How to Build a High-Impact Internship Program

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner looking to create an internship program? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Adam Rossen - a lawyer who founded his firm in 2008—shares the 15-year journey of developing a robust law firm internship program. The episode highlights lessons learned, the importance of mentorship, community impact, and practical advice for building effective internship programs, especially in the legal field. 

Having a solid internship program can really make your law firm stand out and be something to use to attract and retain new talent. Adam speaks to some of the key things to have when formalizing a program. One thing to incorporate is speakers. This will create a real world experience for interns who can learn from the best. Adam had some judges speak to his summer interns this past year. Another component is having a summer book club which makes the program more formal and curriculum based. His students read a book on the federal criminal justice system, written by a judge.

Adam and Tyson chat about how to recruit for an internship program. One thing a firm can do is create some marketing materials to promote the firm. If you have a good relationship with colleges and universities in your city, you can connect with them to help promote the program to their students. Something to consider, which is something Adam has done in his firm, is connect with criminal justice organizations to help recruit individuals who don't have a background in law to intern at the firm. These can be individuals who are looking for a change in career or who have been in contact with the law and want to work in the field.

Listen in to learn more about creating a robust internship program!

4:04 Growth and Speaking to Students
10:18 Formalizing A Program
14:06 Program Structure & Recruitment 

17:28 Advice for Starting an Internship Program
20:27 Long-Term Impact & Networking 

Connect with Adam:

• Website  

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Adam Rossen 00:00:01 All right. Hey, guys. So I'm going to talk about our internship program. I was on the podcast about six, eight months ago. I had about an hour to talk with Tyson about it. This is the 20 minute version. But also I'm going to make this a lot more tactical. I, you know, for most of you guys, you don't. What I want you to take away from this is you don't have to build what we have at my firm today, in the very first summer that you do it, just take some action, pick some things, and you guys will be well on your way. Because this took 15 years to build with some intentionality and thinking behind it. But I want everybody to leave here. If you want to do something like this, you absolutely can. Okay. So this is this is the firm, this stuff a little bit about me. We can skip this. Actually, as of January 1st, I'll be the only lawyer out of this group that's still here.

Adam Rossen 00:00:52 That's a different talk for a different day, though. and when Jim's here talking about failures and everything, I'm like, oh, God, Jim, you always seem to speak to me so. But it's, you know, it is what it is. All right, so that's me. Fun stuff. So let me, let me, let me have you guys go through just the history of this. I started my firm at 26 years old in 2008. I was only a prosecutor for a year and a half, and I loved it, but I also hated it. So I said, screw it, I'm going to start my own firm. And as soon as you become a lawyer, well, guess what happens. People go, hey, you're a lawyer. My cousin's brother's uncle's daughter is going to be in law school. They need an internship. Can you help them out? And one thing that I didn't realize until I became a lawyer is that the the legal profession is a very giving profession.

Adam Rossen 00:01:44 It really is. All of us here. We help each other all the time, right? We're here. We're, you know, we come to conferences whether it's legal or business, and we're always looking to help each other. And mentors have really shaped my life. A bunch of my mentors are here, and I've been able to do that and always wanted to give back. So version 1.0 of the internship was come hang out. Sure. You know, can I help your friend? Absolutely. Come hang out. What are they going to do? I don't know, because I don't have a program. Just come hang out. Right. See what it's like to carry the briefcase every single day, okay? And there's a lot of value in that. But that's the way it started. Watch court, maybe do some small projects, work on a little discovery, and just have one intern at a time. Right? Raise your hand if you've had an intern, and that's what your internship has been.

Adam Rossen 00:02:36 Anybody. Right. Okay. Yeah. And you're providing a great, a good experience for somebody. But how can you get it and make it better? And that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit at the end. Then comes well fun fact we we stopped the internship, I want to say, for about a year or two. And the reason we stopped the internship was because in 2014, one of the interns became my future wife. Okay, little scandalous here for Max law. Little scandalous. And so my. My what? Yes, yes, it was a, well, kind of sort of. My wife and I, our grandparents were best friends, and they kind of put us together. But that's how it started with my granddaughter's got an internship, and then I remember her. Her grandmother pulled me aside and she goes.

