In July, our Chapter members gathered in Cambridge for the Annual Summer Retreat. The day was beautiful, food was tasty, and the company was quite engaged in discussing our current affairs and what’s ahead of us. We spent a lot of time listening to our students and discussing ways to effectively maintain our relationships with NLG student chapters and what could be added to improve them.

On this topic of Law Student Support / Engagement, we identified three opportunities that could provide support to students. Two of the three ideas are focused on recent grads to help maintain their bond with the Guild as they transition into working professionals:

1. Bar Prep Counselors (“Bar Buddies”) – these would be pairings between students studying for the bar and members who have recently passed the bar. The recent passers would provide moral support, encouragement, and general advice (while not duplicating content from Bar prep courses).
2. Post Bar Party – we could host a celebration for exam takers at Democracy Brewing in August
3. NLG Outline Bank – NLG Mass could consolidate and provide outlines for 1L courses (specific to school & professor) to provide immediate value to incoming 1L’s and a way for NLG Mass to draw attention from students at the start of their legal education journey.

We also discussed increasing the general awareness and visibility of NLG Mass’s actions in two main methods: Social Media Outreach and more frequent events.

• Social Media: Guild members could help provide short videos where willing clients discuss an issue that a guild member assisted them with. These videos could be shared to a common social media account (run by NLG Mass) for posting – eliminating the need for each attorney or client to have or use their own social media accounts. We could also provide a “how to” training on how to create short-form content for use on social media. • Events: Generally, the group felt the Guild could benefit from more frequent, more casual events, aimed at being enjoyable rather than productive. These could be things like movie nights, picnics on the Common, hiking excursions, Red Sox nights, etc. We also discussed the possibility of involving the guild in coordinated acts of community service such as coordinating a food banking day. Because these events do not require discussion of Guild activities, they could (potentially) be open to non-members.

If you are interested in being involved in any of these activities, please let us know. We definitely need you to make the plan work!