Kelsey Lamph ('24)

But Kelsey Lamph didn’t know she’d be sitting next to a Nevada legend, Patricia Cafferata, during her externship last year in the Nevada State Public Defender’s Office in Carson City. 

“Patty is an amazing woman to have as a mentor,” Lamph says of the veteran assemblywoman and state’s first female treasurer (in 1982), who has been Chief Legal Advisor to three district attorneys. Now in her 80s, Cafferata still works with the public defender’s office in Carson City.

“Her being this amazing force in Nevada was a great experience,” Lamph says. “It was like going around with a celebrity.”

Lamph graduated from Boyd Law in May ‘24 and is clerking for District Court judge Jennifer Schwartz — an experienced public defender herself — after taking the summer bar exam. “I probably wouldn’t have done a clerkship if I didn’t have Patty pushing me to do it,” she says. “And if I hadn’t been able to do all the research and writing, and realize how much I enjoyed that aspect of the law.”

The Las Vegas native liked what she saw of Carson City in the spring of 2023, when she was traveling back and forth in a different kind of externship with the government affairs-focused Rowe Law Group in Las Vegas. It was a productive semester: A policy brief Lamph wrote for a class ended up being passed as a bill (AB 169), requiring makers of feminine hygiene products to list potentially harmful ingredients on their packaging. 

Lamph wanted to extend her stay in Carson City, but “I didn’t know if I was going to be able to afford to pay for credits during the summer too. So it was so wonderful to get the scholarship.”

She arrived to find the state public defender’s office in a state of transition, with boxes stacked on desktops because Carson City was spinning off into its own public defender’s office due to increasing caseloads.

Part of her summer was spent going through old files of people who had been sitting in custody in Storey County for a long time, and trying to get their cases moving or get them out of custody while they were waiting for their hearings. “One case was close to a year.”

The externship helped Lamph figure out just where she fits in the judicial system— even if, as it turns out, that place isn’t a courtroom.

“I started out the summer thinking that I wanted to be a public defender, and then by the end of it, I was like, ‘Hmm, maybe this isn’t it for me.’ I don’t like going to court. I’m a behind-the-scenes kind of gal. I liked doing the research and the writing better than the going to court.”