Apply for a Fellowship

Kathleen Rubenstein: Hello, everyone. I’m so glad that you’re here – welcome. We will start in just a moment. We’ll give folks a moment to join before we start talking about the Skadden Fellowship program. Thank you so much for being here.

Welcome. I’m really looking forward to speaking with all of you today. My name is Kathleen Rubenstein. I’m the Executive Director of the Skadden Fellowship program and I’m a former Skadden Fellow.

This is our first info session of the year, talking about applying for a Skadden Fellowship. I’m happy to answer your questions today. If you would benefit from a live transcript, there is a link in the chat. If you have any tech questions or considerations, chat my colleague Arelis Batista. We will be recording today so that you can watch it again later. We are just recording the speaker view, so the recording will be of me. I hope you have lots of questions today, so we can get to those. I will pause for questions, but feel free to put questions throughout in the chat.

We will cover five main topics today. We will cover the two things you want to spend the most time thinking about in the fall, which are the designing of your project proposal and the selection of your host organization. Sorry, correction – Those are the two things you want to be thinking about in the spring – designing your project proposal and selecting your host organization. And then we’ll also talk today about the application, the application process, and what it’s like to be a Skadden Fellow.

Congratulations on starting this process in the spring. That will make you most prepared to put forward a compelling application and to serve your clients once you graduate.

So, the basics. Skadden Fellowships provide the first two years of your salary and benefits to do public interest work in the U.S. You apply in the fall of your 3L year, or later you can apply in the fall of a judicial clerkship, or the fall of an LL.M. program. So those are the three opportunities to apply. If you are a 2L right now, and you are planning to apply in the fall of your 3L year, you will be applying by Friday, September 9, 2022, to start a full year later, after you take the bar exam.

You apply for a Skadden Fellowship having already secured a host organization and designed with that host organization your project proposal. Those two ingredients are critical early elements of your process.

There are 28 Skadden Fellows a year. This is well into the 30th year, so there are 900+ Skadden Fellows doing public interest work all over the country. Our goal is to launch a public interest career. So we are looking for folks applying to the Fellowship who are focused on and ready to provide exemplary services to poor clients.

I want all of your questions to be answered today, but I know you’ll have questions after today. I want to give you ways to get more information after today. Arelis, can I share my screen in a moment? You have probably already spent time on our website because you arrived today at our info session. If you haven’t, I encourage you to spend time there. We have pretty extensive FAQs on our website.

In the Apply to the Skadden Fellowship section, you can scroll down to see the FAQs about the application process, about proposals and what we fund, and about the Fellowship experience. There are also FAQs for potential host organizations. If you are talking to an organization that is not familiar with our process, they also have all the information they need to help you put your best foot forward.

We also will have these info sessions regularly over the course of the summer. That’s another place for information. The dates and times are listed here. We also will be having and recording an info session specifically for host organizations. That can be a useful resource for an organization that might not be familiar with applying.

In addition to the FAQs on our website and the info sessions, if you have any questions that aren’t answered there, you should feel 100% free to contact me. My contact information is on the website and it will be in the chat as well.

I am happy to talk to applicants and frequently do over the course of the summer, once you think that would be useful. This is generally after you’ve put in the basics of your proposal and you know your host organization. You can share that with me. We can hop on the phone for fifteen minutes and I can let you know about questions or concerns I have about your plans that you may want to address in your written submissions in September.

Just like today, if we talk over the summer, that is not part of the selection process. I’m just here to make sure you have all of the information you need to put forward a compelling and effective proposal. I will judge your application when I receive it in September.

The website is where we will let you know sometime between now and the fall if interviews will be conducted remotely, as they were the last two years, or in person, as they were previously. Both methods have worked out well. We will make sure that everyone who has an interview will have that specific information, but we will also put an update on the website once we make that determination.

Last of all, and maybe the best resource for designing a public interest project being of use at the beginning of your career, is the broader network of Skadden Fellows. They are my “kitchen cabinet” of 900+ folks, and you should consider them to be resources for you as well. You can look on our website. There is a little bit on our website about all 934 of us. It has a reasonably functional search capacity by keywords, geography, and host organizations. You can see something about all of us. To the extent that someone is already serving the community you want to serve or has worked at the host organization you’re considering, that person will really want you to be successful on behalf of those clients and will be happy to speak with you. Feel free to connect with Skadden Fellows through your own networks, through your law school networks, but also, if there is a relevant Fellow or Fellows, I’m happy to share their email addresses with you.

