KR is fortunate to have seven promising summer associates joining us this season from a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences. We've met the first four, now let's meet the final three. Welcome Cherita, Lauren and Kyler!
Cherita Raines, a 1L at the University of Washington School of Law, was selected as the recipient of this year's Keller Rohrback Diversity Fellowship and will be working in the Complex Litigation department. Cherita’s path to a career in law has taken a different path than most; before entering law school, Cherita was a practicing family medicine physician for twelve years. Originally from Orlando, Florida, Cherita completed her residency at UW, and stayed in the Pacific Northwest providing healthcare for her local community.
The structural and logistical problems that persists in medicine informed Cherita’s decision to pursue a second career in law. “I am interested in law to have a bigger impact than I had with my patients,” she explains, “I was one-on-one with patients in improving their health and law gives me the opportunity to do impact litigation where I can improve the health of an entire class of patients.”
To this end, Cherita recognized that spending her summer internship with Keller Rohrback would go a long way toward helping her achieve this goal. In particular, it was the firm’s work addressing public health crises such as the JUUL youth vaping crisis, the opioid epidemic, and the insulin overpricing scandal that drew Cherita to KR, as these were all issues she had to contend with directly as a medical provider. She stated “This is the upstream work frontline providers need to better care for patients.”
In her free time, Cherita enjoys spending time with her friends and family engaging in activities she is not good at, such as golf, tennis, and bowling.
Lauren Lee is a rising 3L at the University of Washington School of Law with a passion for using law to help and impact many people. After obtaining her Bachelor of Science in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University, she recognized how laws could be challenged and reformed to better serve communities. Lauren is a second-generation Korean American, she continuously seeks opportunities to represent Korean culture and promote diversity. Currently, she is a Korean-to-English translator at the Community Church of Seattle.
Lauren was drawn to Keller Rohrback because of the customized and personable approach the firm takes to address clients’ challenges. Her commitment to litigation was solidified after taking a Trial Advocacy class, which further fueled her excitement for public speaking. This Fall, she is excited to participate in the Tang Moot Court Competition, where she hopes to hone her advocacy skills further. Lauren is a Submissions Editor for the Washington Journal for Law, Technology and Arts, and she enjoys exploring topics like facial recognition technology in airport security systems.
Outside of school, Lauren’s biggest strength is her positivity and openness to trying new things. She loves good food, traveling, and being a tour guide in Seattle. In her free time, she enjoys learning how to play golf and exploring “easy” hiking spots around the Pacific Northwest.
Kyler Teo is a rising 1L at the University of Washington Law School, taking advantage of the opportunity to experience a broad range of practice areas in Keller Rohrback’s Seattle Office as a 2024 Summer Associate. While an undergrad at UW earning a B.A. in Political Economics, Kyler became involved as a coach in UW’s Mock Trial program, and his successful participation in that extracurricular discipline tilted him in the direction of law school. Kyler is still active as a coach in this program today. As he explains it, the efficiency of thought and verbal expression that he derived from several years of competitive public speaking had taught him to “just take my one marketable skill where it goes, and law school was the next extension of that.”
Kyler had explored chemistry and software engineering prior to his political economics major, but neither held his interest nor sparked his enthusiasm like the concepts he was encountering in the law alongside his new major. Though he professes no current specific practice area, he decided that a major priority of his 1L summer would be to figure out if litigation was where he wanted to be, and KR seemed to be a wise fit in that regard with its wide net of plaintiff-side cases. Before arriving at KR, he spent time in the Washington Attorney General’s office doing Labor and Industries workplace safety and wage theft work, but he sees a great advantage to expanding his legal horizons while he’s at KR.
Kyler spends time away from schoolwork working for a trivia company as a content moderator, reading, creative writing, and tabletop role-playing games such as Pathfinder, and he lightheartedly admits that “I drink coffee like water!”