Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Legal Learning Podcast. I’m your host Jolene. And with the Legal Learning Center, I help prospective law students graduate in less time with less debt and stress so they can be financially free and live the life they always dreamed as an attorney. If you want three free strategies right now, visit legallearningcenter.com/money. And if you’re applying to law school or about to, and you want an accountability partner who knows your schedule and helps you through it, one who can review your personal statement and give you hundreds of thousands of dollars in money, saving tips, stay tuned for the release of Financially Free Aspiring Attorneys Accountability Course coming June 1st.
Today, we are joined by Umeesha D’Alwis. Umeesha is currently a college student and founder of LawyerUp. Last spring when COVID canceled her internships. She turned that into an opportunity for hundreds of other students. As you listen, I’d like you to think about ways that you can make your internships better, even without canceled internships. Could you be doing something more exciting, more aligned with your interests than simply accepting the internships presented to you?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
So hi everybody. So like Jolene said, I’m Umeesha and I am the founder and CEO of LawyerUp, which is a legal organization that provides legal internships to students all around the world, both pre-law students and law students. And we’ll definitely go ahead and talk a little bit about how LawyerUp was created, why we created ot, but that’s definitely one of my biggest, biggest responsibilities, but also blessings is to work with law students and to provide you with the legal education before you go into law school, or before you go into university to really make sure that that’s the career that you want to follow.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, it’s a very expensive career path. So it’s really good to have that information ahead of time. So what type of information do you help pre-law students gather?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
So with LawyerUp we really try to cover everything. Our main goal is to create the most well rounded law individual that we can before you go into university, before you go into law school. And the reason why I say that is because the path to becoming a lawyer is different depending on the continent your are in, depending on the country you’re in. So we bring lawyers from all over the world.
So if you’re in the UK, we’re going to bring in commercial awareness a lot more since that’s something that’s very important. If you’re in the United States, we’ll talk a little bit more about criminal justice. We’ll talk a little bit more about business law and we’ll talk about the sectors that are really important to the region that you’re living in, but we actually cover over 30 different sectors of law, because if you think about it, when you do a legal internship, you’re only walking into a firm that handles one or maybe two sectors.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And if you’re not already batching coffee or scanning papers or printing documents, it’s really difficult to know, is this a sector that I want to work in? Or is this a sector that people have kind of pushed me towards? Am I doing it for financial reasons or am I doing it because I like it. So we bring 30 plus sectors of different lawyers all across the globe to talk to you about the good, the bad. And when I say the good and the bad, we really go into the nitty gritty details. We talk about drug addiction, alcohol addiction, all addiction when going through the legal career. And the reason we do that is not to scare any of our interns away, but to also provide you with the coping mechanisms that you need at a very young age, so that if you go through the career and you’re faced with all that temptation with all the work that you’re building up, you have those strategies before you even go in. So in that way, we work with coaches, career coaches, and of course, mental health coaches to not only give our interns that 30 sectors, but also to give them the coping strategies and the career strategies they need to achieve their dream career.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
You said so many things that were so important in that. So first I do want to address you’re absolutely correct. First of all, during law school, there is very little time to intern. You get maybe two, or if you’re lucky, three internships, and it only gives you a small glimpse of what the overall career is like. And that’s once you’re even in law school, during my gap years, I worked for a law firm. Actually I worked for two law firms and I still feel like it gave me no glimpse as to what being a lawyer was like, or what I would be doing or what it was. I mean, I did personal injury and patent and trademark, and neither one was an area I went into or was interested in. So, but it was the jobs I could get.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So it’s really difficult. You really do need more of that information direct from people and in so many different areas. And like you said, mental health and addiction and all those other side issues that I think a lot of us, when we see it on a piece of paper, tend to say, that’s not going to be me. And we walk away, we don’t really hear about how it comes into play, how we can avoid it, how we can work around it or with it. So that’s great. So, okay. I want to get into, we’re definitely gonna talk more about LawyerUp, but I want to get into how did you even come up with this idea to create LawyerUp?