Thank you for the question in the chat. “Do they have to be purely domestic, or can projects be focused internationally?” That’s a perfect segue to the basic ground rules and guidelines. Your Skadden Fellowship project has to address the civil legal needs of people living in poverty in the U.S. We are all lawyers, so we will take each of those words with some care. But to answer the question in the chat, both the Fellow must be based in the U.S. and, on the day that they’re served, your clients have to be here too. They can be recent immigrants – that is totally welcome. But your clients and your Fellowship work have to be domestic.

A Skadden Fellowship provides you the opportunity to design your dream job to launch your public interest career. The requirements of your host organization are quite straightforward. It has to be a 501(c)(3) and it can’t be a project or a clinic of a law school – it has to be a stand-alone nonprofit. It also has to have at least two attorneys whose full-time work is civil legal advocacy. That is really important for us when we evaluate your proposal.

I will tell you right now, the philanthropic purpose of the Skadden Foundation, and what we are looking at when we assess your proposal, is the clients. We know that supervision is very important early in your career. And so your selection of a host with excellent supervisory attorneys is both important to have a competitive Fellowship application, and more importantly, is critical to you being prepared to provide exemplary legal services for your clients. So we look very carefully at the supervision that your host will be able to provide on the issue area and methodologies that you have selected in your project design.

You work with a host organization. You may have dialogue with more than one host organization where you are designing this project that addresses the civil legal needs of people living in poverty in the U.S.

The requirements that we just discussed of the host organization are straightforward. There are probably 10,000 organizations that qualify. Many of them know about the Skadden Fellowship and other project-based fellowships. Many even have a formal process to apply. You may see postings as early as next month looking for information outreach from potential candidates. There are also awesome organizations that have never applied for a Skadden Fellowship or don’t know about our program. In those cases, you would need to be really proactive and bring a proposed concept or project to a host organization and work through the process together.

A couple important considerations about host organizations, and then I’ll pause for questions. You want to develop, through this apprenticeship period early in your career, into an exemplary public interest attorney, one who delivers exemplary civil legal services for your clients. You also very likely have some goals around the methodologies that you want to serve clients with. So you want to be really cognizant that you select a host organization that first of all has a superb track record of client representation. But also that it shares any ideological or methodological commitments that you have, so that it’s a really strong fit.

Another thing I would definitely encourage you to consider is to make sure that you’re bringing these future clients to a host organization that has a very strong track record of supervising and growing the skills of starting attorneys. We ask all of the Fellows for a confidential evaluation at the end of their Fellowship program. I will tell you right now, the Fellows who are the most confident that they have provided those exemplary civil legal services – they of course hewed in their project proposal to their own personal commitments, to design their own dream job. But also, they placed their own Fellowship at an organization that shares those commitments and competencies, that are really ready to host the project and excited to do so. So, picking your host organization is an incredibly important part of this process and should come relatively early, because your host is actually an excellent thought partner in honing and developing your project.

I’ll pause here for questions. There are a few in the chat. Feel free to come off mute if you have a question.

Great question about eligibility. People can apply during an LL.M. program or during a clerkship. It needs to be in that fall, where you will be concluding the LL.M. or the clerkship in that coming school year.

Does the location of the proposal matter in the selection process? That is a great question.

No. We are quite agnostic as to geography, as well as to subject matter and issue area and lawyering tools. You should tell us what clients you’re planning on working with, what problem you are planning to address, and why the components you’ve designed are the right ones to provide the best services.

If you go on our website right now, you will find a handful of states where we have never funded a Fellow. That does not mean either that you should give up on going home or to a community where you have your core commitments, nor does it mean you should find the white pages and figure out which legal services organizations exist in that state. Neither of those is the case. I believe this to be a strategy-proof process. But, you will produce the most compelling application when you are the most committed to the project you have designed. So it really should be in a place you want to be lawyering and with and for the community that you are committed to.

Taking off my Fellowship hat, if you are not sure where you want to be geographically right now but you are sure where you want to lawyer in the future, I would encourage you to strongly consider ensuring that your Fellowship is in that future geography, at the very least so you don’t have to take two different bar exams. More importantly, both the application process and the time in which you work as a Fellow are extremely effective times for inserting yourself into a broader ecosystem of legal services and non-legal services providers. It’s a huge education and privilege to think through these questions carefully about how to be most useful. You will be more useful to your future post-Fellowship clients if you do your Fellowship where you plan to be long-term.

These are great questions. You’re welcome to come off mute. I’ll keep reading questions off the chat as well.

Just summarizing a couple things from the chat. We do not fund projects for recent graduates. We fund projects for 3Ls in law school who will be recent graduates at the time their Fellowship begins, or folks who are coming off an LL.M. or clerkship. And within the broad ambit of civil legal needs of people living in poverty, we are flexible in terms of the project area, practice area, and legal methodology. Let’s go through each of those words with some attention.