Adam Rossen 00:03:32 And she's gorgeous.

Adam Rossen 00:03:33 You know, I had her live in girlfriend at the time. but the old the. Yes.

Adam Rossen 00:03:43 Yeah, yeah.

Adam Rossen 00:03:45 Hey, it was a great story for our wedding.

Adam Rossen 00:03:47 We've been married ten years, but my wife's like, you know, at the time, she's like. And this program's.

Adam Rossen 00:03:52 Got to stop.

Adam Rossen 00:03:53 Right?

Adam Rossen 00:03:55 So now we just make sure we have a lot of interns. So there's witnesses, so I don't get in trouble. No.

Adam Rossen 00:04:01 I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Adam Rossen 00:04:04 Yeah. So anyway. But, No, my and my wife's a gang unit prosecutor in Palm Beach, so she's she's pretty tough, but that's the way the internship started. Okay. And then in 2018, 2019, I'm building the firm. I'm out, I'm speaking. And I remember I'm speaking to a local high school's criminal law club. And I'm telling them about your 16, 17 years old. How do you know what you want to do in life? Go, intern. Go work at a law firm. Maybe, you know, take a gap year between college and law school. You know, intern your summers. You have no idea if you even want to be a lawyer.

Adam Rossen 00:04:38 You're 16, 17 years old. And then. So this little tiny girl comes walking up to me and she goes, hey, so you said we should intern at places. I'm third in my class out of 700 students. I want to intern with you. And I was like.

Adam Rossen 00:04:53 Oh, shit.

Adam Rossen 00:04:54 You know, I'm like.

Adam Rossen 00:04:55 Damn, I.

Adam Rossen 00:04:56 Can't say no. All right, so come on. And we have 3 or 4 interns. And then it grew to that, but 2018 to 2019 was just more of the same, except we really started taking on 2 or 3 at a time. And again, this is the time that I'm going to masterminds, you know, law firm growth, you know, companies. I'm learning, I'm developing mentors. And here we are. We get to Covid. And one thing that I really learned from some of my mentors is if you believe that, you know, at my firm, we want to have a community impact. We're very big in the community here.

Adam Rossen 00:05:28 We have a counter up in our office. That's every time we close a case, it goes up or we do it every week and we're at 30 over 3200 cases closed. And we say that is the impact because that's how many people's futures we've helped, right? That's how many families we have helped. And if we are the community and the relationship builders, and if we are the pillars in the community, then it's our job and responsibility to take on interns. So Covid happens, right? And I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. I, I truly, genuinely believe in making mistakes, taking action, failing forward. But I made some smart decisions in Covid and during Covid. What happened was everybody's freaking out. I joined the guild. The guild just got up and running. Were having like, you know, weekly meetings. I'm making all these great friends online were kind of like figuring out what to do. And I said, everybody's summer is ruined. Judicial internships, law firm internships, everything right there.

Adam Rossen 00:06:32 Summer is ruined. Well, if we are the community builders and pillars that we say we are, then it's our moral and ethical obligation to say yes to everybody. Screw it, I'll do whatever. And crazy Me took on 13 interns back then, when we were a firm of six people, we had just grown from 3 to 6 people. We had twice as many interns as people in the firm. But, you know, I genuinely believe that that it's our job and responsibility to, you know, to have an impact. and we did it on zoom. And I'm in South Florida where, you know, and Fort Lauderdale and Miami was all zoom didn't really open up at all. Palm beach opened up a lot faster. But here we are and we had time on our hands. There were two lawyers, me and another attorney. And so we're starting to take depositions on zoom. Well, great. We're going to we're going to have a little strategy with them. They're going to be on the depots.

