Looking towards 2024: how you can help NPLA’s mission

In 2023, the National Plaintiffs’ Law Association accomplished more than I could have imagined. We’ve helped establish plaintiffs’ law associations on almost twenty law school campuses, we built an online community for students and attorneys passionate about plaintiffs’ side work, and our job fair connected hundreds of students with forty-plus employers. 

I’m confident that this is just the beginning—that in 2024, we’ll be able to do so much more, but to do so, we need your help. NPLA is seeking 2024 Sponsors. With your support, we’ll be able to expand our virtual and regional programming, broaden our reach to new law schools, and begin to turn the passion project of a few law students into a sustainable organization. If your firm is interested in helping us build our organization, connect with us to learn more about being an official NPLA sponsor before February 15.

Firm and institutional sponsors will receive valuable benefits, including their firm logo and name’s prominent placement on our website, recognition as a top employer during our job fair and networking events, priority access to programming, and opportunities to connect directly with student and be featured in educational resources about plaintiff-side work.

We’re so excited to continue to grow in 2024, but we can’t accomplish this alone. Our biggest limitation as an organization is intertwined with the very thing that’s been critical to our success: at the heart of this project are a handful of highly motivated and passionate law students, who, over the past seven months, have been spending as many as twenty hours a week of their free time building this organization. Our board members will spend their day balancing clinic, Law Review, and a full course load before coming home to tasks like building out our website to include a student member-portal featuring exclusive resources or organizing conversations with plaintiff-friendly law school faculty on campuses where we don’t yet have a presence.

At the core of our vision of NPLA is centering students—their voices, perspectives, and experiences—but our reliance on student labor and funds has been a barrier to growth. We’ve had to carefully prioritize our projects, sometimes at the cost of meeting demand. For NPLA to reach its potential as an organization, we need team members with the skills and the time to grow a national nonprofit: to take this energized moment and turn it into a movement that changes legal and law school culture.

Gold Level Sponsor Reid Collins is funding NPLA Board member attendance at the winter AAJ convention.

We already have so many exciting things planned for the upcoming year. We’re putting together a formal Board of Advisors of established, successful plaintiffs’ lawyers who will serve as a guiding force for the organization. In February, members of our Board are headed to Austin, Texas for the winter American Association of Justice convention, an experience courtesy of the generous support of NPLA Gold Level Sponsor Reid Collins & Tsai LLP. We can’t wait to connect with some of the brilliant plaintiffs’ lawyer in attendance.

We’re developing a student member-portal for our website that will feature exclusive resources Our Communications team is busy working on educational content and programming, where we hope to give students insight into topics including what a personal injury attorney’s day looks like or the role of a Plaintiff's Steering Committee in a major MDL. We’re building a mentoring program that will connect law students with attorneys based on interests and values, that we hope to launch this Spring. Based on feedback from both students and employers, we will be hosting our job fair earlier in the summer to directly compete with on campus interview programs. We continue to make new campus contacts every day.

These are only some of the initiatives we hope to accomplish in the coming months. With your help, this can be just the beginning. Check out our sponsorship options below: to be considered a 2024 Sponsor, please reach out before February 15 by emailing sponsor@nationalplaintiffslawassociation.org. NPLA is always accepting individual contributions and small donations here.

All 2024 Sponsor will be listed on the website no later than March 1, 2024; any questions about donations or sponsorship can be directed to sponsorship@nationalplaintiffslawassociation.org.

Laura Shannon is Co-President of the National Plaintiffs’ Law Association.

She is 3L at the University of Chicago Law School, where she participates in the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, is the Topic Access and Recruitment Editor of the Law Review, and founded the Chicago Plaintiffs’ Law Association. After law school, Laura is working at Keller Postman in Chicago where she was a summer associate last summer.