Your project has to address civil legal needs. It has to be civil – we cannot fund criminal representation. We can however fund, and do fund, a great deal of civil work that serves clients who are impacted by mass criminalization and mass incarceration. You can do any project that is on the reentry side as soon as your clients return from jail or prison. We cannot fund a project whose client population are adults detained in the carceral system – that’s jail or prison. We can fund projects that address the civil legal needs of people with records. We absolutely can fund projects on that front, that are related, for instance, to school discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline. And again, the vast majority of collateral consequences work is actually civil in nature.

If it is unclear if your project fits within our guidelines, that would be a very good reason for us to talk this summer. I will let you know if I have any questions or concerns. Then you won’t waste the resources of your host organization applying to something that we cannot fund.

So your project has to be civil. It also has to be legal in nature. There are a lot of ways to make changes as a public interest lawyer, only some of which require your J.D. But 80% of the civil legal needs of people living in poverty in the U.S. are not met, so the Skadden Fellowship can only fund projects that are primarily legal in nature. What that means is that a primary component of your project must require your J.D.

There are a ton of ways to do that. In every class we will have movement lawyers and transactional lawyers, folks who have a more impact or strategic bent, and lots of high-volume direct services providers. You are welcome to use any of those methodologies or other ones that your host organization has the skill set to supervise, and that are well tailored to address the problems you have identified that are the subject matter of your proposal.

You are also welcome to include components in your project that are not strictly legal in nature. So although that primary component has to require a J.D., you are welcome to include secondary components in your project. We see these all the time – outreach efforts, public information and education campaigns, report-writing, or specific policy advocacy – things that don’t require our J.D.’s. But if those components make your project more useful to your clients, you’re welcome to include them.

We talked about how you’re going to design your project. I want to spend just a moment talking about how I would encourage you to consider your dialogue with potential host organizations. You are bringing your passion, your skills, and your commitment. Host organizations have a great deal of insight to offer as well.

First of all, they serve clients every day, so they have a high degree of information about what clients need. They also know things that can be really hard to observe from the outside, like where their supervisory resources lie, and how a potential project would fit within their broader strategic goals. They’re also likely to know, if you don’t already know, the right partner and stakeholder organizations, which can be legal or non-legal, that are critical to helping you design a really insightful proposal. You can tell that this takes time. The goal here is to have an iterative dialogue where you eventually land on a proposal that is your dream job and that they are extremely well positioned to supervise and enthusiastic to do so.

A really good starting question with host organizations is – what it is they would be doing with another lawyer. Are there issues or topics that they really want to be addressing more? Things that they’re turning away? Or – and this is totally fine to propose a project for Skadden that is within the work your host organization is already doing – is there a particular set of needs or set of clients who would benefit from focus?

In the first two years of your legal career, an amazing thing about a Fellowship is that you get to focus on a really concrete identifiable project you’ve designed that allows you to achieve mastery for your clients more rapidly. So you want to make sure that you’re getting insights from your host organization about what is realistic for a starting attorney, and what they’re well positioned to support you in doing.

Do folks have other questions about their project design?

Okay. I’m going to share with you now the application. It’s already posted on our website, along with the instructions and certification. The application is very straightforward. There are a couple pages of brief biographical information and a brief synopsis of your project. You’ll let us know if you plan on using languages other than English. You will let us know, in some detail, your language skills, obviously critical. And you’ll share with us who your recommenders are.

There are four brief essay questions. They each have a 400-word limit, and that word limit is firm. It was 300 when I applied to my Fellowship. You will briefly describe your project in 400 words. You’ll let us know about prior public interest experiences. You’ll explain how you are coming to this work and why this is your dream job and why you’ve proposed this project.

And then after the murder of George Floyd, we added a question that enables you to share your critical analysis with us. So you’re sharing your vision of the role of public interest work in addressing systemic racism. To the extent that you think your specific project proposal touches on that directly, of course feel free to share that with us. I would say the answers to those questions have been really excellent and helpful, even for the Fellows we are sending to Kansas and Maine who work with primarily white populations.

So that’s what the application looks like. Do folks have questions about the application form?

In addition to the application form, you will also be sharing a really straightforward packet of information. I’ll show you that as well. Here are the instructions. This packet of information is your supporting materials. The ingredient that will take the longest to prepare is that the host writes a commitment letter. This document is extra useful for us when you are introducing us to a new host organization or one we haven’t funded in a while. Also, your host is not word-limited, so this is a place where we get some more context about the significance of your project, how it fits within their broader work, who will be supervising you, and things like that. There are some bullet points on our website about what we expect to receive from host organizations. It is not rocket science. You’re just providing us with an opportunity to evaluate how well positioned your host is to serve as your Fellowship host.