Adam Rossen 00:07:24 And then we're going to debrief after with them. We're going to have them on zoom court. You know, we're going to do a lot of things. And it really gave me time to think. How many of us are so busy every day that before we know it, we wake up and we go, oh my God, it's October 9th. What? Right. Or it's wait, it's 2025. Where did the last three years go? Where did the last five years go? So Covid gave me a just an amazing opportunity to sit and think. And I said, all right, how can we make this interesting for them? Well, the George Floyd murder happened Memorial Day weekend of 2020. Okay, I'm going to use this and we're going to turn it into a project. So we gathered everybody up, you know, virtually. And I said, all right. Next Wednesday from 130 to 530, you guys are mine. We have a project. I'm not telling you what it is. I got the, I got the jury instructions in Minnesota.

Adam Rossen 00:08:23 I got the police reports for what happened, and we got the autopsy. I think the initial autopsy, like the first, I don't know, 20 pages or whatever. It came out and they all came on zoom, and I said, all right, here's the deal. We're going to do a law school exam. We've been, you know, we've been chosen to represent Derek Chauvin. I'm taking the unpopular opinion. Here's the law. Here's what he's charged with. Here's the police reports and here's the medical examiner's reports. Write me and say, write me a law firm memo, four hours of how we're going to win this case, because I'm not going to let you take the easy road out and say, well, we've all seen it on video. It's horrific. He's guilty. Right? And I said, I'm going to rank you and grade you against each other, just like law school. And we had high school, college and law students. And you know what? Number one was a law student.

Adam Rossen 00:09:13 Two and three were high schoolers, okay. And we graded them and we gave feedback. My wife helped me with it. And it was it was tons of fun. And the next year, in 2021, we did Bill Cosby's trial as the same project, and we used it as an opportunity to turn them into SEO writers. I had this great SEO project that I wanted to do. We went through and we had 30,000 words of content. We we went from February 2020 about getting 600 hits a month on our site to 30,000 during Covid. Okay. Now we wrote three articles that were like Covid criminal related, kind of just to ride the wave and that bumped us. But once those died off, we were consistently at about 10,000 views a month. Okay. And this is one of the one of maybe the 3 or 4 key factors that allowed me to triple my firm in 2021, in revenue and double in size. We went from 6 to 13 and then the following year to from 13 to 20 employees.

Adam Rossen 00:10:18 Okay. But a lot of it was this, this SEO project that we had our, our interns work on. Okay. And so I'm like, well, wait a minute. Like, we got something like, this is a really cool, fun experience. Yeah, I'm a little crazy. Okay. But what can we do to make it even better? So now we're in the. This is a program. Okay. 2022. We said we're creating a program. So it's curriculum based. Okay. It's a formal program. We get speakers from all across the country. This is a this is a federal judge down in Miami in the middle. Okay. we've taken them to federal court. You know, they're in state court all every week. We book club a book on criminal justice. There's a book written by a federal judge in Southern District of New York called Why the Guilty? Let's see why the why the innocent plead guilty and the guilty go free. And it's a harsh rebuke of the federal criminal justice system.

Adam Rossen 00:11:11 So there's an academic component, a curriculum book club. And we had the judge, Judge Jed Rakoff, this summer. We got him to speak to our interns. So it was amazing. And we pair them with our lawyers. So they're in it every single day. We've gone and had Osis, and I just was like, you know, I want my lawyers to go back to their law school as they, you know, being there on the other end at Osis for this, how how cool, how amazing. And so I'm like, well, how do I do it? I don't know, just call the career people. And I called them and called them an email and said, we want to do this. We want to do this. We have your alums here and we do. We go back to our old schools, our local law schools in South Florida, and we have it through a formal application process. So this has been, you know, as we've evolved, this is how it's evolved.

