The Criminal Law Society and its faculty advisor, Professor Siegler, invite interested students to attend the first lunch in the new Public Defender Brownbag Lunch Series, which will be co-sponsored by OCS. The goal of this informal discussion series is to connect students who are interested in exploring public defender careers with each other, with interested faculty, and with practicing public defenders, and to help them feel like they are part of a larger community. The series will provide information about finding summer PD jobs, pursuing post-graduate PD jobs and fellowships, and obtaining loan forgiveness, among other topics. It will also be a forum for sharing information, ideas, and concerns more generally. During the course of this series, we hope to bring in public defenders from every part of the system—state, federal, trial, appellate, juvenile, etc—to give advice and talk about their career paths.

This lunch will serve as the kick-off event for the new Public Defender Brownbag Lunch Series and will be especially useful for 1Ls and 2Ls who are looking for summer public defender jobs. During this first lunch, a number of 2Ls and 3Ls who have worked at public defender offices and other organizations that engage in indigent criminal defense work will explain how they obtained their summer jobs, discuss the work they did, and answer questions. The following types of PD work will be discussed:

• Federal: Max Kampfner (a 2L who used to be a paralegal at the Federal Defender for the Southern District of New York)
• State Appellate: Kyle Poelker (a 3L who worked at Illinois’s Office of the State Appellate Defender during his 1L summer)
• Juvenile: Laura Thornton (a 2L who worked in the Juvenile and Criminal Justice Project Clinic last summer)
• State Trial Level: Adrienne Young (a 2L who worked at Chicago’s Cabrini Green Legal Aid office last summer)
• State Trial Level: Tammy Zhu (a 2L who worked at the D.C. Public Defender Service last summer)

We very much hope that you will be able to join us! Please bring your own lunch. Drinks will be provided by OCS.