You will also share with us two letters of recommendation. One is from someone who supervised your lawyering – an internship or externship. Another letter is from a law school professor. They can submit those directly to us; there are instructions on that.

You will also be sharing your law school transcript with us. We are familiar with the incredible diversity of law school transcripts. We also know that some of you will have missing grades due to COVID. We had that experience last year. It is not a problem. When we look at your transcript, we are looking for a lot of things. Of course we are looking for excellent applicants, but that’s not the only thing we’re looking for academically. We are also evaluating the degree to which your coursework is preparing you for the project that you’ve designed. We’re looking at how you’ve spent your time, and more broadly, the overall trajectory of your law school career to date.

You are also going to share with us a resume. That can go back as far as you want it to, it can be more than one page. Oftentimes Fellows are designing a project based on one or even multiple prior experiences that have given them some insights into the client community they want to serve or that have founded their commitment to do this work, and your resume is helpful in us understanding that, as are your essays.

And then two totally optional ingredients for your proposal to us, and again, totally optional. One, if you are working in a state where we have never funded, or on an issue area that is emergent, you are free to attach a brief newspaper article that directly speaks to the nature of the client need or to a component of the project. If you are doing affordable housing here in New York or immigration in a state that has a lot of immigrants, we won’t need that brief article. But you are welcome to do so if you think it would help us evaluate your proposal.

And then the other thing you can submit, and again totally optional – if you are co-designing your project not only with a host organization, but if you have another nonprofit that is really central to your conceptualization of the work, they can submit a coalition support letter. Again, instructions are on our website. These are very brief; they just need to be one page: “This is what we do. This is how we’ll work with the applicant. This is why it’s helpful to our members/clients/patients/community.”

You want a coalition support letter really just to reflect the foundation that you have already laid, if you are in fact really developing your proposal with another nonprofit. Some examples that we see are a domestic violence project where you are planning at being onsite at one or more shelters. If you are doing a medical-legal partnership and your project intimately involves working with medical providers, a coalition support letter is critical, so that we know that work is well under way, in terms of – it is a plan, not a hope. If you are a movement or community lawyer and you plan on lawyering for and with organized communities, we would expect to see that in the design of your project, including in one or more coalition letters from the partners that helped you design the work, who will be your movement lawyering clients.

So, totally optional, but those are two other ingredients. Do folks have questions about the packet of supporting materials that you will be sharing with us?

Just one more ingredient I’ll show you briefly here. There are two certifications that you will be sharing. The first one is from you. You will read it carefully because you’re a lawyer, but everything here is true. If you are selected, you’ll spend your full time on your Fellowship.

And then the second certification is from your host organization. And I wanted to bring your attention to it, because if you’re working with a host organization that has not applied in the last few years, this will be new to them. There are extensive FAQs and explanations on our website. It does not change the relationship we have had with hosts in the past. But what we wanted was for you as the applicant to have complete transparency both about our support for your host and also your relationship with your host because they will be your employer for these two years.

So, this lays out the eligibility criteria for hosts to make sure you are not applying with a host that is ineligible. And it lays out the support we provide for the host organization. We provide host organizations a salary of $58,000 a year for you. The host organization can pay that amount or more. We also provide some benefits to your host organization. We pay the full cost of your medical and dental. We pay the FICA for the host organizations. So we are providing these, and this makes it crystal clear what it is they will be receiving in their quarterly payments.

There is only one exception to our $58,000 requirement, because again the host organization must – here in this document – tell you what your starting salary will be, and the salary must be at least the $58,000 that we provide. The only exception is if you are working at a host organization that is unionized, and the host’s collective bargaining agreement does not allow you to have a salary of $58,000 a year. They can submit the CBA to us, and they can have a salary for you that is as low as $54,000 a year. We wanted to make sure that we were not excluding from host eligibility the increasing number of host organizations, particularly outside of metropolitan areas, that have lower salaries.

So, your host will be your employer. You will be subject to all of their employment rules and regulations and also their standard benefits package. The certification letter provides them an opportunity to tell you if you won’t have access to any benefit that is normally provided to their employees.

This is a really useful document. All I can say is, please do not leave looking to it to the last minute. Your host organization may need one or several people to look at the certification who are not the lawyers with whom you are developing the proposal. It could be an HR person, a finance person, a chief operations officer. You want to make sure that your host organization is going through the steps to ensure that it will be an effective host organization, which starts with correctly filling out their host certification document.

I will pause here for questions about hosts and about the application packet. You’re welcome to come off mute, and I’ll answer the questions I see in the chat.

