Junior Tim O'Leary works with Skylawyers for an ELO

This past year junior Tim O’Leary has been interning at a local law firm Sklawyers. Monday through Thursday, O’Leary said he goes to the firm and performs a variety of clerical tasks assigned to him.

“They are mostly just things they are behind on with filing or closing a legal file or doing a conflict check,” O’Leary shared. “Which is just them making sure that when someone wants to be represented by them, we haven’t represented someone related to them or anything that is a conflict to the case.”

He said Sklawyers is the closest law firm to Winnacunnet so it’s easy to get to being only a minute drive away.

“I first saw this ELO in a powerpoint on the daily announcements,” O’Leary said. “I didn’t know I actually wanted to do this until someone presented their ELO in my class last year.”

O’Leary said that ELO Coordinators Donna Couture and Amy Smith helped him get the internship set up.

“This year Tim expressed interest in law and we said we had a relationship with Sklawyers are you interested,” Couture said. “We had to tell him a little bit about what his responsibilities would be.”

O’Leary shared that he has always been interested in the justice system.

“I took ‘Business Law’ last year and I really liked it despite all others not liking the class due to the workload,” he said.

O’Leary said he hopes to gain connections and experience from this.

“Seeing the set up of a law firm is very useful for my future if I do become a lawyer or in any office because the dynamic is the same,” he shared. “I can also use this in my college resume, boosting how I look to college.”

He said he hopes to possibly turn this into a summer job as well, making money and again making his resume stronger.

For future plans O’Leary shared that he would like to go to law school so this ELO will help him figure out what kind of law he would like to do.

“I am interested in possibly majoring in accounting in college, while taking some pre law classes that they may provide,” he said.

An internship is an extensive and time consuming ELO. Four out of five days O’Leary is at the firm and the other day he talks to the coordinators Couture and Smith for a weekly check in.

“I have to do a good amount of out of school work for what I expected,” O’Leary said. “But I would not say it gets in the way of other classes.”

Overall, O’leary has been liking the ELO and thinks it has strengthened his people skills and networking skills.