Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

The Privilege to Shadow

Most legal internships expose interns to only one side of the legal field, as their work days are typically spent doing office work in a cubicle. Although much can be learned through performing tasks such as legal research or document creation, one can only garner an in-depth look at the day to day life of attorneys by seeing them in action. Luckily, my supervisor had an unselfish desire for me to learn as much as possible from my internship, so she asked me to tag along with her at a deposition. Naturally, I agreed and it turns out that this experience was among the most valuable that I had all summer.

At this deposition, I watched my supervisor strategically break down the plaintiff’s story to the extent that the plaintiff cried in what was likely to be a realization that all hope of victory was lost. Now, obviously, it is never fun to see a person get emotional and this was definitely not the goal that my supervisor had in mind. However, I was amazed at my supervisor’s ability to poke holes in the plaintiff’s story with the mere use of questions. Before this experience, my interest in the legal field was more on the contractual side of things, but watching my supervisor in action definitely sparked my interest in a portion of the legal process that I did not previously think of pursuing. Thus, my advice to anyone thinking of pursuing a career in law would be to attend a deposition or court hearing because not everything can be learned in an office.