We have a great question, which is, “what is considered full time?” I will answer that both for you and for those supervisory attorneys. And then also, “can the work be remote?” That’s a really good question that we have continued to evolve our thinking around in the last two years.

I’ll take those one at a time. Your “full time” being devoted to the Fellowship for these two years means whatever that means to you and your host organization. It certainly means that you do not have another paid job outside of your Fellowship time, that your full time is devoted to your Fellowship.

For the host organization, for meeting that requirement that there are at least two attorneys who are devoting their full time to civil legal advocacy, we have some flexibility there. So first of all, you’ll see I said civil legal advocacy. They do not necessarily have to both be doing full time direct representation. Although, if you are doing direct representation, and you almost certainly will be, they do need to be really well positioned to support your representation and your clients. So for those two attorneys, it needs to be effectively their full-time job. At most nonprofits, most attorneys have some obligations other than lawyering. And of course, we understand that, and that’s especially true at small organizations.

Okay, so full time for you, and full time for your employer. And then the other question here is “can you be remote?” It’s a really good question. I would say that the Skadden Fellowship generally, and I specifically, have a small “c” conservative understanding of what creates excellent supervision for Fellows. In the before-times, we expected, and our Fellows benefitted from, a real shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with their supervisors – being onsite, being supervised very closely.

There have always been some Fellowship projects that benefit from a broad geographic scope. We’re just asking what’s most useful for your clients that you’ve identified. Broader is not necessarily more useful. If you are at a far remove from your clients, we’re going to have a lot of logistical questions about how they’ll best be served.

All of that said, we have all learned a great deal about how some components of remote representation can actually be the strongest way to serve clients, and can be in clients’ best interests. If your host organization is already lawyering well in that way, you can talk with them in detail about what components of your project would be face to face, assuming things are healthy, and how best to design a project that takes advantage of some of the things we have learned about remote representation.

We will ask a lot of questions about supervision. Those questions will be heightened if your organization is one where your direct supervisor is not physically in the same office with you every day. But we also understand that a great deal has changed in the last couple years.

If you plan on lawyering at a distance, we will also have questions for you about the bar exam. If you are representing folks in multiple places, how is it that you are going to be doing so? We do ask the question on the application about which bar exam you’re planning on sitting for, or if you’ve already been admitted, if you’re clerking.

These are great questions. Are there more questions about your project design, your host organization, and the application itself?

I’ll tell you a little bit about what happens after September 9th. The answer is that we read a whole lot of applications. We do read every word of every application. There is no secret GPA cutoff – we look at every part of every packet. And we try to move our process as efficiently as possible, so from the beginning to the end of the process is about two months. We tend to receive around 200 applications for 28 Fellowship slots.

We are not able to interview everyone who applies. In general, we are able to interview about 100 folks, so about half of the applicant pool. And if you receive an interview slot, you will get an email from Kathy Quijije who will let you know when and where it is. That email will come out about two weeks after the applications are due – probably by September 25th we’ll be letting everyone know that they have an interview.

If you have an interview, it will occur from the tail end of September through mid-October. The interviews are quite tightly packed and, as you can imagine, we have quite limited flexibility there, because we’re trying to fit in a lot of those. So you will be informed about when and where your interview is.

I will be at every interview, as will a partner from the firm who is a member of the Foundation’s advisory committee. The advisory committee members are all involved in legal services – board service, significant pro bono here at the firm, and also very involved in our process at every step of the way. They are very familiar with the Skadden Foundation and the Fellowship. They are my partners in helping identify the 100 folks that we will be interviewing, and then they are part of the interview process as well.

As soon as the interviews conclude – and we can talk a little bit today about the nature of the interviews as well – as soon as the interviews conclude, we will let every applicant who had an interview know if they are a finalist or not. We bring about 56 finalists to our independent board of selection trustees. They come to New York and they meet in person, hopefully – they did this year, before Omicron. The trustees identify the 28 Fellows that we will be funding for the incoming class. So it’s a really robust dialogue. The partners from the advisory committee and myself – we are all there, but ultimately it’s the trustees who decide on the class of Fellows. And again, we will let all the finalists know the next day, so we’ll be letting everyone know this year on November 11th.

There are of course many phenomenal public interest attorneys who do not make it into that 28, or even into that 56, so we want to let people know as soon as possible and enable them to move on with their overall selection process for their first public interest job.

The interview – we will be, and have been for the last couple years, sharing a brief video with instructions for everyone who receives an interview slot, so they know just what to expect. I will start by saying – they are 30 minutes long. The advisory committee member and I will have read every word of your proposal, and also believed in it and you. So the interviews are not cross-examinations, depositions, or interrogations. They are really conversations that start off from the materials that you have shared with us.

