Summer 2018 - Hennick BizLaw Internship at CAMH!
By: Aleeza Freedman
JD’2019 and Summer 2018 Recipient of the Hennick Centre Business Law Internship Award
As a second-year law student at Osgoode Hall Law School, I faced a daunting task when it came time to researching different summer employment opportunities. I sought a meaningful summer experience that would allow me to build upon my legal studies and involved practicing business law within a health care context. When I learned about the Hennick Centre’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Corporate Internship, I immediately thought that it would be a perfect fit! My background in health combined with my more recent exposure to business law in Osgoode’s Business Clinic equipped me with the basic tools that I believed would enable me to excel in this internship. I was excited to embark on the CAMH Corporate Internship that I knew would complement my past experiences and enable me to further develop practical legal skills, specifically in a client-oriented and mental health-focused business arena.
My summer internship was an enriching experience that enabled me to further develop a well-rounded set of practical legal skills within a fast-paced and multi-faceted healthcare setting.In this role, I explored various corporate/commercial tasks by working closely with CAMH’s Corporate Counsel team to draft different types of contracts and MOUs, reviewed due diligence and corporate compliance reports, prepared legal opinion letters to assist the hospital in its business decisions, engaged in policy development, and conducted legal research on timely corporate and privacy law matters.
Looking back on my experience at CAMH, it is quite surreal to think about everything that I was able to learn in a relatively short amount of time. I gained experience working with a variety of agreements including amending agreements, funding agreements, licensing agreements, service agreements, and corporate research contracts, among others. My supervisors made a strong effort to expose me to different types of corporate work and invested their time into teaching me how to apply my learning from inside the classroom into the real world.
One of my key takeaways was gaining a greater glimpse into the unique role of in-house corporate counsel by being actively involved in their process of developing a deep understanding of one client and engaging in a multitude of diverse legal tasks in collaboration with staff across several departments. While many law students begin their legal careers working for a firm, I have learned that getting the opportunity to work in-house at an early stage is a fantastic learning experience.
It is difficult to describe the profound impact that the Hennick-CAMH Internship has had on me but I can say with certainty that it truly exceeded my expectations; a truly challenging, interesting, and enriching experience! Not only do I appreciate this experience for the wide breadth of knowledge and skills that it provided me with, but beyond that, this experience allowed me to build lifelong relationships with the staff at CAMH, many of whom I consider great career mentors and friends.
Read more about the 2018 Hennick Business Law Summer Internship placements:
About the CAMH Corporate Internship
CAMH is Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, as well as one of the world’s leading research centres in this field. The annual Hennick Centre/CAMH Corporate Internship exposes Osgoode students to the hospital’s dynamic and innovative corporate culture, while providing a unique opportunity to develop practical business and legal skills from an in-house counsel perspective.
