My thanks and congratulations go out to Katie Lamb and everyone who worked with her to make Legal Aid’s first annual recruiting open house a success.
The event, which was held in the central office on January 11, drew in 39 law students, including 3 from KU and 5 who drove in 2 hours from MU. Legal Aid had 7 openings for new attorneys in 2009, including 3 newly created positions, based on new grant funding. For most of these openings we received 50 or more applications. So getting large numbers of applicants has not been a problem.
We have found, however, that often times we get the best, long-term attorneys when we hire people who have already clerked for us. When law students do internships, they give us the opportunity to see their commitment to serving low income people and their talent in representing our clients. So the open house focused on encouraging students to do internships with Legal Aid. The open house and our other recruiting efforts have generated enough interest that we will have to make the internship application process competitive over the summer this year.
Another goal of the open house was to increase awareness of job opportunities at Legal Aid among minority law students, to work toward increasing the diversity among our attorneys. The invitations to the open house originally went out to minority law student organizations at the three area law schools and was spread to other student organizations. As a result we had some good diversity among the participants.
The original idea for the open house came from Karen Hester, who is the Director of Career services at KU, but Katie and her volunteers did a great job of making it happen and giving the students a good experience. My hope is that this will become a Legal Aid tradition.
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