Skadden Fellows share the impact of the program after 30 years.

The Skadden Fellowship Foundation launched in 1988 to commemorate Skadden's 40th anniversary and has since become the largest public interest law firm in the United States. The program provides two-year Fellowships to recent law graduates to pursue the practice of public interest law on a full-time basis.

Our guiding principle is to improve legal services for the poor and encourage economic independence. To date, the Foundation has funded over 900 fellowships. Ninety percent of former Fellows remain in public service, and almost all of them continue working on the same issues they addressed in their original Fellowship projects.

The Fellowship Foundation has funded 962 total Fellows. The Fellowship community is currently working in public interest in 42 US states. 90 percent remain in public interest. 24 are nonprofit founders. 59 are executive directors. 115 are professors and lecturers. 159 are government officials. 19 are judges.

Fellowship Spotlight

Former Skadden Fellow Estella Cisneros Returns to the Central Valley to Fight for Agricultural Workers’ Rights

Former Skadden Fellow Estella Cisneros Returns to the Central Valley to Fight for Agricultural Workers’ Rights

Estella Cisneros (’12), the legal director of California Rural Legal Assistance’s Agricultural Worker Program, grew up in Planada, California, in the heart of the Central Valley. Nearly 95% of the town’s 4,000 residents are Latino, and the majority — including Estella’s parents, who immigrated from central Mexico — work in some type of agriculture, including on large-scale farms.

Former Fellow Sheerine Alemzadeh Helps Survivors of Gender-Based Violence Harness Their Leadership Skills

Former Fellow Sheerine Alemzadeh Helps Survivors of Gender-Based Violence Harness Their Leadership Skills

Many of the insights that guided Sheerine Alemzadeh’s (’11) vision for Healing to Action (HTA) — a Chicago-based nonprofit she cofounded that empowers survivors of gender-based violence to develop and lead community-organizing campaigns — were sparked by her experiences as a Skadden Fellow.

Fellows Profile: Nisha Kashyap (’15) and Charlotte Tsui (’16)

Fellows Profile: Nisha Kashyap (’15) and Charlotte Tsui (’16)

In April and May 2020, the Skadden Foundation awarded $10,000 Flom Incubator Grants to 28 former Fellows to support their work addressing critical legal needs amplified by the pandemic. The distribution marks an expansion of the existing FIG program, which has awarded more than 140 grants to support innovative legal projects by former Fellows since 2011.

The COVID grant recipients have taken on a variety of legal issues related to housing, domestic violence, education, juvenile detention and other matters impacting low-income communities and vulnerable populations. We spoke with two recipients, Nisha Kashyap and Charlotte Tsui, about their projects.

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Contact Information

For more information, please contact:

Kathleen Rubenstein / 212.735.3954 / Kathleen.Rubenstein@skadden.com / Executive Director 

Kathy Quijije /212.735.5176 / Kathy.Quijije@skadden.com / Project Coordinator 

Lauren Aguiar / 212.735.2235 / Lauren.Aguiar@skadden.com / President, Skadden Foundation