We will have questions related to how you picked your project, and who your clients are. We will have questions about the lawyering and how it is that you’ve done your thinking. If you put the clients front and center in your project design, you will design a project that is useful and well crafted, and situated at a strong host organization. And then by the time you interview with us, you will very much be the expert in your dream job, in your proposal.

One thing to keep in mind, both for your writing of that first essay and for your interview, is that we here at the Skadden Foundation are public interest generalists. The person before you may be a housing attorney, the person after you may work with survivors of domestic violence. In that day there will also be immigration attorneys and transactional attorneys. So you want to make sure that both your written submission and your presentation to us are accessible to folks who, like me, are supportive of the public interest work that you want to do, but probably not as expert as you are in the particular area of law that you have identified.

We try to give everyone an opportunity to ask a question at the end or, alternatively, share anything that we have neglected to elicit in the 30-minute interview slots. I will let you know right now, 30 minutes goes incredibly quickly. So you do want, both in your writing and in your interview, to be really strategic about how you use your time, and to come prepared with what you think are the most important parts about your work and your preparation to do it.

I suspect you all have questions about the application process or the interview, so please go ahead and ask those. None today – that’s all right.

As I’ve said, the last two years we’ve done interviews remotely. We’ve tried to craft a really thoughtful, non-stressful process. They’re here on Webex. Everyone gets to log in five minutes early, do a mic-check with my colleague Kathy Quijije, and then once you’re ready, she brings in myself and the partner.

If we return to interviewing in person the way we did before the pandemic, I travel to six cities where the firm has offices and we have members of the advisory committee. So you would be interviewed in one of those six cities – Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C., and New York. If you are not in one of those six cities, because your law school isn’t, or your clerkship isn’t, we would pay for your travel and arrange your travel so that you can interview in one of those six cities. Either way, we will let you know – we’ll let all the applicants know if we are going to return to in-person interviews or if we’re going to remain in two dimensions.

I will offer a few tips and suggestions as you think about entering into this process. I would also welcome questions. So first of all, we’ve talked a little bit about how we are agnostic in terms of geography. One thing I will note is that projects look really different geographically, and that’s okay. The most common host organizations in smaller legal markets provide different types of legal services. That’s totally fine. Also the nature of legal needs really differs. So although we have reentry projects right now in a number of jurisdictions, it’s only the one in Indiana where receiving access to driver’s licenses is a core component of the project. It’s not as critical here in New York. We expect your project to be really thoughtfully designed to address the nature of the client need that you’ve identified.

The same thing goes for methodology. If you are a movement lawyer, for instance, you want to go to a host organization that shares those values. You want to go to a host organization that already has the relationships that will make your project useful and successful. Same thing if you want to do impact litigation. The number of host organizations that have the skill set to do complex affirmative federal litigation is smaller than the overall universe of legal services providers. Again, any of these are totally fine. You just want to make sure that that fit is really strong.

A word on impact litigation, which is – I would say we have a healthy skepticism about impact-only projects. You will find very few of those. Most projects include components that bring you into a closer partnership with your clients. That’s for a couple reasons. First of all, impact litigation does not lend itself to a two-year Fellowship. It certainly doesn’t lend itself to the timeline of a one-year Fellowship; Skadden Fellowships are two years. You will have to be mindful about what is being done both before you arrive and also after you leave your Fellowship.

Also, impact litigation can have you practicing at a pretty significant remove from your clients. In order to have a successful primarily impact project, you will have to come with a really significant amount of knowledge and insight into the needs of the client community that you will be serving. You also would want to have thoughtful conversations with your host organization about how it is that you develop core lawyering skills around counseling and being client directed in the context of that greater degree of removal. If the problem that you’ve identified is best addressed by broad strategic litigation, that’s okay. You just need to make sure that you design a project that is really targeted at and accountable to core communities.

We spoke earlier about the project needing to be civil and legal, and about your clients needing to be in the U.S. I wanted to add one important point about the Skadden Fellowship’s being poverty law. Your clients must be poor. We do not have a strict financial cutoff for the definition of poverty. If you are working at an organization that is funded by a legal services corporation, you are, in all likelihood, going to be screening your clients, and all of your clients will be below 125% of the poverty line. That’s fine.

If you work at an organization that does not screen your future clients, that can be okay so long as you design a project that is meaningfully poverty law. So it is not sufficient for a Skadden Fellowship to design a project that addresses an issue that disproportionately impacts poor people. That would be a lot of issues. You actually have to design a project that is targeted at, and accountable to, poor clients.

