Supporting interns achieving excellence
Luke Malek
No matter what business you’re in, creating passionate and hard working employees requires care and intention from the leadership team. Now is the perfect time for law firms and other professional businesses to revamp their summer internship programs to build something that creates great returns not only for the intern but the organization as well.
While there are several factors that contribute to creating a successful and thriving law practice, a main one for our firm is our comprehensive internship program where we support our interns as they learn to achieve excellence in the field of law. In general, we adhere to three main principles in our internship program: dispelling the “interns just get coffee” status quo, prioritizing mentorship and working to foster a space where we grow, collaborate and learn from each other.
Interns do more than just get coffee.
We like to joke that at Smith + Malek, everybody gets their own coffee. From their first day, our interns are valued members of the team. They will be present on calls with a client, research, work on initial drafts of internal and client-facing memos, and draft an assortment of different legal documents. By actively engaging with interns, they develop their legal skills outside of the classroom as they help our team solve real-world problems for our clients.
Mentors matter.
We pair each intern with a mentor. By prioritizing mentorship, interns are provided with in-depth — and real — workplace learning opportunities and experiences.They take their guidance from the attorneys they are mentored by, but the entire team is there to help support them and their tasks.
This design stems from interns in the past not receiving enough guidance. Interns who don’t receive enough support in the office, we have noticed, don’t gain as much experience and consequently, their success is hindered. Today, we manage interns to reward their strengths and discover opportunities for improvement.
Cultivate a space where we grow, collaborate and learn from each other.
Smith + Malek prioritizes a positive work culture, and a lot of this work revolves around the hiring process, and we always try to hire people (interns included) who display an ability, passion and willingness to learn. Each and every one of our attorneys has been in the shoes of an intern. Therefore, we do not tolerate ego at any end of the spectrum and strive to demonstrate that everyone is committed to making the best work product possible.
Our interns — who are paid — truly are an investment for the firm. Even for the undergraduate-level interns that we have had come through our office, we want to plant that seed early. One adage we like to employ around Smith + Malek is “When you win I win.”
Our internship program reflects our value of increasing the opportunities women and folks with families have, by creating space and benefits that allow our team to be their full selves (inside and outside of the office). We have incorporated a host of family-friendly policies at Smith + Malek including, but not limited to, flexible work, paid parental leave and the elimination of a partner track.
At Smith + Malek, in that light, we remain diligent in our mission to cultivate and foster an environment that puts people — employees and clients — first. We are certainly grateful of how intentional and deliberate we have been with our internship program, as it has truly morphed into one of the most valuable assets to our firm.
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Luke Malek is a founding attorney and co-owner at Smith + Malek.
