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Leading up to National Pro Bono Week (October 23 – 29), UW School of Law celebrates our students’ public interest and service work. In this series, students share a firsthand account of their meaningful summer work experiences.

Kelly Skahan

Over summer 2016 I was lucky to work for Senator Patty Murray as an Oversight and Investigations law clerk at the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions in Washington, D.C. It was an incredible opportunity to try out an alternative legal career path, and much of the substantive work I performed throughout my externship was quite different from that of a more traditional legal summer job.

The Oversight and Investigations team does important work for the Committee – essentially, the office looks into issues that fall within the Committee’s jurisdiction to make sure laws serve the public properly and effectively. When a law is difficult to follow, doesn’t properly solve the problem it intends to correct, or just isn’t followed consistently, the Oversight and Investigations team conducts research to help correct those issues.

Accordingly, I had the opportunity to work with raw data, crunch numbers and come to conclusions based on our results. Though I did conduct a fair amount of traditional legal research, much of my time was spent working with new information and helping to develop policy recommendations based on that data. I hope that experience will be invaluable as I begin my second year of school and learn more about the discovery process.

I was also lucky to gain access to meetings, hearings, and briefings that helped me gain a better grasp of the legislative process and where substantive legal work plays a part in lawmaking, and I had the opportunity to research and write my own policy proposals throughout the summer.

I found the summer extremely rewarding, and it’s likely I’ll focus much of my job search on policy-minded work that handles issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction. Though it may seem cliché, this position ultimately gave me a renewed sense of duty. When I applied to law school I felt a responsibility to use my skills and talents to better the world around me, and the long grind of 1L dulled that feeling a bit. Seeing the law in action helped reinvigorate that sense of duty to do good, and I’m now much more focused on working in the public sector.