Paid Externship Program Leads the Way with Groundbreaking Model

During her legal career, Professor Neha Lall has always been an advocate and mentor who meets people where they are. Lall, UBalt Law’s Director of Externships, knows how helpful paid externships can be to students who have to manage both their education and budgeting finances for daily necessities. Lall started out her career as an advocate for victims of abuse. Now she is helping forge a new model of experiential learning that is changing the legal educational landscape in America. 

Lall is one of a handful of legal subject matter experts who are leading the way in creating impactful paid externships programs, which allow students to earn academic credit for legal work while also being paid. In the three years since UBalt Law began building out its paid externship program, 73 percent of externs have been paid, either directly by the employer or through a public service stipend. She said externships offer law students the opportunity to explore their education in a way that brings them back to the passion that brought them into the profession. Paid externships can also provide some relief from financial stress, as they consider how to juggle daily expenses and school loans. 

“What I really love about my role as an externship teacher is that I work with the students to get back to their ‘Why?’ To figure out why they are here. What is it that they really want to do with their law degree, and how do they get there?” says Lall. 

Most law students get their first jobs through internship and externship connections they’ve made at organizations they’ve worked for, she says. Just over 10 percent of top students generally get hired by big law firms, many through on-campus interviewing programs. The other 90 percent of students have to hustle to gain experience and connections to land a post-graduate job. Externships teach students to become self-directed learners: Students must lay the groundwork for themselves, identify their goals, and learn to self-advocate. This fosters the kind of initiative that leads students into fulfilling careers aligned with their own skills and values. 

Lall believes students who are more invested in their externships will get more out of them. For many students, getting paid for their time helps students feel seen and raises the bar on their performance. When students have a voice, they can find experiential learning opportunities that align with their goals, evoke more commitment, and ultimately make for a better learning experience. 

The field placement experience is backed up by an academic course with a seminar and weekly assignments. Externship seminars are relatively small and meet weekly for a 75-minute online discussion. Lall stipulates a maximum of 15 students, but she really would like to see that number limited to a dozen. She says the students and faculty instructor must get to know each other for the externship to be effective. She also encourages all students to speak up in class.  

The academic component is required to be qualified as legitimate and educational by the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools. 

“I wanted to be careful about the temptation to just slap credits on any job,” Lall says. 

Although the ABA has green-lighted paid externships, there remains institutional resistance to the concept at other universities around the country. UBalt Law’s paid externship program, and those like it, have often faced an uphill battle to find support. Critics believe that the act of including pay with a student’s externship might sully the educational experience, perhaps leading to exploitation by employers, or a lessening of academic standards. 

But Lall and her UBalt Law program has shown much of that concern is unfounded, and the law school has curbed the critics by meticulously collecting data on students’ fieldwork.. 

Lall is invested enough in this field that she completed a groundbreaking, data-driven study on paid externships that was accepted for publication earlier this year, and she is working on a second that she hopes to publish next year. She says the findings were surprising — both the demographics of who was being helped, and who was doing the hiring of paid externs. 

“Paid placements were available across all sectors, including public interest placements. And participation by women in externships skyrocketed, especially in law firms,” she says. Her findings from four years of data concluded that law students with directly paid externships received more diverse and higher-quality learning opportunities than their unpaid peers or those receiving public service stipends. This directly contradicts the position of critics of paid externship, who argue that paid students are likely to get worse work because employers would put profit before learning. Directly paid students also received long-term employment offers from law firms, and both state prosecution and public defender offices, at much higher rates than unpaid students. 

Lall believes that supervisors pay more attention to people they are paying, as opposed to unpaid volunteers. That leads to better training, more supervision, and ultimately, better learning experiences for students. 

In April of 2025, Lall was honored for her work by the American Association of Law Schools with an Emerging Leader Award. Her peers have lauded her, too. 

“I think the research and the scholarship that she is doing is among the most important scholarship that is coming out of our community,” said Nira Geevargis, clinical professor and director of externships at the University of California College of Law at San Francisco. “Her research is really of the moment — very cutting edge.” 

Ali Trdina is vice president of the University of Baltimore School of Law Student Bar Association and a member of the law school’s Class of 2026. She was a student of Lall’s, and because of her experience with compiling empirical data, she was one of the people who assisted Lall on her study. 

“She’s just a great person to work with,” Trdina says. “Having someone analyze my work in real time, and giving me that feedback, also in real time, that was really helpful for me.” 

Reflecting on her career trajectory, Lall now recognizes that being an advocate and developer of the paid externship program at UBalt Law is really where she wants to be now. It allows her to push forward with projects and programs that help others, which seems to fit her intuitive passion for the law. 

“When I took this job, I thought this would be a great way to get to know the Baltimore community and connect my real-life practice to teaching. But I just really ended up loving this job,” she says.