Meet BBS' 2024 Business Behind the Scenes Fellows
2024 BBS Fellows, L-R are: Johnsenia Brooks, Sukraj Singh, Sam Haddad and Ian Hayes
BBS just wrapped up its 4th year of the Business Behind the Scenes Fellowship. We’ve been so lucky to have had three years of incredibly talented first-gen law student fellows—and this fourth year was no exception!
Each BBS Fellow receives training by legal professionals from a wide variety of legal backgrounds and organizations, via remote and in-person sessions during the Spring 2024 semester. This is entirely a training and mentorship opportunity for our fellows. BBS fellows are not asked to perform any work for BBS or its clients. Fellows receive training in subjects including:
● tools for succeeding in legal practice, in law firms and beyond;
● law firm economics at both the associate and partner level;
● strategic & logistical considerations in starting a firm;
● nonprofit economics & startup costs; and
● alternative career paths.
This year’s Fellows will also benefit from training, mentorship, and advice from BBS Fellowship alumni of our past three years of programming. BBS is thrilled to be living up to its commitment to building a robust network of current and former fellows to act as a peer network for career development, mentorship of first-generation professionals, additional training opportunities, and advocacy for diversity within the broader legal market.
Johnsenia Brooks attends Berkeley Law, where she is a first-year student. Johnsenia is a first generation professional and Afro-Latina, who has dedicated her academic career to exploring the legal and social frameworks that have marginalized communities of color. Before law school, she worked as a Spanish translator at the Delaware Public Defender’s office, using her skills to reassure and advocate for indigent defendant; she also served as a paralegal for the Innocence Project. Johnsenia looks forward to more fully immersing herself in the legal community: "[g]rowing up, I did not have a formalized roadmap on how to fulfill my dream of being a lawyer nor have a tangible example of what being a lawyer looked like....As a BBS fellow, I [seek to] learn from mentors and programming so that one day I can give back to the next generation of first-gen lawyers."
Saman (Sam) Haddad is a first-year student at Yale Law School. He grew up in San Bernardino, California, in a low-income, single-parent household, where he developed a love of education and his community. After watching residents struggle during the 2008 financial crisis and seeing the City of San Bernardino declare bankruptcy in 2012, Sam became determined to learn about community and economic development. After graduating from UCLA, Sam worked as a Coro Fellow in small-business finance and affordable housing development. When the BBS fellowship concludes, Sam looks forward to staying connected with the network of current, former, and future Fellows in order to “share knowledge and resources with one another, growing together as entrepreneurs and advocates.”
Ian Hayesis a 1L attending law school at Cornell University. After graduating from Harvard, Ian worked for a juvenile detention center, where he came to recognize that “my time, my gifts, and my talents are not the fruit of my labor alone but collectively produced and intended for collective use, nourished by generations, and marked by the communities that I inhabit and the people that form them.” Ian hopes to put his experience as a BBS Fellow to practical use, and to be “equipped with the skills, knowledge, mentorship, and community necessary to not only become an effective litigator but also to bring about legal systems and cultures committed to equity and justice, spaces that are reflective of the populations we serve.”
Sukraj Singh is attending UC Irvine Law School as a first-year student. Raj grew up in California’s Central Valley, where as a child he stepped in to run the family’s gas station’s operations after his father was deported. Raj learned deeply from the Punjabi-Sikh business community in his hometown, and hopes to contribute to better legal representation for Sikhs throughout California. “I am eager to join the BBS family network and contribute to its mission of promoting diversity in the legal field. As a turban-donned Sikh, my identity is rooted in values of equality and justice, which I plan to carry throughout my career. I [hope] to gaining valuable insights from the fellowship and using them to further advance diversity and representation in the legal profession.”
About BBS and the Business Behind the Scenes Fellowship
We founded Bradley Bernstein Sands LLP (“BBS”) in July 2020 after each practicing law for nearly 15 years at some of the biggest law firms and most forward-looking city governments in the country. We are a majority woman-owned firm that represents private and public clients in complex litigation on the West Coast. For over a decade before founding BBS, Heidi Bradley was a leading litigator in Seattle and Los Angeles, and was co-chair of her prior firm’s litigation team. Erin Bernstein has been a national leader in the government affirmative litigation space. And Darin Sands is a first-generation professional who has gone on to become a go-to commercial litigator in Portland. The three of us are longtime friends and are also the parents of young children. As we have built our own law firm, we’ve spent time distilling the important lessons we’ve learned in our prior positions—not just about the dollars and cents of how law firms run, but also about the value of leadership training, building professional networks, project management skills, and integrating a true balance between family life and career ambition into a larger office culture.
Each of our founders is a highly experienced and successful litigator in our own field. But when we set out to start a law firm, we realized that our legal education and career training had not included any information about the economics of big law, government, and nonprofits, or alternative career paths available to lawyers in and outside of the law. We hope to help fill that gap for first generation law students and help demystify the opaque world of law firm economics and non-traditional legal career paths—focusing especially on students who don’t have attorneys or other professionals in their family networks. As we built BBS, we wondered—given the grim statistics of female litigators in BigLaw’s partnership ranks—why there weren’t more women-owned firms like ours, and why there are so few law firms founded by people of color. Systemic inequality and racism certainly play a role in this disparity. But so too does the lack of guidance for diverse lawyers on how to successfully navigate those realities and find a career path that provides autonomy and control over your future. We want to see more firms like ours out there, and we want to empower and help train, mentor, and fund the next generation of founders.
In addition to training on many substantive topics, BBS Fellows will receive focused career coaching from the outstanding coaches at Glassman Coaching + Consulting. “We are thrilled to continue our work with the BBS Fellows. It’s inspiring to watch our friends at BBS [lead] this meaningful and innovative fellowship and it’s an honor to work with the incredibly talented group of law students in this year’s class.” – Jill Long. BBS is incredibly grateful for the extraordinary contributions of Glassman Coaching + Consulting to our Fellows.
For press inquiries please contact Erin Bernstein (ebernstein@bradleybernstein.com).