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So I love sharing this story because it came from rejection. And I know there’s a phrase that goes all throughout LinkedIn, every career platform that says rejection is regeneration. And for most of my life, I brushed that aside and I said, yeah, okay. They’re just salty that they didn’t get this job or whatnot, but I truly truly believe that those words mean so much because at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was coming into my junior year, I had just come from studying abroad in Argentina and I felt behind, I thought I don’t have any legal internships. I don’t have any internships period. And I’m about to go into my third year of college. I’m not going to be able to get a job. So I started applying pretty aggressively to a whole variety of different industries. A lot of them being legal and I think finally was able to secure three different internships.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
And I was in the process of deciding which one I wanted to go to. And then of course, March hit and everything started closing down and we all had to go home and stay at home. And one by one, those internships started sending me emails, saying, rescinded, rescinded and rescinded. And the first thing I did, and I want to talk about this because it’s really important for students to know is right before I got those rescinded emails, I actually reached out to the hiring managers of all three of these companies. And I said, hi, as you know, in Los Angeles County, we unfortunately cannot work in person. However, I am really willing to either shadow a lawyer at your firm or even virtually just join, you know, a basic meeting, not anything that has any liability concerns or any private information, but I really just wanted to shadow them because at the end of the day, I knew I wasn’t going to get that in-person internship, but just even a day of shadowing virtually that could help a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
And I always tell students feel free to reach out and say, okay, I didn’t get an internship here, but am I able to talk to a lawyer at your firm? Am I able to shadow a lawyer at your firm? And that’s just important as well. So unfortunately I wasn’t able to do that either because they were still in the process of moving to virtual. And then I decided, okay, I’m not going to have an internship. So I’m going to create my own. And I remember texting my boss, I texted my parents and they looked at me like, okay, how do you, you can’t, you can’t create your own internship. And I said, I’m pretty sure I can, because what are the things that you get out of an internship that is networking, the experience of working within the sector and also just skills of building your communication, building your time management, building your prioritization.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Those are all things that I can do almost like a freelancer because I could network with a hundred lawyers this summer. And that way I crossed out the networking aspect of the internship and in terms of building my skills, when it comes to communication and time management, if I’m trying to meet with a hundred lawyers that are, that comes with being able to communicate both verbally but also in written communication as well, and being able to reach out to people and prioritize, okay, when do I want to do my own work? When do I want to network with these lawyers? So then the idea started circulating and I put it down on paper. I shared it and it came to a point where I didn’t want to do this alone. So I told my parents that I would publish it on LinkedIn and I wanted 12, 12 students. That was my number. I wanted 12 students to join me on this journey. And almost overnight, we ended up with 150, then 300, then 650, then all the way to the end of summer, where we ended up with exactly a thousand and exactly a thousand because we kept it at a thousand, but we still had applications rolling in and we still do have applications rolling in even though LawyerUp only functions during the summer, as of right now. So that’s really how it started is rejection turns into redirection.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
That’s brilliant. I think that when we aren’t allowed to follow the traditional path, it opens up the opportunity for our minds to get creative. We have to get scrappy and you know, some people just shut down. They just can’t handle. I’m supposed to do this summer internship. I’m supposed to go to an office for eight weeks or whatever it is, but other people, you know, they might have that moment to shut down, but then they say, okay, what can I do? And I absolutely identify with this. This is brilliant. I created something similar when I was in law school, where my first summer after law school, I was burnt out. I did not want a legal internship. And so I worked at a school elementary school, but I did research for the Sierra club. And so that’s what’s on my resume and it was great. And it’s the same thing. You need to get scrappy if something’s not working for you, if you’re burnt out, if everyone’s rejecting you, what can you do to make things better, to make things work for you? And this is great. So how did you start the system? Cause this sounds like a chaotic system.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