If you are not sure if your project is sufficiently focused on poor clients, that would also be a reason for us to talk. But just by way of some examples, issues like education rights, voting rights, health care access, and the environment can include poverty law projects and work that is where the clients are poor. To the extent that is the case, we can fund them as Skadden Fellows. You may well, if you work on one of these issue areas or another, work at a host organization that has commitments to more than just poor clients. That is okay as long as they are fully committed to your clients and the project that you are doing together is fundamentally serving poor clients. That’s a really important one, so I’m happy to take questions there as well.

We’re going to fund a tremendous number of issues in any class. We are not coming in saying there’s going to be four housing projects, or two in the South, or anything like that. One really important source of advice to us is our broader community of Skadden Fellows. And again, they are a source of advice to you as well. If there is a Fellow who you can see on our website is doing work that you want to emulate and serving folks that you are committed to serving, that would be someone who could be a really helpful thought partner for you in designing your project, along with folks at your host organization, folks at non-legal organizations in the community you plan on serving, and your clinical faculty and other folks from law school as well. If you do not have access to that Skadden Fellow, I’m happy to share their email address with you.

One thing I would definitely encourage you, as you are putting together your application – please do not feel any need to pad your application. As you can tell, we receive a significant volume and we’re reading them all. The application is intentionally streamlined. That is out of respect to your host organization, to resource them with limited unnecessary effort. It’s also what is realistic in our efficient selection process. So please don’t pad your application.

What we’re really looking for – again, putting your clients front and center – is we are looking for your skill set, your passion, your insight. We especially welcome applications from folks who are – their personal or professional experiences – have yielded that deep insight into client community and that deep commitment. We’re looking for that throughout your materials. So you’re sharing your background to date, and your resume, and your essays, and you’re letting us know how those have prepared you for the work that you’ve outlined.

You can tell that this process is best done on a significant timeline. You will be doing well spending your spring researching excellent host organizations, and researching how it is that you can be most useful. If you have already interned or externed at an organization that you think is absolutely top-notch, that has that track record of both client services and supporting the growth of starting interns, that’s a totally fine place to start your search. It is not necessary. Every year we have a number of folks, and as it happens, I was a Skadden Fellow, who had not worked at their host before. That’s okay. I would just only note that then your obligation to vet that host organization, to be sure that it is the right place to bring your future clients, is just all the more important.

I think I have shared with you the main insights that I have into our process. I welcome questions. I can also speak briefly to the supports that we provide Fellows. You’re welcome to come off mute or put questions in the chat.

What is it like to be a Skadden Fellow? It’s great to be a Skadden Fellow – I highly recommend it. In addition to the monetary support that we provide your host organization, we also provide significant support for the Fellows during their Fellowship and afterwards. Skadden Fellows are Fellows for life. I talk to folks from the first couple classes in the late ‘80s and ‘90s most weeks.

During your Fellowship, we bring the Fellows in person, here to New York, for a symposium. So that’s three times – once after you’re selected, in the spring before you start, and then in the spring of both years of your Fellowship. The symposium is super awesome. We are looking forward to having the symposium here in person again this year, and expect to return to that as the public health situation allows.

We also have a website. You saw the external-facing portion. The Fellows are able to log in and see the contact information of all of the other Fellows. We have a newsletter that shares the successes of all 900+ of us with everyone else in our community. And we often have webinars and trainings both by and for the Fellows on a variety of public interest topics. We just had one the other day for the Fellows on strategic messaging for policy change as public interest lawyers. We’ve had ones recently at the beginning of the pandemic on how to best serve poor clients remotely. We were able to provide a webinar on that topic in March (2020) because we already had Skadden Fellows who were really expert at doing that before the pandemic.

Both during your Fellowship and afterwards, the firm is happy to provide pro bono support to Fellows. I have a query in my inbox right now about that, and the firm does its best to meet pro bono requests from the Fellows.

We also have funds available for former Fellows, and funds available for current Fellows. So during your Fellowship, we have $2,000 set aside for each Fellow to attend conferences and trainings that are relevant to their Fellowship that their host organization would not be able to send them to. We also have limited loan-repayment assistance if your host or law school does not provide that, and also relocation expenses – we reimburse so that you can get to the location of your Fellowship.

Also, the former Fellow community set aside, more than a decade ago now, the Plum Emergency Needs Fund, in honor of Susan Butler Plum, the founder of the Foundation and my senior advisor here at the Foundation now. And the PEN Fund can provide small-dollar emergency resources to your client. So you can submit a request, it goes to a community of former Fellows, and the PEN Fund is an awesome and lovely exemplar of the community and its devotion to public interest.

Once folks conclude their Fellowship, about half the people tend to stay at their host organization, and other folks go on either to other public interest organizations or to clerk. Both of those are fine. And again, you stay in our community forever. Just like we have symposia where we convene the current Fellows, we also have regional reunion symposia, where we convene the Fellowship alumni who live in any individual geography, again, to create opportunities for mutual support and learning about our shared client communities.

