By Gwyneth K. Shaw
By her own account, Sue Schechter is a connector. And after 19 years at UC Berkeley Law, her network resembles a galaxy — linking current and former students, faculty, and staff at the school and around the nation, and sometimes around the world, across the years.
Currently the director of the Field Placement Program and co-faculty director of the Pro Bono Program, Schechter earned a big recognition for her decades of work in legal education earlier this year, receiving the 2025 Association of American Law Schools Clinical Section’s inaugural Impact on the Externship Field Award.
The nomination for the award featured heaping praise from clinicians, students, field placement lecturers, and field supervisors, who lauded her deep reverence for students and bottomless commitment to public interest and public service work.
“Sue Schechter is the most important person across the externship land,” says Nira Geevargis, clinical professor and director of externship programs at UC Law San Francisco. “She’s the glue that holds us together.”
Below, Schechter talks about her history at UC Berkeley Law and why she loves what she does more than ever.
What was it like to get the AALS award and that recognition, as someone who’s been working in this field for so long?
It was amazing and overwhelming and humbling, and it was really lovely to feel that much love from my community. I am very proud of the program that I built at Berkeley Law, but what I am maybe even prouder of is the externship field getting recognition. Externships live in a world that is not always very respected in the clinical and experiential space. And to me, raising the profile of externships and how important they are for law students is really critical.
Doing this work, I have seen how life-changing they can be for students — and, quite honestly, sometimes for supervisors. So I am just honored that this work was recognized by my national community.
How did the Field Placement Program get started?
There have been field placement programs at the law school for many years. Up until the late 1990s, field placements were overseen on an ad hoc basis, sometimes by staff and sometimes by faculty. Professor Eleanor Swift led a review of the entire Experiential Education Program and made a number of recommendations, including hiring a part-time field placement coordinator and building an in-house clinical center. The faculty approved these recommendations in 1996 but also requested a review of field placements after three years, when the Clinical Center would presumably be in operation.
Ann Cummings came on board as the first field placement coordinator, later followed by Margaret Crow Rosenfeld. Professor Chuck Weisselberg joined the faculty in 1998 to develop the Center for Clinical Education and chair the then-Clinical Program Committee. In 1999, the committee noted the continued demand for field placements and recommended maintaining the status quo. In 2005, the committee acknowledged the important role of field placements, which complemented rather than competed with the in-house clinics. The committee recommended hiring a full-time director and the faculty approved.
This is where you got involved?
When the position was posted, I applied, and I lobbied pretty hard, and got the job. And then it was, OK, build a program. It bumbled along at first, because we were trying to figure out exactly what it should be. And then I started realizing that we needed structured class components, we needed to ramp up the advising part of how we were helping students find field placements, and we needed to see how we could complement other programs.
At the law school, we have a strong Clinical Program, we have an amazing Pro Bono Program, and there’s all these other wonderful things that have always been happening and even stronger today at Berkeley Law, including our centers and the amazing work they do. We added accompanying class components and even built a two-unit class for civil and criminal field placements to meet the law school’s Professional Responsibility/Legal Profession requirement, and to provide structured opportunities for reflection and thinking about what, how and why lawyers do what they do. I feel like the Field Placement Program exists to give students another important opportunity to learn what being a lawyer means, and also to connect with lawyers out in the field.
I have conversations with students all the time who have done field placements and externships who consider it among their best law school experiences. So I think we made the right choice for sure.
Why do you think it’s so valuable for students to have these opportunities and what are some things they really bring to their experience?
Our Admissions Office does an incredible job admitting great students. So they come in, they think they know what it means to be a lawyer, and they think they know why they came to law school. We lay a good foundation in the first year, which includes Deborah Schlosberg directing our amazing Pro Bono Program that gives students the chance to do social justice and public interest-related service.
Clinics are important, and I encourage all students to do clinics. They are seminal. It is very nice to be able to take a case or a project and dig deeply with students on it. What field placements are designed to do is to let students really see the field they are interested in, and what it and the people in the field are like — really what it means to be a lawyer. Students get very caught up in the substantive work and, of course, that is foundational, but it is also important for them to be in the legal environment and see what that means.
I think those experiences are critical for students, both to see the fields they want to go into and in some cases to rule fields out. A student may say they are interested in criminal law, and doing a part-time field placement in a county public defender’s office exposes them to the issues, the clients, and how that world works. Then they can take that as a way to inform whatever kind of criminal law they might want to go into, or not go into, and to pivot and see other ways to work in their chosen field.
And of course, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the great team I get to work with including Kiara Williams, Lesly Avendaño, our student assistants, and the whole Public Interest Working Group team who support our students looking at public interest, public service, and social justice opportunities.
Given the growth in experiential offerings — the Clinical Program and Field Placement Program, and the student-led opportunities through the Pro Bono Program — is UC Berkeley Law now attracting students who already kind of want that experience?
Oh, yes. I think three things set Berkeley apart in that way. One is our community orientation. For the most part, students are not that competitive, and they work together. The second is how they can jump in right away, and get involved in Student-Initiated Legal Services Projects in their first semester. I think it is definitely an attraction to students.
The third thing is our flexibility: When I tell students you can go anywhere in the world and do any legal work you want under the supervision of a supervising lawyer with a nonprofit or government at an approved field placement, that is a draw. Most of them do not end up doing it, because they get some involved in the amazing programs, classes, and more we have at the school, but just the idea that it exists makes Berkeley Law more attractive to them.
Judging from what your colleagues from across the country said during the AALS award ceremony, and talking to people at the law school, it seems you have a profound impact on students and a big role as a mentor — of students before and after graduation, of people at other law schools, all kinds of places. What drives you to play that role, which isn’t necessarily part of your job but is clearly driven by your passion?
I do not think of myself as a mentor. I think of myself as a connector. I cannot tell you how many students come into my office and say, “I do not know why I am here. I do not know what I want to do with this degree.” I think my job is to help them find a good mentor, to find a good supervisor, to help them find that person (or people) that is going to help them realize why they came here and what they want to do with their degree, or at least what they want their first step out of law school to be.
The number one reason I do my job is to support students. And I get students in three ways. Some know the field placement they want to do, and they are lovely to work with and support. Then there are the students who know they want to do a specific area, but do not know the range of options in a specific field — public interest, government, etc. Then we talk about what their goals are, their interests and skills, and we work on finding a good fit.
And then I get students who are sent to me by Student Support Services, the Career Development Office, and faculty and they are lost, or at least they have lost their vision for why they came to law school. I love working with these students. I feel we really have a responsibility to help them find their way. If that’s the reputation I have, I’m very happy with that.
We work at an amazing law school, and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is an incredibly committed public servant. He does so much to support our public interest law students. I feel honored to be able to advocate for students and support students in their journey to figure out what kind of lawyer they want to be, or maybe what kind of lawyer they don’t want to be.
There’s something very satisfying about a student coming back and saying, “I am so glad I did that part-time, and now I know I do not want to do that now for my career.” And they have not spent a lot of energy job-searching for something they do not really want to do. If they can leave law school a little more supported with a little more direction and with a lot more hope, that is a good thing.
The world is hard now, and our students are feeling it. In the middle of each semester, I meet with every student doing a field placement. Last spring it was about 92 students. I learned so much about them, and about the placements they did. So many of them said, “If I was not doing this or something like this, I do not know how I would be getting through.”
This moment is really impacting them, and they feel like they have to use their law degrees to do something. With these experiential programs, they can see the client, they can work on an issue. They can make a difference. And that matters.