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For Paige Gentry JD ’13, few things are more satisfying than putting families in safe, affordable housing. That passion developed during her first job after college as an AmeriCorps volunteer with an affordable housing developer. Eventually, it led her to Duke Law School.

“I fell in love with that space and the commitment to helping people have a home and building communities where people of all different socioeconomic statuses can live and thrive,” Gentry said.

Gentry says she researched clinics in looking at law schools. A conversation with Clinic Director Andrew Foster sold her on Duke.

“When you think about civil rights, justice, and the power of law, people forget about the transactional side of law,” Gentry said. “There's a part of law that is about building the bedrock of society — building the companies and the nonprofits and housing and all the pieces that help move us forward. It isn't as flashy but it's important as well.”

Gentry, now deputy general counsel at the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County, Maryland, maintains relationships with Foster and other clinic alumni, including Merrill Hoopengardner JD ’04, a longtime community development finance executive, who jumpstarted Gentry’s career by hiring her for a summer associate position at Nixon Peabody. That led to a job after graduation in the firm’s tax credit finance and syndication division.

“It set me up very well, because what I have done since then is represent investors, lenders, developers, folks that are running these businesses and building affordable housing and redeveloping low-income areas,” Gentry said.

“It's the starting point for almost whole career as a lawyer in this field, and that is 100% due to Andrew connecting me to Merrill and Merrill saying, ‘Let’s try you out.’”

Along with Elle Gilley JD/LLM '13, Gentry now teaches a one-credit fall seminar at the Law School called Lawyers as Leaders and Team Members. 

Like Gentry, Hoopengardner decided to attend Duke Law after connecting with Foster and hearing his vision for the clinic he was about to launch. During her two semesters in one of its first cohorts, Hoopengardner helped an organization become certified under the New Markets Tax Credit, a federal program to stimulate investment in underserved communities, in the first year it launched. That experience was pivotal. After graduation she was hired at Nixon Peabody and became the firm’s first-ever new associate placed in its specialty practice in community development and affordable housing.

“One of the things that significantly impacted my career is being able to start at the ground floor of a new federal incentive program at the same time that very senior partners were doing it,” Hoopengardner said.

“I raised my hand and ended up getting an unusual amount of client-facing and industry facing experience as a very junior associate because I knew about it and wanted to take a deep dive into it, and I’m still working in that tax credit program today, more than 20 years later.  

Jeff Ward JD/LLM ’09 said enrolling in the Community Enterprise Clinic as a student helped him find his career path after having worked as a business consultant and schoolteacher. His clients included the West End Community Foundation, which he assisted in advocacy and negotiations with the city over the community center the foundation operates in the Lyon Park section of Durham. The project was special for its strong sense of place, Ward said.

“The executive director and many others in the organization had lived in or grown up in the neighborhood, and they were working and advocating for themselves in the most essential Community Enterprise Clinic type of way, to develop the resources they needed to grow and thrive and have a better life,” Ward said.

After graduating, Ward worked in mergers and acquisitions and capital markets transactions and, through his firm, served as a public interest law fellow at a community development project in Chicago. He returned to Duke Law School to work as the clinic’s supervising attorney and director of the Start-Up Ventures Clinic and now directs the Duke Center on Law & Technology.

“The clinic was far and away the most meaningful experience of law school, not only in terms of satisfaction, but also in building the kind of skills that were relevant to the kind of work that I'd be doing,” Ward said. “I remember getting to my law firm and thinking, ‘I can do this because I've done this before in the clinic.’ It was truly seminal for me.” 

During her time as a clinic student, Elizabeth Martinez JD/LLM ’13 successfully helped a client include its social governance proposals in two major banks’ annual proxy statements through a shareholder advocacy process involving the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Martinez keeps a framed copy of the letter issued in favor of her client by the SEC in her office at Milbank, where she is a partner in the Alternative Investments Practice.

“To be successful with the support of and supervision of Andrew Foster and [then supervising attorney] Jeff Ward in my arguments against practicing lawyers, who were partners from a major New York law firm, was a pretty neat achievement in my third year of law school,” Martinez said.

“They showed me what it was like to practice law before I knew what it meant to practice law, and they had confidence in my abilities and gave me all the support I needed, even at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. The experience showed me I was capable of more than I thought.”

Martinez said the clinic also helped her develop the client management skills that are critical in her practice. It's something she and her firm look for in new associates — and a big reason Duke Law is important in her recruiting efforts.

“You're also much more excited to begin a legal practice once you've had a taste of what that practice could look like. And that's why clinics are absolutely essential for law students.”