by Eileen Korey
When Jacqueline Groskaufmanis ’25 first entered Cornell Law School, there were few things she loved more than professional basketball. However, before taking several sports law classes in her second year, she had never envisioned combining her passion for sports with her interest in the law. In her third year, her experiences in law school broadened her vision. One of the most impactful experiences was her externship course. It was, quite literally, a game changer.
“It was so special to be able to spend an entire semester in a job, to have an opportunity to really learn the ropes and to see if you like it,” says Groskaufmanis who spent last fall semester as a legal extern with BSE Global, the parent company of the Brooklyn Nets, New York Liberty, and Barclays Center. She says she became an avid basketball fan while living in Brooklyn, New York, before law school, but never dreamed of combining that passion with lawyering. Her externship “was not at all what I expected, which was really intriguing to me. All the attorneys were excited to come to work every day. It wasn’t confined to ‘sports law.’ I liked all the transactional work—intellectual property, contracts, acquisitions—which was a bit surprising to me because I typically gravitate towards litigation.”
Cornell Law’s externship program offers students the opportunity to explore, reflect, grow, and learn in ways that simply can’t be taught in a traditional classroom. Students earn up to twelve academic credits in a placement, working in fields as diverse as government, nonprofit, judicial, and corporate sectors. They are mentored by attorney supervisors in the field and guided by Dena Bauman ’91, director of externships and pro bono scholars and lecturer of law.
“Externships give students a platform to learn about themselves, the profession, and their place in the profession,” say Bauman, who joined the Law School faculty last year, returning to Ithaca from a career in California and Washington, D.C. A New York native, Bauman says she was inspired by her father, Louis W. Bauman ’56. “Dad was in private practice but had a very strong commitment to public service.”
Bauman brings three decades of experience in public interest law, career services, and academia as a law school educator and administrator. “When I was a Cornell Law student, I don’t believe I ever heard about externships. I’m grateful to my predecessors here, Glenn Galbreath, JoAnne Miner, Andrea Mooney ’92, and Michaela Azemi, for creating a strong foundation on which to build.”
“In my teaching role, my goals are for students to be self-aware, self-directed, and able to self-assess. Students begin the semester by writing a plan for the semester, which functions as their own syllabus, identifying their goals, the strategies by which they will achieve them, and ways in which they will assess their progress. This is a way to set one’s intentions at the beginning of the semester and serve as a road map.”
For Groskaufmanis, her goals included improving her networking abilities (“I’m naturally a shy person”) and achieving a better balance between efficiency and quality of work in a fast-paced, in-house environment. She achieved both, gaining confidence in the quick turnaround from research to written recommendation. “Having someone high up in the organization act on my legal research in high-stakes situations was exciting,” she says. Between lunches and basketball games, networking became more intuitive and comfortable. “I found my sea legs in this role.”
“There are certain areas of the law where networking is critical and now students like Jacque can get their foot in the door in an externship and maintain those relationships, which gives them more career options,” says Akua Akyea, associate dean for career development. In her eight years at Cornell Law, she has witnessed the dramatic growth of experiential learning opportunities in all practice areas, along with the excitement that externships inspire in students. “After the isolation of COVID-19, a lot of students told us they would love to go into an office and actually work with lawyers and talk to clients. We’ve seen an uptick in externships and study abroad,” says Akyea.
Akyea has also seen a dramatic increase in interest in the state’s Pro Bono Scholars Program, which allows students in their third year second semester to sit for the bar in February, spend twelve weeks working full time in a pro bono placement, fulfil their academic requirements, and jumpstart their law practice by several months after passing the February bar. Cornell Law has the largest Pro Bono Scholars program in the country; this year there are twenty scholars.
“The Pro Bono Scholars Program is a specialized externship,” says Akyea. “It’s an externship on adrenalin. I have heard students say that the work is transformative. They’re passionate and revved up. I love to see that.”
“Experiential education is developing by leaps and bounds, including here at Cornell,” says Bauman. “This semester, I had twenty-one students in my externship class. Some are in person, some are remote, some are hybrid. I have a student working full time in the United Kingdom; others are in New York City, Tampa, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.”
“Dena is a national leader in this rapidly developing area of legal education,” says Beth Lyon, associate dean for experiential education, clinical professor of law, and clinical program director. “She built a community of externship faculty around the nation and brings all that richness to us. She created a working group here at the Law School to engage in cross-department initiatives to enhance student opportunities and growth.”
