During her fellowship Lauren worked on a wide range of substantive litigation including lawsuits against two St. Louis County cities operating modern day debtors prison schemes, and several class actions against banks charging customers usurious extended overdraft fees. Lauren assisted with deposition preparation and discovery, drafted several oppositions to summary judgment motions and motions to dismiss, and briefed jurisdictional issues in the Eleventh Circuit for an appeal from a district court’s denial of T&Z’s clients’ motion to compel class arbitration on behalf of families and friends who were serially overcharged for making money transfers to loved ones serving time in prison.
For her non-profit placement, Lauren spent two months at Public Justice—a national public interest law firm—where she worked primarily on the organization’s court secrecy project. The project intervenes to unseal records in lawsuits against corporations that make all kinds of harmful products; from tires that cause rollovers to rifles that fired without anyone pulling the trigger. As part of this work she helped research and draft a brief before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to unseal records in a products defect lawsuit against Chrysler.
The T&Z fellowship experience gave Lauren a strong base of litigation skills, which will serve her well during her clerkship in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
We look forward to hearing from you.