Every year, between 60 and 80 Michigan Law students spend a semester as externs in nonprofit organizations and government entities around the world. While the Law School is best known for its established programs in Geneva, South Africa, and India, externships this past academic year took one student to a hand-crafted position in New Zealand.
New Zealand’s progressive renewable energy and environmental policies drew Lindsay Saginaw, ’26, to pursue an externship there. She spent a semester at the Environmental Defence Society in Auckland, where she helped the nonprofit challenge a proposed gold mine, among other projects.
Saginaw focused mostly on environmental and energy law and policy while at Michigan Law. Although she was interested in New Zealand, the idea of finding her own placement on the other side of the world was daunting.
Because New Zealand is not among the places where Michigan Law has established externships, it was up to Saginaw to find an organization.
“At first it was definitely scary. I was flying to another continent in which I knew literally zero people and didn’t have the buffer of other students doing externships in the same region as me. But at the same time, it was really exciting—a completely new geography, completely new environment, and a completely new set of laws to learn about,” Saginaw said.
“It wound up being a really rewarding experience, and I would encourage students to not be hesitant about pursuing opportunities that might be less traditional,” she said.
Michigan Law’s externship program allows students to design the educational experience they want in a specific area of interest, said Amy Sankaran, ’01, director of externship and pro bono programs and a clinical assistant professor. “It’s all about developing their own professional identity.”
Michigan Law has had a full-time externship program since at least 1976 and added a part-time program in 2011.
Externs have worked at organizations as diverse as a human trafficking clinic in Mexico City, the World Bank, the NBA Players Association, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Michigan Attorney General’s health division, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the Justice and Equity Centre in Sydney, Australia.
Law school classes teach legal theory, but not much about what day-to-day practice is like, Sankaran said. “We can only teach you so much through the case method, and then you just have to do.” An externship, she noted, is an opportunity to learn by doing.
Externs earn a full semester of credit and take a seminar. Students set goals for the experience, interview their supervisors, and complete other assignments that shed light on what the life of a lawyer looks like, Sankaran said.
Students are grouped into twos or threes for partner discussions. They talk with their peers, who may be working on other continents, about what they’re doing in their externships, what challenges they’ve faced, and what wins they’ve achieved.
The road to New Zealand
For Saginaw’s 2L summer internship, she worked at Morgan Lewis in New York City with a partner in the energy and infrastructure group. He had a connection who worked in Auckland at a solar developer, and that connection reached out to organizations across New Zealand, including the Environmental Defence Society, on Saginaw’s behalf.
The society advocates for environmental protection and brings legal challenges against polluters that violate environmental laws. It was busy and needed help, so it took Saginaw on as an extern.
Her day-to-day work included researching case law and finding procedural deficiencies in the government’s decision-making processes about granting what they call resource consents.
Saginaw also wrote an energy policy statement after researching New Zealand’s energy needs and capacity for new generation. “The team is really involved in crafting new policies for the future of environmental law in New Zealand,” she said.
This experience made her a more well-rounded attorney, building her research and drafting skills, which she expects to use in her full-time job back in the United States, she says. She is joining Morgan Lewis as an attorney in its energy and project development group.
Saginaw enjoyed traveling throughout New Zealand during her time there. “It’s clear that the work that I was doing really aligned with the philosophy that New Zealanders have about land and land stewardship,” she said. “How much my work related to my everyday life there was really cool to see.”
She also appreciated the “kiwi friendliness” she encountered. “Everyone in New Zealand was just incredibly welcoming and friendly, and my coworkers were so, so warm. I really learned a lot from them,” she said.
A valuable experience
Through externships, students often learn more about what they want—or don’t want—out of their careers.
For example, if you’ve always wanted to work for the UN, and you get there and don’t like working there, “you have learned something very important, and you will not spend the rest of your career trying to get to a place that you did not like. That is not a bad thing,” Sankaran said.
One student planned to work at a law firm in antitrust after graduation. Because externships don’t include firms, he pursued an externship on the other side of antitrust, as a prosecutor, Sankaran said.
“When he came back, he said, ‘I’ve got to get back there, because the prosecution side is way more interesting.’ And that, to me, is what an externship is. It’s opening students’ eyes to something they didn’t know.”
Externs who work in other countries have an added layer of comparative law, learning how other countries’ legal systems work. In New Zealand, district councils are the closest thing to US state governments, with similar functions and authority, Saginaw said.
“Comparing the laws of the US surrounding environmental policy, like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Policy Act, and the Natural Gas Act, to things like the Resource Management Act, the Conservation Act, and the Reserves Act in New Zealand and seeing how those different laws match up and differ has been really interesting and in some aspects surprising as well.”
The externship helped Saginaw “approach problems from a legal research and case law aspect, as well as from a drafting and more transactional law aspect,” she said. “It also made me more willing to explore connections that I have in my network, which I think will be really important as a developing attorney.”