Virtual Networking Forum

While focusing on ending racial injustices across the world, law firms and legal departments also need to stay vigilant and take intentional actions to increase equity and diversity in the legal profession.

With major support from the five founding law firms (Eversheds Sutherland, Goodwin, Nixon Peabody, Orrick, and Stoel Rives) and 25+ legal departments, MTN is hosting a 10-week Virtual Summer Networking Forum for 1L diverse law students.

This effort is focused on increasing the pipeline of diverse students across the country — with a specific focus on racial and ethnic minorities — attending and graduating from law school.

Knowing that many diverse 1L students’ summer internships were cancelled or condensed, our goal is to help them build relationships with influential members of the legal community, learn the unwritten rules of succeeding in law, and ensure that they have career-building internships/jobs going forward.

The Forum is not a replacement for diverse students’ internships. Rather, it is designed to supplement truncated or cancelled summer experiences and provide students with the opportunity to hear from law firm and corporate legal department leaders on a variety of topics, including: (1) the current state of the marketplace through the lens of specific industry sectors, (2) the distinct roles of in-house counsel versus outside counsel and how they collaborate to prevent and solve business issues, (3) the traits and competencies of successful lawyers, and (4) career-enhancing tips and techniques. Most importantly, each session of the Forum will incorporate small group networking so that the students can meet, get to know, and ask questions of law firm and legal departments practitioners in an informal setting and make additional professional connections in the legal industry.

The Forum is open to diverse 1L summer interns at MTN firms and legal departments, as well as those organizations participating in the 1L MTN Pipeline Collective. The Forum is also open to diverse 1L students participating in other affiliated internship programs and organizations such as, but not limited to, LCLD, the Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative, Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program, Corporate Counsel Women of Color, and Twin Cities Diversity in Practice.

The Forum is hosted virtually once a week on Thursdays from June 25th to August 27th starting at 9am PT/12pm ET and concluding at 12pm PT/3pm ET (or earlier on some weeks). The schedule of industry topics, speakers, and agenda follows.

For more details, please contact Lindsey Boyle at Lindsey@DiversityLab.com