Faculty/Staff ProfileTitle

Areas of Expertise
Externships and Experiential Learning
Professional Identity Formation
Gender-Based Violence
Housing Law

Biography
Professor Lall joined the University of Baltimore as a Professor of the Practice and Director of Externships in 2019. Under Professor Lall’s leadership, UBalt Law has built one of the largest paid legal externship programs in the United States, with a large majority of UBalt Law students receiving compensation in conjunction with their externship work. A profile on the impact of UBalt Law's model in The University of Baltimore Magazine Winter 2026 issue can be found here. 

Professor Lall is an advocate for creating paid pathways for law students interested in public service careers and addressing issues of inequity in legal education. She launched UBalt Law's Housing Justice Fellowship program in 2022, which funds UBalt Law students working in Access to Counsel in Eviction placements throughout Maryland. The public interest impact of the UBalt Law Externship Program in the The University of Baltimore Magazine Fall 2023 issue can be found here.

Her empirical research on the impact of pay on law students’ externship experiences was selected by the Clinical Section of the Association of American Law Scholars for its Bellow Scholars Program. Her articles, Paying Dividends: An Empirical Examination of How Student Compensation Enhances Externships and Paying Our Dues: A Student-Centered Examination of Paid Externships, analyze extensive empirical data from UBalt Law School to rebut commonly held assumptions about the educational value of paid externships. Rather than diminish the quality of learning, an empirical analysis of student learning opportunities showed that directly paid externs did more diverse and complex work than their unpaid counterparts – the opposite outcome as skeptics of pay had predicted. In an extensive student survey, completed by 86% of students over three year, she found that the option of pay also had a positive impact on learning. Allowing students to pick learning experiences that align with both their values and their personal needs increases student investment and overall learning experience.

Professor Lall is immediate-past co-president of the Clinical Legal Education Association, the largest organization of law professors in the United States. In this role, Professor Lall has engaged in advocacy with the ABA Council on Legal Education on educational standards and academic freedom for clinic and externship teachers. She is also co-chair of the American Association of Law Schools Externship Committee's Subcommittee on Faculty Status.

Professor Lall was awarded a 2025 Emerging Leader Award by the AALS Externships Committee, the University of Baltimore James May Faculty Award in 2022, and the Chicago Bar Association Alliance for Women Founder’s Award in 2018.

Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Lall was a Supervisory Attorney in the Housing Practice Group of Legal Aid Chicago and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where she taught courses on Gender-Based Violence and the Law. As a Staff Attorney at Life Span, she launched a legal program to represent survivors of sexual assault and litigated the first appellate court case under Illinois’s sexual assault protective order statute. Professor Lall has also taught as a Clinical Fellow at Northeastern University School of Law and Harvard Law School.