Ethan Berg '26 gained valuable insight into the court's decision-making process through his summer placement at Erie County Surrogate's Court.
Summer fellowships offer great experiences, equal access
A law student’s summer placement can be a game-changer—a foot in the door, or a newly cemented appreciation for the impact of a legal career.
UB School of Law’s summer public interest fellowship program is a catalyst for those crucial experiences, both in connecting students with placement opportunities and helping them make ends meet while they’re working without pay in the public interest. And in recent years, a groundswell of alumni support has made more such pairings possible.
“I think of these fellowships as a way to make sure all students have access to high-quality unpaid summer experience,” says Lisa M. Patterson, the school’s director of externships and access to justice initiatives, who helps connect students with positions and fellowship support.
“They enable students to accept opportunities they couldn’t otherwise afford to take,” she says. “These can be life- and career-changing internships. The program demonstrates a significant commitment to equity, making sure everyone has a shot at them.”
Building on the longtime support for such placements by the student-run Buffalo Public Interest Law Program, students interested in pursuing access to justice work have benefited from increased alumni donations. About 50 students each year receive summer fellowships. “We’ve been fortunate that in the last few years we’ve had so much support from our alumni,” Patterson says. “This year, we were able to provide funding for every student who needed it.”
Students spend their law school summers at work in nonprofit organizations, government agencies and judicial placements. You can read about their experiences here.)
The generous donors who fund these fellowships do so for a variety of reasons; some to encourage students to pursue a particular area of practice, some are simply grateful for the careers UB Law enabled for them.
“We are delighted to have the opportunity to give back by endowing judiciary and public interest summer fellows,” say David Koehler ’94 and Kristin Graham Koehler ’94. “From our own student experience, we understand that, although many judicial and public interest internships can be priceless to one’s development as a lawyer, those positions—especially following the first year—are often unpaid. We hope these summer fellowships alleviate a little bit of the financial pressure that might otherwise deter students from pursuing these interesting and rewarding opportunities.”
Another donor, Hon. Michael M. Mohun ’80 (ret.), says, “As a multi-bench judge in Wyoming County, I saw firsthand the effects of the lack of attorneys practicing in rural communities. As a result, my wife, Joyce, and I fund a fellowship through the law school to promote awareness of the opportunities available in these communities. My hope is that this fellowship will facilitate a greater awareness of the opportunities to practice in rural communities.”
Mark Bassett '25
The beneficiary of the Mohuns’ fellowship this year was third-year law student Mark Bassett, who worked in the Wyoming County Public Defender’s Office doing research on briefs and motions, and observing a busy rural law office at work.
“They gave me a little bit of everything,” Bassett says. “And I got the chance to shadow the attorneys in court; every other day I would follow an attorney to hear them do a motion or some sort of pleading or meet with a client. I would also go with the county investigator to the county jail to discuss with the prisoners any legal questions they had. I got great writing experience, and I met a lot of good people in the area.”
The fellowship, Bassett says, made it all work—especially because he was driving an hour each way to work in Warsaw, and those trips to the gas station added up.
Meredith Wattle '25
His classmate Meredith Wattle left behind her job in Buffalo to spend the summer working in the Brooklyn office of Communities Resist, a nonprofit provider of legal services to low-income tenants in New York City. “What interested me,” she says, “is that this is a model focused on community-based lawyering; it integrates legal work with community activism. It’s much more about working with people cooperatively.”
She spent the summer interviewing clients, getting their affidavits in order, attending tenant association meetings and visiting tenants who were dealing with significant problems in their rent-stabilized apartment complexes. “I really liked that experience,” she says. “It’s one thing to read that someone’s ceiling is cracked, but it’s another thing to see it firsthand and help them do something about it.”
Maeve Morley '26
It was the Professor Virginia A. Leary Memorial Fellowship in Human Rights, Wattle says, that made the summer possible. “I don’t have a lot of funds in reserve,” she says, “so if I hadn’t received the funding, it probably would have been a no-go for me. I was relying on that.”
Second-year student Maeve Morley tested the waters of public interest law with two part-time internships in her 1L summer.
At the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, she was assigned to Buffalo City Court and researched legal questions in support of the assistant district attorneys doing litigation there—many of them not long out of law school. “It was a really nice experience, especially because I was so close in age to a lot of them,” she says.
The other position was an internship in state Supreme Court, Eighth Judicial District, with Hon. Daniel J. Furlong. “He was able to impart a lot of great advice, especially on professional ethics,” Morley says. She would brief cases—the issues, the nature of the dispute, the relief being sought—and discuss them with the judge. The cases ranged from negligence suits to matrimonial issues to Child Victims Act cases. She also sat with the judge in settlement conferences, learning how to craft a settlement.
“These were very valuable experiences,” says Morley, whose fellowship was sponsored by Hon. Dennis C. Vacco ’78, the former New York State attorney general. “This fellowship gave me the opportunity to be exposed to the public interest sector during the summer—it made it possible for me to do the work in the first place.”