We also have financial support available to former Fellows. We have $10,000 grants available for former Fellows who are innovating on behalf of clients. So we were able to create a special application period at the beginning of the pandemic and fund 20+, almost 30, Fellows who were rapidly responding to urgent client need.

This is one thing that I do want to highlight, which is – in your Fellowship application, you can apply hewing very closely to the core commitments and competency of your host organization. We do not require or select for novelty or innovation. At the beginning of your legal career, you want to apprentice for attorneys who are already really skilled and ready to supervise the work that you’ve outlined. So we do not ask you to propose a project that your host organization isn’t currently doing and can’t supervise – very much the opposite.

But the FIGs (Flom Incubator Grants) for former Fellows do allow and support innovation further on in people’s careers. We also have writing stipends available for former Fellows who are writing academically on the subject of poverty law that both facilitates entry of legal services and nonprofit attorneys to academia, and also raises the profile of issues of poverty law and poor clients within the academic setting. And we provide ongoing career support to Fellows throughout their careers. We recently had a big convening for Fellows who were considering roles in the judiciary, and also one-on-one and small-group support for people’s careers over the course of their career.

That is a little bit about the Skadden Fellowship program. I would be delighted to stick around and answer any questions you all have. I hope you have everything you need between the website and future virtual info sessions. And again, I hope you consider me a resource in your process. I would be happy to speak with you if that would be helpful. Thank you so much.

Speaker, I see you have a question. That’s great.

Speaker: I’m just interested if you know the percentages of people that tend to stick around at their host organization after the two years?

Kathleen Rubenstein: We tend to see that it’s around half of each class that stays. Over the course of those two years, you do a tremendous amount of learning about what kind of lawyer you want to be and who’s doing the work in that city or geography. To me, when folks go on and find a different awesome organization for their career, that’s not a success or failure in any way. It just means there’s a better place for them to continue on in their career. But about half the Fellows choose to stay, and certainly more than that are offered the opportunity to stay.

Speaker: Cool, thanks.

Kathleen Rubenstein: It’s also worth discussing with your host organization in advance – of course they can’t make any commitments three years out. But organizations do have different postures or attitudes towards whether or not they want to prioritize keeping Fellows on, and it may help you with your project design to think that through. Do folks have other questions? That was a great question.

Speaker: I had another quick question, if you don’t mind. If you are looking at doing a potential impact litigation or systemic-type project, is it usually that the coalition letter is going to want to be from somebody you have already worked with or been in contact with? Or is it sometimes, if the organization already has community partners that they work with, that you would talk to them and work out the project with them too, to see if you can plug in with them, even if you haven’t done a bunch of work with them in the past?

Kathleen Rubenstein: Either of those can be the case. Those stakeholders and core partners are folks who can help ensure that your project is useful and insightful and well tailored to the nature of the need that everyone is seeing, whether or not they write you a coalition letter.

Coalition letters are useful, certainly in the case of an impact project that is going to represent institutional plaintiffs. We see this all the time where other nonprofits, in addition to individual poor clients, are the caption of a case, the plaintiffs in the case. And to the extent that you and your host organization already know who it is that you want to be lawyering with and for, a coalition letter can reflect that work.

Speaker: I have a little bit of a follow-up on that. I was interested that you said you don’t look as much for people who are looking to do only impact litigation. As an example, I’m considering doing a housing or homelessness project. I know the way the organization I’m hoping to do it with does it – they do a lot of direct representation, and then out of those representations, they might find “oh, this could be a good case to take up on appeal” for whatever reason. Is that something that would be appealing, because it’s not solely impact focused? It’s not like they are saying “oh, we don’t represent people.” Does that still fall into that same concern category, or is that a different approach.

Kathleen Rubenstein: That’s different. We see that commonly, where Fellows in their first year are serving clients. If you want to work at an organization that can support that kind of project, there is often a bullet point at the end that tells us – opportunities for systemic change, whether the organization specializes in legislative advocacy or impact litigation, that you’ll be looking for those systemic problems, and that you plan to address them in the course of the Fellowship as they come up.

You want to make sure then that you have a host organization that is equally skilled in supporting both elements of that project. So that’s an important thing to think about. The organization, the one you’re talking about, already does have direct services infrastructure in place, and also has the skill set to bring impact litigation where appropriate. That’s totally fine.

Speaker: Great. Thanks so much.

Kathleen Rubenstein: Anything else? Or I can let you all go. It was nice to speak with you today. Thank you for taking the time. I look forward to answering your questions and seeing your applications in the future.

[End of event.]