Kellogg Full-Time MBA Program

A busy summer

This summer has been quite varied and considerably busier than I thought it would be. Regardless, after spending a year at the law school in downtown Chicago, taking a mix of law and business classes has been a relief.

My summer began back in early May as I finished law school classes. The Saturday after they finished, I boarded a plane to San Francisco and began my internship on Monday. I worked at Oakland Unified School District, essentially as an employment law intern. The District didn’t have money with which to pay me, but thankfully that’s where the law school stepped in. It has a generous program (SFPIF) that compensates those of us who seek public interest work.

Even though I’m not going into law, I wanted to know what practicing law could be like on a day-to-day basis and I wanted to apply the skills I learned over the previous year to help an organization that could use them. It was a useful and eye-opening experience, to be sure. I participated in a negotiation for distribution of funds from a previous settlement. I wrote memorandums on current cases and legal issues for the General Counsel and other staff attorneys. I took part in a deposition. I wrote a contract template form that is now being used in the District. I even authored a reply letter to an attorney after researching previous communications and recognizing that he was breaking the law. The list goes on, but you get the gist. I was essentially working as an associate attorney after one year of law school. Intimidating? Sure. Interesting? Definitely.

While much of my intern work had business applications and connections, it still wasn’t business, per se. Needless to say, I was eager to begin my summer classes in late June and focus more directly on my business interests. My summer classes consisted of accounting, statistics, entrepreneurship law and the Small Business Opportunity Center (SBOC) clinic. The business classes were held at the part-time Kellogg building next to the law school. While the classes were interesting, the SBOC was by far the best part. There were about ten students in the clinic this summer and we were essentially the attorneys for a few small businesses that needed our help. One of my clients was a not-for-profit for which I filed its Articles of Incorporation and finished a complicated IRS form for tax-exempt status. For the other client, a for-profit, I filed its Articles of Organization, drafted an Operating Agreement and extensively checked for possible trademark infringement claims. While the SBOC work was not the kind of thing I would want to do as a career, understanding the incorporation process and the key legal issues for small businesses will be exceedingly helpful in the future when I begin my own venture, consult or manage. Working as counsel definitely offers plenty of lessons for the budding businessperson, for it’s amazing how many avoidable mistakes are made due to ignorance of the law.

Anyways, summer is wrapping up and it’s a busy time for JD-MBAs. Many are doing law interviews during the worst legal hiring conditions in years (our specific class…it appears to be shaping up for future classes). Many are doing a KWEST trip before we begin our first official Kellogg year. Many are moving from Chicago to Evanston. All are taking finals. Few are resting. And despite the busy summer, there’s at least one JD-MBA who’s looking forward to the change of focus that Kellogg will offer.