NetApp
Founder and former CEO of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) Brenton discusses her latest project, Community of Legal Interns (CLI) – a diverse and inclusive program connecting legal interns across the globe, supported by Southern University Law Center.
A year ago, I was invited to speak at a law school event in Miami. While there, I was introduced to the chancellor of Southern University Law Center, John Pierre, and he said: ‘We’re doing things differently here’. It sounded intriguing, so a colleague and I from NetApp went to visit, with the goal of meeting some of Southern’s students and potentially hiring an intern. It was a life-changing event. When we got there, we discovered that the students were recruited for ‘grit and gratitude’, and they were amazing – one after another, after another.
Their life experiences were different compared to what I typically see for a student attending one of the Bay Area law schools. They’re not generally going into big law – that’s one of the areas to which they don’t have access. Many of them have had jobs for a long period of time, so they have a sense of what it is to work, alongside a passion for what they are studying and why they are studying. There’s a true desire to make a real difference in their communities. There’s an aspiration to learn and be exposed to a multitude of experiences so that they can bring that back and uplift their communities. The school itself is in Baton Rouge, one of the poorest cities in the US, and the students simply have a different cultural background, work background, attitude, and a real sense of grit.
