DIVERSITY CORNER
DIVERSITY CORNER
Where Are They Now: AOIP Success Stories
JEAN MARIE MIDDLETON
AMBER SANDERS
Four women who came through the Bar ' s Advancing Opportunity Internship Program( AOIP) are now practicing law in Palm Beach County, and two of them are already back serving on bar committees.
That sentence is the whole argument for AOIP, and it is worth pausing over. A pipeline program is easy to describe and hard to measure. The applications get reviewed, the placements get made, the summer ends, and the students scatter to their law schools. What happens after that is usually invisible to the members who funded the program and hosted the interns.
In this article we answer that question directly. Eva Bjorgan, Kristina Bergman, Natalie Lanz, and Amber Sanders interned through the program in 2023 and 2024. All four were admitted to the Florida Bar and are practicing law. All Four took jobs here in Palm Beach County.
A short reminder of what AOIP is
The AOIP was established in 2010, succeeding what had been the Minority Law Clerk Program. It exists, in the Bar ' s own words, " to provide traditionally underrepresented law students with the opportunity to obtain practical experience in the legal profession and gain exposure to the Palm Beach County legal community while working with local law firms and government agencies."
The AOIP is run by the Bar’ s Committee for Diversity and Inclusion. Placements have gone to private firms, to federal and state judges, and to government offices including the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, the State Attorney, the Public Defender, the County Attorney, and the School District. Members who cannot host an intern underwrite one instead by funding a stipend for a placement with a judge or an agency.
Alumni of a certain vintage still call it DIP, the Diversity Internship Program 1. You will see that name in the profiles below, because it is the name they use for themselves.
PBCBA BAR BULLETIN
Where Are They Now?
Eva Bjorgan, DIP intern 2024, spent her summer with United States Magistrate Judge William Matthewman in the Southern District of Florida. She graduated from FIU College of Law in 2025 and is now an Assistant State Attorney, heading the County Court division handling misdemeanors. While interning in a judge’ s chambers and working as a Prosecutor in a misdemeanor division are different worlds, they share the thing that matters early in a career: volume, and the judgment that comes from it. Eva is in a courtroom nearly every day.
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Kristina Bergman interned with the Palm Beach County School District, which is to say she spent a summer inside a public law office that defends cases against the School Board, answers public records requests and advises a board that meets in public. She graduated from the University of Miami College of Law in 2025 and is an associate at Werner Hoffman Greig & Garcia in their Boca Raton Office.
Natalie Lanz, DIP intern 2023, interned with Searcy Law and is now an associate there. She graduated from the University of Miami College of Law in 2025. She sits on the board of the Palm Beach County Hispanic Bar Association and serves on committees of this Bar, the Young Lawyers Section, and FAWL. She was hired where she interned, which is the outcome the program is built to produce.
Amber Sanders participated in the program twice, in 2023 with Judge Rowe and in 2024 with Searcy Law, where she is now an associate. She graduated from Michigan State University College of Law in 2025. She co-chairs the social media committee of the Sheree Davis Cunningham Black Women Lawyers Association, and also co-chairs AOIP for the Committee for Diversity and Inclusion with Natasha Dorcent. Three years after first applying to the program as a student, she is the one reviewing the applications.
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The program’ s original name was the Diversity Internship Program.( Continued on next page)