The Good and Bad of Law School Rankings

Select students at the Colorado School of Law interned at tech companies this summer.

Interns Thrive in Boot Camp

 
The term “boot camp” at best can sound like a week of summer camp complete with dank socks, irritable drill sergeants and all-you-can-eat goulash. The University of Colorado School of Law put their own spin on boot camp this summer. Instead of bunk-lined barracks, think intensive tech and business lectures. Colorado’s pioneering Tech Lawyer Accelerator program takes participating students, puts them in a four-week boot camp and deploys them to local and national tech firms for paid, 10-week legal internships.
Thanks to a $100,000 grant from Access Group, Scholar-in-Residence and former in-house attorney for Sun Microsystems Inc, Bill Mooz was brought in to establish and instruct the program. The idea is to give students a classroom and hands-on view of what it is like to work in the tech industry. The 16 carefully selected students participating in the inaugural session gained classroom expertise in specific tech subject matter and a business environment before being placed in 13 different tech organizations in Colorado and the Bay Area. Some participating agencies include Cisco, NetApp and CoreSite.
Many of the participating agencies had never had a legal intern before. Nor had many of the students previously interned in the tech industry. But a briefing with Mooz on what students were taught leading up to the 10-week program allowed supervisors to assign relevant projects from the beginning. Consequently, a mid-summer report from the law school revealed blissful interns and supervisors.
The beauty in this program goes beyond potential careers and learning and experience—it can (and probably will) be adopted by other schools. A prepared statement from the law school states part of the Access Group funding will go to further development of the program and ways to share the program with other schools. As articles from the National Law Journal and The New York Times state, law schools are starting a significant shift in skills and topics discussed—including tech and entrepreneurship.
Source: National Law Journal
Source: Colorado School of Law Statement