A Passion for Helping Those in Need
Chicago-Kent College of Law valedictorian Betül Serbest ’19, who will join the law firm of Reed Smith LLP this fall as a litigation associate, wants to continue giving back to society as an attorney through pro bono work.
“The law can seem kind of exclusive and inaccessible to people who are under-resourced,” she says. “So to make sure that they have the resources that will give them justice in an area that they don’t have it or need it the most is something I’m really passionate about.”
Throughout her time at Chicago-Kent, Serbest has helped others. She has worked at Chicago-Kent’s Patent Hub, which matches low-income inventors to intellectual property attorneys working pro bono, and at the Self-Help Web Center at the Daley Center, aiding self-represented and under-resourced litigants to assemble legal paperwork or find legal representation. In 2013, before starting law school, she began volunteering through her uncle’s law firm as a Turkish-language interpreter for asylum seekers in their credible-fear interviews and has continued ever since.
This semester she’s working as a Public Interest Law Initiative fellow in the Adult Division of the Cook County Office of the Public Guardian, which advocates on behalf of abused and neglected children and disabled adults.
Serbest cites her work as a legal writing teaching assistant for first-year students as one of the most rewarding parts of her law school career. Her role was to help students with citations and writing while also providing moral support. “The highlight of my law school experience was hearing how grateful some of the students were for some of what I considered to be the basic help I provided,” she says.
As a student, she has taken full advantage of the opportunities Chicago-Kent offers, including competing on the law school’s award-winning Moot Court Honor Society team, working as a judicial extern for the Honorable Daniel J. Lynch of the Cook County Circuit Court, and serving as vice president of the Intellectual Property Law Society and social chair of the Society of Women in Law. This February her article “Enhanced Patent Infringement Damages Post-Halo and the Problem with Using the Read Factors” was published in Volume 94 of the Chicago-Kent Law Review.
In addition to her extracurricular activities and volunteer work, Serbest has made the dean’s list every semester and earned CALI Awards for the highest grades in her Legal Writing I; Contracts; Criminal Law; Constitution Law; and Patent Law courses.
“I can honestly say that Chicago-Kent strives to make classes and courses designed so that they are experiential and so that they do apply to your career as a lawyer once you’re out of here. For instance, the intellectual property classes I’ve taken have been extremely useful in the jobs that I have done,” says Serbest. “Furthermore, the legal writing classes here are taught in a way such that you can apply what you’ve learned in those classes to the real world.”
Born in Turkey, she grew up in the Chicago suburbs and graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology. She’s active at the Kurdish Cultural Center of Illinois and served as the center’s secretary from 2016–17.
“The most valuable lesson I learned in law school is that confidence goes a long way,” she says. “I started out kind of timid, but I’ve noticed over the years I’ve grown to be a lot more confident and a lot more assertive. And I think that’s important not just in the law but in other areas of life as well.”