So it was, it was the first, I would say hurdle that I had to overcome was this idea of, are lawyers going to give you the time of day? Because in my mind, at that time I viewed every lawyer as I put them on a pedestal. I said, Oh my gosh, they’ve gone through university. They’ve gone through law school. They’re at the top of their game. But once I almost accepted that I would get more nos than yes, and that’s still true to this day, out of the 70 lawyers that we had, I probably reached out to over 300 and same thing with universities as well. I actually went on the collegeboard.com and I looked at the list of the top 500 universities. And I individually researched every university, found the Dean of a law program there or a professor who was dpart of the law program.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
And I wrote individualized messages to over 400 different professors across the country saying, hi, there’s a COVID opportunity for law students. I’d love if you could pass this on. And I added a graphic that really showcased, okay, what type of lawyers, what type of career strategies where we going to cover, et cetera, et cetera. And I just spent really about a month, my first month of April, just sending email after email from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, just personalized, if I could go on their LinkedIn and find a connection that I had, whether they liked the same sports as me, or whether they were from the same areas, me or whatnot. And it was, it was a lot of work. But at the end of the day, I learned more from it. And I considered that aspect of the planning as part of the internship for all the students who joined us.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
The internship started from May to August, but for me, it started in April because this was my internship into entrepreneurship and into law and into program management and project management. So I really considered this part of my work. And that’s really how it started is just individually reaching out to people, creating that connection and networking calls nonstop. If I could, there were some lawyers who were in Africa, Asia, which the time zones for those two continents are completely different and I would stay up until 4:00 AM, 3:00 AM. And of course I wouldn’t tell them so that they wouldn’t feel bad, but I would be here in this room with my headphones on just talking to them and asking them, what are the sectors that are important in your specific region so that we could tailor it to students that were coming in from there. So that was the process of it was really communicating and not being scared to get know and not taking any or not taking a no response personally, because I think a lot of students do that is when we reach out to a professional and we don’t get any responses, we say, Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
And then we give up and we don’t necessarily keep persevering, but I mean, it was a pandemic going on. There was so much mentally that people were struggling with. So I tried to keep that in my mind that people are living lives, that I’m not privy to. There’s so many things that could be going on in which they can’t reply to me at this moment, but I’m going to keep going. And eventually as the summer went by, I started to build my confidence and I started reaching even more lawyers at the top of their game. And then I started going even higher almost. And I reached out to Brian Cuban, who is the brother of Mark Cuban, but also talks a lot about addiction within the legal industry. And that was a huge thing for me as well.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
But I think one of the biggest biggest moments or milestones for me is during the George Floyd protest, we wanted LawyerUp to be as transparent as possible. We wanted to go into this program knowing that we were going to talk about very difficult topics, but topics that needed to be addressed. And I ended up finding the lawyer who actually represented the friend that was with George Floyd in the car. So that was just incredible for me to have Ashley McFarland here to talk to our students about, of course not about the case, because at that time it’s still going on, but also to talk about white collar criminal justice, and to talk about that sector that a lot of us aren’t necessarily aware of. And I loved it. I mean, it’s almost as if the, the way the summer progressed, the more levels that I was going into.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah. I saw the speeches that you had lined up and I saw the number of, and the countries they were from, from India from just everywhere. It was so impressive. And just the fact that you made this happen within about a month’s time where really, you know, one minute I think you and I were talking on the phone and then the next minute it was, you know, I think you were having a lot of scheduling going on.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Actually you were the first ever lawyer that I ever talked to the first lawyer that ever responded back to me who got on a call with me, and I remember we went a phone call. We went on soon and I ended the phone call and I ran to the kitchen. And it’s like, I talked to a lawyer, I talked to a lawyer and said, just having a complete, complete, you know, freak out. But I finally talked to a lawyer and my parents were like, good job, good job. She’s so kind, she’s so sweet. She gave me this advice. And so a lot of that success has to do with you too.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Oh, thank you. So funny. I knew I was early on. I didn’t realize I was that early on. So yes, I thoroughly enjoyed watching it grow. Now what are your plans for next summer for LawyerUp?
