Legal Counsel, Director of Blackstone Professional Development

Make a difference with us! At Alliance Defending Freedom, we believe God has brought you here for His purpose—to stand for truth and defend the God-given right to live and speak it. Together, we protect religious freedom, free speech, the sanctity of life, marriage and family, and parental rights. Review our Statement of Faith to ensure we'r a fit for you.

Locations: Lansdowne, VA / Dallas, TX

The Blackstone Legal Fellowship is a rigorous formation for gifted Christian law students whose judgment and moral imagination are rooted in the rule of law, and who go on to shape law and culture—courtrooms, boardrooms, legislatures, and law schools are the visible examples, but the reach is wider: agencies and regulatory bodies, state and federal government, media and publishing, medicine and bioethics, technology, education, ministry, and the institutions that have not yet been built.

The Director of Professional Development owns the quality of the counsel that shapes those decisions. The role does not place Fellows into positions. It equips them to discern, prepare for, and compete for opportunities of real consequence, and it builds the curriculum, advisor network, and institutional relationships that deliver that counsel to a full class each summer and to a growing body of alumni in practice.

• Form and defend judgments about individual Blackstone summer interns and Fellows' capacity, trajectory, and professional fit, and calibrate those judgments over time against actual career outcomes.
• Develop and maintain the assessment framework used across the professional development function, including the signals that predict success.
• Deliver candid, specific assessments to Blackstone summer interns and Fellows regarding the capabilities standing between them and the positions they are pursuing.

• Set the intellectual direction of the professional development curriculum and own its design, sequencing, and annual revision across all phases of the Fellowship.
• Determine what is taught, by whom, and what is removed, informed by doctrinal developments, hiring market conditions, and Fellow outcomes.
• Establish and enforce quality standards for all workshops, seminars, guest lectures, and outside speakers.
• Teach the portions of the curriculum where the Director's own judgment and experience are the substance.
• Oversee the summer internship program, including placement, employer expectations, performance standards, and evaluation.

• Own clerkship outcomes end-to-end, including application strategy, materials review, recommender cultivation, and interview preparation.
• Build and maintain relationships with federal chambers and clerkship alumni sufficient to ensure Fellow applications receive serious consideration.
• Advise Fellows on decisions with long-term consequences, including first position selection, transitions, and the choice among private practice, government service, academia, and public interest litigation.
• Counsel Fellows on sustaining conviction and effectiveness under institutional pressure during the early years of practice.

• Cultivate the employer relationships that establish the standing of the Blackstone credential in advance of any individual application.
• Serve employers actively recruiting Fellows, and protect the credential by advancing only candidates who meet the standard.
• Place Fellows deliberately, prioritizing strategic position over volume of placements.
• With the Alumni Team track Fellow career trajectories and treat departures from the field as a diagnostic input to program design.

• Recruit senior practitioners and accomplished Fellows into a…