Adam Rossen 00:12:01 But then this year we did something different. We niched down even more. Oh, we have a summer award now where the intern of the summer, we wanted to make it competitive. So our intern of the summer gets that award, and we have a plaque in the office with nameplates for every year so they can live forever, you know, in the history of the firm. And so it was the same as last version, but we wanted a niche down further, not just criminal law, you know. Not at first. It was, oh, you want to go to law school? Maybe you checked this off your box. Maybe you get inspired. Then it really went to criminal law. Criminal law? Maybe you want to be a prosecutor. Well, that could benefit me as well, because at least we can have an influence in some prosecutors and let them know that we're good people and know what it's like to represent good people. But now it's criminal justice. And what we've done is we've partnered with criminal justice organizations in South Florida and around the country.

Adam Rossen 00:12:56 Okay. And as you all know, by niching down niches create, you know, create riches. And so now we've been able, from an SEO and a digital marketing play, to get backlinks from hyper local and nationwide criminal justice organizations that link back to our site and our program. We've had media and PR based on this. I've been on their podcast. They've been on mine. We've created more relationships that are spreading by niching down into this. It's helped our branding. You know, back when I started, I could not care about branding. Now, with 25 people in the firm trying to get to, you know, obviously be bigger, branding is a big, important thing. And I want us known as a law firm that really stands up for people and social justice initiatives. It's very important to me, and it's helped us get better interns, interns that really know what they want to do. And so we really focused on this last summer. What we do is we open up applications every year in January and January through April is really is when when we do it and we have our program.

Adam Rossen 00:14:06 Oh, that's not going to work. Okay. Let's see if this works. But we have our program that's run. may through first week in August. This is a little video. I only wanted to play about a minute of it, but my marketing team put this together and it's on our site. And again, it's it's used when we're trying to make connections with other organizations. And it's used to create hype and promote the firm. Let's see. Yeah, I think that there was some internet issues where it wasn't going to work. Okay. Well, it's on the site and you guys can look it up. All right. And one of the things that I realized with talking with a lot of these criminal justice organizations is, look, my internship is elite. It is elitist. We have it's high academic. We have Duke law, Cornell law. Miami, Florida. And what we do is we split. We only take three undergrad students from one local private school in South Florida, American Heritage, where I have a deep connection with.

Adam Rossen 00:15:02 And then it's college and law students, and you either need to have a tie to South Florida or have the money or both to be able to work an unpaid internship for the entire summer. This past summer, we had two two law students move here. Moved to South Florida. They lived together, one from Penn State law and the other from Duke Law. Okay. It requires a certain financial stability to do that. We know that. We get it. Okay. But I wanted and I wanted to add something else on while still keeping the internship separate. So through talking with the criminal justice organizations next year we're going to offer a new program. And this is going to run September through or through April. So it's not going to conflict. Okay. And this is going to be it's it's really a mentorship program. It's a paid mentorship program where we will pay somebody to come work at the firm. Right. Okay. Obviously an employee, but somebody maybe with no experience. Somebody who maybe was a high school dropout and got his his or her GED, maybe went to a technical school, maybe had a criminal case, and maybe they want to be a lawyer.

Adam Rossen 00:16:15 Maybe they want to work at the clerk of the courts or the public defender's office. You know, to support as a support staff role. Maybe they want to be a paralegal, a legal assistant, but no one will ever give them a chance because of their criminal record or because of their lack of education. So we're doing this where it's a one higher one at a time for that period. Hands on experience learning. Best case, they come and become a full time employee with us. Worst case, they now have have new skills and we they have it on their resume and we can help open the door for them. Maybe not at the fancy prosecutor's office because they're kind of judgy, but maybe at the clerk of the court, maybe at the public defender's office, and they can move into a great career. Okay. And so that was something that just came from talking with these with with these organizations. So what can you folks do? Okay. And this is something I talked to Tyson a lot about over the past few months because he's like, Adam, I want you to, you know, yes, your program is nice and you built it over 15 years, right? But here are some things that everybody here can do right now, today, if you want to do something like this and you can start with one intern, but make it intentional.

