NRDC’s Summer Legal Internship Program: What We’re Doing Now to Live Up to Our DEI Values

Each summer, NRDC welcomes approximately 25 students from law schools across the country to participate in our summer legal internship program. Summer legal interns work closely with NRDC attorneys on active litigation and legal advocacy projects, getting hands-on experience in the day-to-day practice of environmental public interest law. Summer legal interns also become part of the broader NRDC community—joining team and organization-wide meetings, participating in voluntary events and discussions, and partnering with staff in our collective efforts to create a workplace that values diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

In 2020, NRDC’s summer legal interns called on us to show how we live up to our values in intern hiring and supervision and to make our efforts public: to tell law students, career centers, and law professors what we’re doing to make our summer legal internship program more just, diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We previously wrote about our efforts. Three years later, it’s now time for an update—so here it is. 

Incorporating Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into Our Summer Legal Internship Recruitment and Hiring Practices

We truly value the opportunity to work with summer legal interns from law schools across the country with a wide variety of academic, professional, and life experiences. You don’t have to attend a top-ranked law school or identify as an environmentalist to come work with us. We’re looking for students who are committed to the public interest and who want to learn how to use legal advocacy to make the world a better, healthier place for all. If that’s you, we hope you’ll consider applying. 

We’re committed to making NRDC a welcoming space for students of all races, identities, and backgrounds, from hiring to supervision and beyond. Internships shape attorneys’ career trajectories; today’s interns are tomorrow’s environmental lawyers and leaders. Prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our summer legal internship program is key to overcoming racial inequities and centering environmental justice at NRDC—and in the environmental movement more broadly—today and in the years ahead.

Over the past several years, we have taken the following steps to improve our recruitment and hiring processes based on best practices and research, especially when it comes to welcoming a cohort of interns who reflect the full racial, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity of the communities that NRDC seeks to serve.

a. Recruiting a diverse pool of applicants

Our intern classes can only be as diverse as our applicant pools. So, over the past several years, we’ve expanded our outreach to historically underrepresented law schools, including by building relationships with career centers, affinity groups, and diversity placement programs. We’ve also prioritized attending virtual and in-person table talks, career fairs, and other activities at these schools. We still have work to do on this front, and we are always looking for more opportunities to connect with students. If you’d like to invite NRDC attorneys to participate in an event at your school, please reach out to us at legalinterns@nrdc.org.

We believe it’s important to expand opportunities for first-year law students to explore careers in environmental law. Summer internships can give first-year students the chance to gain public interest experience while retaining the option of working for a law firm during their second summer. With that in mind, we encourage 1Ls to apply, and we’ve adjusted our hiring timeline to better accommodate the needs of 1L applicants (see “What’s the Timeline for Applying?” here). All of our offices welcome applications from 1Ls, and most of our offices specifically set aside positions for 1Ls each summer.

Finally, because the comparatively low salaries for public interest internships can be a barrier for students without economic privilege, we offer a stipend for summer legal interns who don’t have funding from their schools or other external sources. (As of summer 2023, we offer stipends of up to $10,000 for a 10-week internship period.) We also consider applicants who wish to split their summers between NRDC and other employers (including law firms).

b. Reducing bias in application review and interviews

Studies show that implicit biases can show up in even well-intentioned employers’ review of job applications. While there’s no single solution, we use a variety of practices to counteract implicit bias in hiring. 

For example, when reviewing applicants’ written applications, we anonymize writing samples so that we can evaluate them without the filter of any preconceptions we might have based on the applicants’ law schools or other personal information. At the interview stage, we conduct all interviews by videoconference, so that no one is disadvantaged because of geography or inability to travel. We also endeavor to standardize the interview experience by asking each applicant the same prewritten interview questions, which we’ve drafted as open-ended questions to equalize the playing field for applicants who may not yet have directly relevant experience in the environmental legal field. These strategies are meant to reduce the potential for unfair advantages based on personal connections, geography, socioeconomic privilege, and other factors.

We recognize that these practices may work well in some contexts but not in others, and the body of research on these issues is evolving. The members of NRDC’s summer legal intern hiring team—which includes a broad group of attorneys and non-attorneys—continuously reexamine our assumptions and practices, based on feedback and learning from trainings, colleagues, and interns.

In our review of applications, we’re mindful of the role that privilege can play in a student’s choice of undergraduate institution and law school, their GPA, extracurriculars, and prior work and internship experience. The highest GPA, the highest-ranked law school, and the longest list of environmental jobs and courses do not automatically put a student at the top of our hiring list. We value the contributions of interns with a variety of life experiences and areas of expertise. We encourage all law students who are committed to justice and the public interest to apply.

c. Checking our progress: How are we doing?

Accountability and transparency are important, so: How are we doing? Are our efforts to improve our intern recruitment and hiring practices yielding results? 

We’re making progress, though we humbly recognize that we still have work to do. Over the past several years, our summer legal intern classes have shown steadily increasing racial diversity, according to self-reported data:

We’ve also welcomed interns from a large number of different law schools each year:

In total, during this four-year period, we’ve hired summer legal interns from 37 different law schools. 

We don’t currently have statistics on other diversity metrics for intern applicants (geography, disability, LGBTQIA2S+ identity, first-generation or second-career law students, etc.), so we can’t yet quantify and track our progress on those. But we’re continually evaluating our accountability measures. 

Cultivating a Welcoming and Inclusive Workplace

Inclusivity in recruitment and hiring is just the beginning. Once interns join NRDC, we’re committed to ensuring that everyone has a positive, meaningful summer experience. 

It’s true that our legal staff, especially at more senior levels, is not as racially diverse as our intern classes tend to be. The U.S. legal profession in general and the environmental legal field in particular still fall short of reflecting the full diversity of the communities we seek to serve, and that’s true at NRDC too. (You can read more about NRDC’s staff diversity data on Green 2.0’s website.) Recognizing that starting point, we’re committed to building a community of dignity and belonging at NRDC, where everybody feels safe bringing their whole self to work. We’re investing in training for our staff, including the attorneys who supervise interns, to make this commitment a reality. 

We take mentorship and feedback seriously: It’s our honor to help train the next generation of environmental advocates. Supervising attorneys put significant time and thought into each of their mentoring relationships. They strive to ensure that interns receive timely feedback on their work; they help interns craft strong writing samples; and they provide interns with opportunities to develop practical skills through interactive trainings (like mock oral arguments or mock depositions). 

In addition, supervising attorneys look to maximize opportunities for team building, networking, and career development. We match each intern with an NRDC staff mentor who can serve as a resource for career advice and other questions. We plan social events that appeal to a wide range of interests (we know not all environmentalists hike!). We invite interns to participate in the life of the organization, including in NRDC staff discussions related to racial justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we actively welcome interns’ thoughts and feedback on their experiences too. 

Our goal is that each one of our interns leaves NRDC with real-world legal advocacy skills, lasting professional connections, and the tools they’ll need as they build careers fighting for justice and the public interest.

In Sum: We Want You (and Your Feedback!)

We hope this update gives law students who are considering applying to NRDC a concrete sense of where we’re at and where we’re headed on our DEI journey. We welcome scrutiny, suggestions, feedback, and reality checks in response.