Per American Bar Association standards, a field placement must include a classroom instructional component, regularly scheduled tutorials or other means of ongoing, contemporaneous, faculty-guided reflection. “As a guide and a sounding board, my highest priority is to have students take responsibility for what they want to learn and the decisions they make, and then to reflect on what went well and what could be better next time,” says Bauman.
From the beginning of the externship course, it’s clear that it’s very different from other law classes. Bauman says, “I try to give students as many choices as possible in their professional development assignments by offering several different exercises. They choose one depending on their personal goals. One of the most popular is her wellness assignment: “Learning how to handle stress and work/personal pressures in constructive and wholesome ways is necessary for your personal life and your career. Being able to successfully manage them will also help you achieve job satisfaction. Your placement is an ideal setting to explore these issues by trying out different approaches and learning from those experiences. Ultimately, you want to build wellbeing into the DNA of your life and career.” (Wellness Exercise, Spring 2025). The ABA has recognized the importance of wellness by incorporating it explicitly into its standards for legal education.
The wellness exercise includes budgeting two hours for non-work activities and reflection (a “wellness block”). They can do it in fifteen-minute periods scattered through the day or longer blocks of time. It can be an activity that energizes or relaxes, and incorporates time for reflection. “Where else can you get law school credit in terms of hours for taking your dog for a walk?” says Bauman, with a smile. Students reflect on the experience in an essay, and how they intend to integrate what they learned into their future practice.
“For me, those forced moments for reflection were about taking the time to process what happened at work,” says Abdul-Aziz Ali ’26, a joint J.D./LL.M. candidate who was part of Bauman’s “beta” class during his externship as a full-time student attorney with Cornell’s Veterans Law Practicum. Ali, a veteran who served in East Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan and had a career in military intelligence and foreign affairs before attending law school, said the externship presented new challenges and advantages to previous practicum work.
“It was one of the few instances in law school where your worth was more than how you perform in the classroom,” says Ali. “Having your own client load, developing client-facing skills specifically with people who had experienced trauma, recognizing the soft skills and intangibles I could bring to the job. I needed to take the ‘good soldier hat’ off and put the ‘good lawyer advocate hat’ on. You are the legal representative for the client, devoting one-on-one attention. I didn’t anticipate how emotionally exhausting it would be.”
Ali says keeping a journal and having check-ins with Bauman provided invaluable insight. “If you want to give more to the client, you have to take care of yourself. I remember getting off a two-and-a-half hour call with a client and I was just wiped. Forced reflection teaches you how to process those feelings and what to do to recover afterwards.”
Bauman’s approach prepares law students to be better advocates and to lawyer under the most stressful of circumstances, says Jenny Stoneburner who oversees externs at the Sacramento Public Defender’s office. Stoneburner worked closely with Bauman when she directed the externship program at University of California at Davis School of Law. Stoneburner has about twenty externs working in her office each semester.
“We have a lot of vicarious trauma on this job. Dena made it okay for our externs to express what they’re feeling, to be mindful, and to deal with those feelings while they are working in a fast-paced environment with a huge volume of cases,” says Stoneburner. “Whether or not they go on to public defense work, they develop skills that make them attractive to any employer and they are typically hired immediately after they graduate.”
Akyea notes that Cornell law students often go directly into corporate law immediately after graduation, attracted by financial incentives and the opportunity to pay off debt. Externships during law school give them a chance to try out something different. “The big law firms are hiring earlier and earlier and some students get committed to that path for a period of time. But if they want to transition to another field of law after they’ve done corporate work and pushed down their debt, they have a work record in a different field and it gives them more flexibility in their long-term career options.”
“I really appreciated having that opportunity,” says Groskaufmanis, who accepted a position at a law firm in New York City after graduation.
“Our graduates are practice-ready on day one when they start legal practice,” says Jens David Ohlin, Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law. “Part of that practice-readiness no doubt starts with their critical thinking skills honed in our famous classroom and clinical experiences. But much of it also flows from their placement in real legal practices while they are students. I hear from many of our students that the intense responsibility that they had to carry on their shoulders during an externship was invaluable in fostering in them a sense that they truly are fiduciaries for their clients and their legal interests.”
“When I graduated from Cornell Law in 1991, the experiential offerings were so few,” says Bauman. “Still, I remember the poverty law clinic being formative in my education and career path, allowing me to start exercising my own judgment and trusting it, giving me confidence that stayed with me forever. Today, the externship experience offers a model for lifelong career management.”
