Diversity & Inclusion

It Takes a Village: The Promise of the Southern District of Florida’s Judicial Intern Academy to Inspire Mentorship and Leadership Through Service

By Jonathan K. Osborne

Jonathan K. Osborne is a shareholder and co-chair of the White-Collar Defense & Internal Investigations Practice Group at Gunster law firm. Previously, he served as a Criminal Division assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida. Osborne serves in the FBA’s Broward County Chapter as the chapter’s national delegate. ©2022 Jonathan K. Osborne. All rights reserved. There are many inspiring quotes about the virtues of service. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” and “Everybody can be great … because everybody can serve.” Mother Teresa said, “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.” Anne Frank said, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” And on leadership, John C. Maxwell has explained that “A leader is great not because of his or her power, but because of his or her ability to empower others” and that “leadership is influence.” There is a U.S. district judge in Miami who personifies these principles and, through her service and leadership, is multiplying leaders while inspiring future generations of attorneys. That judge is Hon. Beth Bloom.

A graduate of Broward Community College, Judge Bloom received her undergraduate education at the University of Florida and attended the University of Miami School of Law. Judge Bloom’s judicial career began at the state level in 1995 and, on Feb. 6, 2014, President Barack Obama nominated her to serve as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Florida. She received her judicial commission on June 25, 2014, and, in the ensuing years, has presided over numerous significant cases.

The focus of this article, however, is what she has done for our bench and bar—and the students and aspiring lawyers of our community—and how her example can galvanize generational progress in federal jurisdictions around the country with respect to mentorship and leadership.

The Key Roles of Federal Law Day and Civil Discourse and Decisions in Fostering Mentorship in the Southern District of Florida

For many years, U.S. courts have participated in Law Day, which was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to celebrate the role of law in American society. Federal courts, including in the Southern District of Florida, have also participated in Civil Discourse and Difficult Decisions (CD3), a national initiative of the federal judiciary, which brings high school and college students into federal courthouses to tackle legal issues youth face. Both Law Day and CD3 facilitate student interactions with judges, court personnel, private attorneys, and representatives from U.S. Attorney’s and Federal Public Defender’s offices. In our district, Judge Bloom spearheads Law Day and works with federal judicial colleagues in Broward and Palm Beach counties to deliver the CD3 program, with help from local FBA chapters. These programs teach about the role of law in society and introduce students from various communities—across a wide range of backgrounds—to the court.

Law Day and CD3 are also inspirational. These programs have inspired me to be grateful for the mentors

who have enriched my life and career and to become a leader who, like Judge Bloom, serves with humility, commitment to excellence, a team mentality, and vision.

Feedback from the 2021 Law Day program, which was held via Zoom due to the pandemic, illustrated the impact of the program on students. Last year, through the leadership of the court and Stephanie Turk, a shareholder at Stearns Weaver Miller, Law Day touched nearly 1,000 students across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. In providing feedback, students indicated they learned, among other things, that with hard work and dedication, you can achieve your goals and aspirations. Another student remarked that Law Day was a “once in lifetime opportunity.” A teacher from a participating school remarked that she appreciated that Law Day offered students “an opportunity to hear from attorneys that looked like them and had different backgrounds that [her] students could relate to and be inspired by.” These examples demonstrate the value of our court’s outreach to high school students, many of whom aspire to careers in law enforcement, law, and other forms of public service. Moreover, Judge Bloom’s latest project, the Judicial Intern Academy, holds great promise for the development of our youth and federal bar.

The Judicial Intern Academy Motivates Service at Every Level of the South Florida Federal Legal Community

Research on the value of mentorship shows that “[m]entoring relationships are critical to launch successful careers in law and, at a minimum, necessary to adequate career development in law.”1 It is also widely understood that, in the law firm context,

A good mentor acts as an advisor, teacher, exemplar, and career advocate. A good mentor can also acquaint a new associate with firm culture and client relations, and can help groom the associate for partnership. The road to success is often paved by a good mentor.2

More broadly, quality mentorship offers strategies for managing job demands, provides advice on how to balance work and family demands, models ethical behavior, communicates values of the legal profession, and “lend[s] meaning to work through demonstration of its broader social worth.”3

Judge Bloom’s Judicial Intern Academy—which launched in summer 2022 in its pilot stage—demonstrates the power of the federal judiciary to advance mentorship and teach leadership through creativity and inclusion. Designed to offer the benefits of a federal judicial internship to rising 2Ls who are unable to devote their summer to a full-time unpaid judicial internship, the inaugural Academy paired each of its 18 participants with a former federal law clerk. The former clerks, who now work in state and federal government agencies and an array of law firms, served as law clerk advisors (LCAs), volunteering their time to supervise the interns. As far as workload, the Academy asked each student to draft a proposed order and argue an issue at a mock hearing, with the goal of developing recommendations for the court and producing a writing sample. In addition to the tremendous value generated by these assignments and relationships with the LCAs, the Academy leveraged the court’s ties to our legal community to expose the interns to the litany of career options available and invited judges, court personnel, and federal practitioners from varied backgrounds to the mentorship table.

To that end, a highlight of the program included an initial session about the work of the court, ethics, and wellness. Over the course of the ensuing eight weeks, interns attended federal civil, criminal, and bankruptcy proceedings as well as a naturalization ceremony, and at the state level, they attended civil, criminal, juvenile, and family proceedings. Among the summer’s invaluable experiences, the Academy convened “Conversations with the Court” and “Meet and Greets” with more than 20 federal circuit, district, magistrate, bankruptcy, and immigration judges as well as state judges. Each week also featured “Learning from the Legends” sessions with renowned and emerging leaders of the federal bar who discussed their careers and offered advice to the interns. Through sessions on practical topics like preparing for on-campus interviews and maximizing law school, the Academy also provided practical tools for success. Impressively, Judge Bloom and her team accomplished all this while she maintained her active docket and hosted full-time interns in chambers.

The Promise of the Judicial Intern Academy

Judge Bloom herself said it best:

Creating the Judicial Intern Academy allows the Court to provide intern opportunities for a greater number of law students and to reach out to more law schools. Many students are unable to devote their entire summer to an internship because of financial or other personal reasons but still want to learn and grow.¼The Academy will allow more law students to learn about our judicial system, meet dedicated members of our court family, and hopefully become inspired about their futures.

And in a profession that continues to confront how to foster a diverse and inclusive legal community, resources like the Academy illustrate the capacity for federal courts to leverage their role in society and legal communities to inspire, equip, and mentor future lawyers while multiplying leaders across the bench and bar by inviting us to serve. 

Endnotes

1Fiona M. Kay, John Hagan, & Patricia Parker, Principals in Practice: The Importance of Mentorship in Early Stages of Career Development, 31 L. &Pol. 69 (2009). 2Elizabeth K. McManus, Intimidation and the Culture of Avoidance: Gender Issues and Mentoring in Law Firm Practice, 33 Fordham Urb. L.J. 217, 219 (2005). 3Fiona M. Kay, John Hagan, & Patricia Parker, Principals in Practice: The Importance of Mentorship in Early Stages of Career Development, 31 L. &Pol. 69, 74 (2009).