Adam Rossen 00:17:28 Have an actual plan. Who's managing? What is the day to day going to look like? Because the worst thing for an intern is just to come hang out and be bored, unless they want you to be their future husband. Okay, then. Then it works. no. But to find the work, right? Create the experiences. Be creative. We are all so creative at our cases, our casework, whether it's criminal defense, personal injury, estate planning and trust, or some of the most creative and tax lawyers, some of the most creative lawyers I know. So why can't you just think. Be deliberate. Think. And let's give them great experiences. Okay. You want to onboard? Well, because the last thing is somebody, you know, they're coming in and they're just bored or. Or they feel like they're a bother. You don't want that at all. And you can do it. Keep it simple. Go slow. Be intentional. And everybody here can have a great program.

Adam Rossen 00:18:24 Okay. It's really pretty easy. that's all I have for you guys. So if you want to stay in touch. Okay? My LinkedIn is here. I'm getting big in LinkedIn, so let's let's hang out. And I think I have like three minutes. So am I allowed to do a Q&A? Anybody want to hear any jokes? No. Is there any questions?

Adam Rossen 00:18:46 How do you make sure that you're not in trouble with FLSA for having interns doing work?

Adam Rossen 00:18:53 Right. So that's a great question. And it's because we have the curriculum. Okay. There's an academic component to it. All right. So it is curriculum based. now. and that's important. We have weekly meetings. We we teach, we book club, we have the speakers. They're right. And look, these interns, I mean, a lot of the feedback we've gotten is like, we want more. We want more. Give us more. I mean, we had 300 applicants for this summer. 300. Now we're really good on SEO, but we also put it out on Wise hire.

Adam Rossen 00:19:25 And we were I mean, just applicants. And we were doing we had to do group interviews for the first round because I couldn't do them all. So people really, really, really want this. One thing that I've thought about, one thing that really bothers me is the hypocrisy of law school, that they won't give school credit for this. So I'm considering starting a nonprofit. and seeing then if we can either get funds to pay through the nonprofit or at least get credit school credit from the nonprofit, because it really frustrates me because we we lost like three good candidates this summer because they wouldn't get they wouldn't get credit when.

Adam Rossen 00:20:00 You had to do SEO copy. Did you give them credit for their writing on the website or have that? Have you happy to do that?

Adam Rossen 00:20:09 no, we didn't give them credit. I mean, same as, like, an agency or a vendor. And we edited it a lot. But no, I didn't think we needed to. I think we had them sign an agreement saying they were going to do that.

Adam Rossen 00:20:18 You know, five years ago. So. Yeah. the handsome young gentleman in the front.

Adam Rossen 00:20:27 I spoke in your internship class with interns at our office, and, blew me away with that. It hit so many bright people there. This was not an internship program, right? These guys were all around. That's perfect.

Adam Rossen 00:20:43 Yeah. And then we had happy hour.

Adam Rossen 00:20:46 That was nice touch with me. But it's also good because a lot of you're young, it's. You get the benefit of ten, 15 years of these people. A lot of them will be in the community who will refer you to this, will remember you, and we'll refer you.

Adam Rossen 00:21:01 All right. And one of our interns from this summer. Her best friend's older sister was our intern two summers ago. Yeah. And so that happens. And we've had people now become prosecutors from my internship. We've had people now at the public defender's office, and there are 1 or 2 superstars that I can't wait until they're ready to come home and come join the firm.

Adam Rossen 00:21:23 So it's been very helpful for all of those things. And Bill was so gracious and generous to come on down and talk. You know, it was amazing. So if there's anything I can do. Text me. Call me. I'm around. Follow me on LinkedIn. Like, I'd love to help because I'm very passionate about this. I think all of us, we can and should have that responsibility to help others and really show that being a lawyer is amazing. Running a law firm is amazing. How many people do we know where they, you know, they'll talk to a young person and they'll say, well, don't be a lawyer. Don't be a lawyer, right. Get that. Young people get that all the time. No, this is amazing. What we do create so much value. So thank you very much.