Speaker 2 (16:00):
So this summer we will be continuing with LawyerUp. Then we actually have a tier based system. So one thing that I noticed is some students weren’t interested in all 30 sectors. They really just wanted to narrow in on five sectors that they were interested in and to learn a little bit more about it so they could move on, especially since a lot of our students were already in law school. So they had a little bit more experience than the students who were still in the first or second year of university. So to create that, and again, to make it a little bit more accessible for students of all, I guess, education levels, we really wanted to create that year based system. So it could be tier one where you only get an introduction to five sectors and a few key career strategy workshops, or you can do the complete ultimate tier where you have, you know, all 30 sectors and career strategy, as well as any legal workshops that we have.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
And legal workshops are something that we’re introducing this summer, where we noticed that a lot of students were struggling to learn how to read and write like a lawyer, because the way lawyers read and write is very different to how you might read a fiction or creative writing novel or book. And that’s something that we wanted to start early on because it’s hard to break that level of writing until you’re in law school. But sometimes you struggled during those first few months. So we wanted to get in right away and bring people in professors who could teach them how to read and write, but also how to negotiate.
I know negotiation is a huge, huge aspect when it comes to law. So in the legal system, negotiation is incredibly important, but we also recognize that even if you go through this program and decide, okay, I don’t want to be a lawyer that negotiation aspect can still take you a long way in your career because we often go on LinkedIn and go on these career platforms. And we talk about salary and being able to convince the interviewer that you’re worthy of being a candidate being hired for this position. And that negotiation aspect still comes in because you have to really negotiate, but also persuade the audience or persuade the interviewer that you’re worth being at that company. So again, even with our legal workshops, even with our career strategy workshops or even if you go through this internship and you decide law isn’t the career for me, you’re still walking away with enough skills to go into whichever career you choose. And that was incredibly important to me because when people ask me, what was your greatest accomplishment with LawyerUp? It was the students who came to me and said, law is not for me.
I’m not going into law. And people will always look at me like, hi. I mean, this is a legal organization, but at the end of the day, they were about to spend 200, $300,000 going into law school, investing, you know, five years of not just three years of law school, but also those first two years of really, you know, 60 to 80 hour work weeks and really grinding it out sometimes even longer. I’ve heard lawyers say that that lasts for seven years sometimes. So I wanted them to know exactly what they were getting into.
And again, when they said that to me, I asked them, you know, what are you going into, what career do you want to do? And they would tell me that, you know, this workshop really helps because now I can do this or that lawyer who actually came about environmental law taught me a little bit more about sustainability. And now I want to go into sustainability. So that really helped as well. And that was probably one of my biggest accomplishments is knowing that I’m getting students at both the good and the bad, because a lot of programs, they try to sugar coat the process. And my job here is not to, you know, push law down your throat, but rather to give you all of the details and to help you make that educated decision. And that’s what we want to do this summer as well.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
That’s so great. And it’s so necessary because I think a lot of students just tend to put that on the back burner. Like, look, I’m interested in this area of law, I’m going to do it no matter what, a lot of times it also comes from personal experience. You know, my family, something happened to them and I want to make sure that never happens again. And that’s wonderful. But what you don’t realize is aside from paying $200,000 to protect your family for the rest of your life, you’re signing yourself up for a very high level of potential depression, anxiety, addiction, and long hours of work, which again, stem from the high debt load.
If you don’t have the high debt load yeah, ou can leave that long hour job and work part-time or whatever it is, but it’s a never ending cycle for a lot of people and they don’t know what they’re getting into. So that’s where this internship is so fabulous because yes, I saw your informational type interviews. And then I saw, you know, I think I was doing more. I think I did an interview course.
Speaker 2:
And I definitely wanted you for that because of the way you’re really personable and you communicate so well.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Well, thank you. So yes there are so many different skill sets that are needed for anything professional, really, but from lawyers, like you said, with negotiations, that can go across different fields, but it’s always necessary for lawyers. And then yeah. Writing is so you’re absolutely right on that as well. It took me my first semester to learn how to write how I was supposed to write. And yeah, my first semester grades in law school were not so great because even though I had the content, the information, I wasn’t conveying it the way they wanted it. And then when I learned how they wanted it conveyed, then yeah, my grades shot up.
But it’s very hard to understand because in college they teach you “write extra fluff”, you fill up the space and in law school they say, no, it’s almost like baby language, A + B = C, just get right to the point. No fluff. Don’t talk to us just almost bullet point.
