Liam Commons on his Indiana Bar Foundation Internship

From my first day at the Indiana Bar Foundation, I knew that I was going to love everything about my experience. One of the scariest things about starting a new position with new people is not knowing what the people will be like and whether you will get along. This fear was immediately put to ease due to the kind and accepting environment created by Rachon, Megan, and Kim in welcoming me and making an effort to get to know me. Additionally, being one of two interns meant that I would be working closely with another person for the next eight weeks. I had the same fears about this initially, but after meeting Norah, I knew that we would get along great and be able to work well together.

The rest of that first week was spent getting to know more about the Foundation, its mission, and how we would fit into realizing this vision. I came into the internship with some knowledge about the civic education programs offered by the Foundation due to my experience with We The People and Mock Trial, but getting to meet the Civic Education team and hear from them directly helped put that aspect of the Foundation’s mission into perspective and gave me greater insight into what is necessary to make those programs possible. I finished out the first week by making some social media content for both the civic education and civil legal assistance teams—a We the People calendar and a Civil Legal Assistance (CLA) one-pager, respectively. The CLA project was especially interesting because it helped add to my understanding of the other half of the Foundation’s mission in how we help underprivileged Hoosiers gain access to civil legal assistance.

Over the course of the next few weeks, my role as an intern would be solely focused on preparing for the Annual Meeting & Awards Luncheon. This included making social media posts for almost every day leading up to the event and providing live updates during the event to our supporters unable to attend. This was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the internship thus far because I was able to explore how to use short-form content to educate people about our honorees and what they had done to be so deserving of each award. Additionally, getting to see the final product on our social media pages and hearing from the honorees at the Annual Meeting how much it meant to them was both reassuring and inspiring. Then, on the day of the event, I had the chance to speak with former Board member and Executive Director of Pro Bono Indiana, Scott Wylie, as well as incoming Board member Yvette LaPlante, about civil legal assistance and their experiences with the Foundation. The chance to network and meet so many people of importance in the Indiana legal community has been an invaluable part of my internship thus far.

Finally, this past week, we went on three different outings to bring some real-world learning to the internship experience. The first of these was a trip to the We the People Summer Institute in Bloomington. Here, I had the chance to listen to a lecture from IU Maurer School of Law professor Steve Sanders about the pertinence of constitutional law regarding the checks on executive power. It was fascinating to listen to the questions asked by educators who would be using the information from the lecture to formulate lesson plans similar to ones I had been taught just five or six years ago. After the lecture, we then had the chance to fulfill some of the development related goals of the internship by walking around Bloomington to solicit silent auction donations for the 75th Anniversary Gala. 

The second outing we went on was a trip to the Statehouse in order to watch an oral argument in front of the Indiana Supreme Court. This was my favorite thing we’ve done during the internship up until this point because it was fascinating to witness what the legal process actually looks like. After getting the chance to process the experience, I feel more confident than ever saying that this internship has helped me to realize I want to go to law school and become a lawyer, especially one who works to help those most in need.