exposure to law came in high school, just like the students in the program. He took a criminal justice class and was intrigued by it.
It’s significant for students in the firm’s program to be able to come into the office and be treated with respect, Gammage added.
“Their confidence goes sky high. That comes from them. That comes from the students,” he said.
Also as part of the program, Barnes & Thornburg provides students with uniforms and new shoes.
That’s important, Gammage noted, because some of the students don’t know what they are supposed to wear in an office environment.
He called it inspiring and heart-warming to hear students talk about their experiences in the program, adding that he and Barnes & Thornburg staff stay in touch with program graduates.
“We tell them, ‘This is not a one-shot deal,’” Gammage said.
Learning the system
Daniel described her time in the internship program as an eye-opening experience, saying it was the equivalent of job shadowing in several different fields.
She mentioned Maher, Gammage and Amy Kintz, Barnes & Thornburg’s senior marketing services manager, as some of the people she got to meet who were helpful in answering questions.
St. Joseph County Prosecutor Ken Cotter hired Daniel for a summer internship in his office and called her a great employee.
“Hopefully this is an area where she hadn’t thought about it, but now she will,” Cotter said.
When students in the Barnes & Thornburg program came to his office, Cotter said a lot of them were more interested in the investigative side of things than the day-to-day work of a county prosecutor.
Students were particularly interested in wanting to know how people in the legal system are to trying to get justice, and whether the system really works or not.
Cotter said he feels the students came away from the experience feeling better about the system and how it works.
For Daniel, law school is an option for her after she completes her undergraduate degree in criminology at Howard.
She said she’s also considered becoming a Federal Bureau of Investigation specialist.•
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