Quality Supervision: Ensuring Your Intern Grows

I say this all the time but it’s worth repeating: I love working with interns! I often feel like I’m drowning with work, but interns help make things move at a much faster pace. As I mentioned before, many attorneys dislike working with interns because they feel like it’s a lot of work for just a minimum amount of help. I do admit that it’s a lot of work upfront. But once you find a steady rhythm of supervising the work quality and quantity is so worth it!

I can be tricky to manage when you’re new or when you’re not used to good supervision yourself–even though we’re in the midst of summer you can still attempt to find a supervising groove to help you help your intern and increase your own supervision skills:

One. Have consistent and frequent check-ins. At first it usually has to be daily, sometimes more than once a day, where you meet and discuss assignments. Eventually it won’t have to be so frequent, but you need check-ins to make sure your student “gets” the assignments and will turn in usable work for you. You can’t gage how they’re doing without have real face-time.

Two. Provide consistent structure. It’s unfair to give your student nothing for a few days and then a ton of urgent work on other days. They should have consistent work that they’re doing for you and you should be consistent in how you assign it so that there’s no miscommunication and nothing falls through the cracks. If you email one day, and randomly mention another task in person another day, it’s hard for the student to keep track. Plus if you assign the same way, you’ll have a steady stream of communication, which is a plus.

Three. Give background. I rarely assign even a small task to a student without giving them the background facts of the case. Yes, they could read the notes in our system, but few students will proactively do that). And yes, knowing how a client got to us five years ago may not seem relevant to filing a simple work permit app, but I provide this information because as a poverty law attorney I want students to recognize the real-life, urgent problems that my clients need solved and to recognize that clients are more than just an immigration form. Even in Big Law this information is important to provide because you want your interns to be zealous in all their advocacy and they can’t do that if they don’t know the facts.

Four. Don’t shy away from feedback. It’s awkward and at first it can feel mean, but it’s not really–we’re just often conditioned to not be anything but nice and calling out mistakes can feel weird. Push past the awkwardness to give back meaningful guidance and critiques so that your student grows in meaningful ways under your supervision–that should always be your goal.