So yeah, there’s a quote that I think sums up what you’ve been talking about. And it’s from your about page, which is “knowledge is power, but power is useless when you can’t share the opportunity. It brings with those around you”. That is just a wonderful quote, absolutely sums up what you’ve been saying that you were trying to do. So it’s, yes. It’s fabulous that you are living what you are saying. Many people talk, but they don’t walk the walk.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
And for me, it was incredibly important because I came from a place where a lot of people didn’t expect me to succeed. I had an incredible sister. She is so smart and so awesome and everything she does and touches. And for me, I always felt like, Oh, I’m not going to be able to really achieve the same level. And a lot of my adults in my life also thought the same thing. So as soon as I came to America and I started pushing myself to do more and becoming the person I am today, I don’t need that. I never ever wanted somebody else to feel that they couldn’t do something, but for whatever reason it may be. So everything that I do, if you go on my LinkedIn, if you go on my Instagram, if you go on my website, it’s really about bringing education to people.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Not because I, yeah, so I’m a little bit of a nerd, but also because at the end of the day, I believe in lifelong learning, you learn something new every day and that’s important. That’s important to keep your curiosity going. And that’s why I always talk about knowledge being power. Because I think in the social media world, we look at likes, we look at followers. We look at those numbers as being a mode of power. But I always tell people quality over quantity because you have 10 followers on LinkedIn, especially to those students out there who are scared to use LinkedIn, you can have 10 followers, but out of those 10 followers, your post could inspire one of them to create the next LawyerUp. So don’t be scared to start because you don’t know just how powerful your story is until you share it among other people.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
That is beautiful. I love it Umeesha. All right. So what is a way that if students want to reach out to you, either for LawyerUp or just in general, for some guidance or help where can they find you?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
So you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. I’m a bit of a LinkedIn nerd. So I’m there all day, every day. And I have my messaging on, and it’s an open profile. So even if you’re not comfortable with connecting with me, but you have a quick question, please, please, please reach out. I’d be happy to answer. I do my very best to go through every single message. So you will get a message from me is actually, even if it takes a little while, but on top of LinkedIn, you can also go on www.umeesha.com. Jolene I know you’re a fan of that website and you can just see everything I do. And there’s also links to all of my social media if you feel more comfortable reaching out in a different way.
And regardless of what your question may be, whether it has to do with mental health, law, LawyerUp or career strategy or resume or LinkedIn or whatnot, definitely reach out. And if I can’t answer it for you, I will find somebody who can. And that’s again, one of the biggest, biggest things I deal with LinkedIn is I know how difficult it is to reach out to someone, especially as a student. So if I can’t find you your answer, I will find a professional for you who will be able to give you a much better answer than me.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Before we get into my top takeaways, a quick word from our sponsor. Juno, if you need to take out student loans, check in with Juno first. Juno can often offer law students 1-2% lower interest rates than the federal government and with no origination fees and oftentimes cash back as well. Visit advisor.legal learning center.com/juno for more information.
My top takeaways from this chat with Umeesha, number one, don’t give up when things are down, get creative. This applies to how you handle your cases in law as well. I had a million dollar case that I won, The law wasn’t really on my side. So I kind of argued, “It’s not fair”. That is not a legal argument, but I had to get creative. Number two, it’s important to know all aspects of your potential career path so that you can evaluate it properly.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
That is something I try to do with this podcast as a whole, listen to all the different stories, see the pitfalls, try to avoid them. Whether that means that you take a slightly different path than you had originally intended or completely different path. Number three, don’t take rejection personally. I still get rejected all the time. I reached out to people constantly and several never respond or say Nope. So just move on.
A full transcript is available@legallearningcenter.com/lawyerup. And all the show notes will be there as well. Stay tuned. Next week, we will speak with Jeff Bunn of The Mindful Law Group, Jeff helps law students and law firms learn the direct connection between mindfulness and results. As always. If you learned something today, please like share comment, subscribe so that this show is more visible and can help those who need it. Thanks.
