Rudman Summer Fellow of the Week: Nic Malm
Nic Malm, a Rising 2L, is working at the N.H. Office of Professional Licensure and Certification this summer.
Nic Mahn describes handling one particularly challenging Right-to-Know request.
(The following excerpts from a recorded interview have been edited for clarity and brevity.)
On the work of the N.H. Office of Professional Licensure and Certification:
The office handles the administration and enforcement of all occupational and health care licensing for the whole state, making sure that all occupations are up to date with their licenses and that they're not breaking any updated regulations, because the laws update every year, I鈥檝e since found out, and their sole purpose is to protect public safety. For instance, if you have an electrician going into someone's home, that's someone's private space, you want to make sure they're meeting all the regulations. This is the office that is kind of the watchdog over all those regulations.
On his work there this summer:
I鈥檓 focused on fielding Right-to-Know requests, New Hampshire鈥檚 91A statute, which basically says any member of the public or any occupational board member has a right to access certain information. This is the office you reach out to if you need perhaps a copy of an old license you had. There are a lot of privacy restrictions, so when we receive a request, I have to go through the 91A statute to see if the information requested is available for public access They can be very simple requests, like a person just wants a transcript from their barber school, or it can be someone requesting records from maybe 60 or 70 years ago that haven't been found in the past 20 years. So we have to do some digging. It can get interesting. It can be a very simple request to fulfill or the most complicated thing I've ever seen in my life. But, regardless of what the request might be, I always get something new out of it. So, me and the 91A Right-to-Know statute, we鈥檙e like best friends now. So it's definitely given me a lot of perspective about how these things operate.
Everyone is terrific there. I especially like that the attorneys I work with directly, they're not only being my supervisors and boss, they also have their moments when they are teachers. When I'm assigned a certain project or maybe a type of request that deals with an area I've never encountered before, my supervisor will apply it to law school and then also to life in general, so that I understand where this fits into the big puzzle of the world of law, which I really appreciate. I don't think I was expecting that from a legal internship. Not only am I getting the practical experience, I'm also getting the insight of these particular attorneys. And I've been enjoying that.
On his goals for the summer:
I鈥檇 very much like to be able to draft rules alongside the rule-makers team, which reviews statutes or rules. I think it would be really interesting to be a part of that process. And I've been told that's the direction they're hoping I go in towards the end of my internship. So that'd be kind of exciting just to be a part of something like that and to see what that process actually looks like would be really cool.
The attorneys I work with want to expose me to as much policy as they can, not only to get me used to reading rules and understanding them, but to be able to recognize what goes into drafting such rules, which isn't an easy process. There's a lot of deliberation, a lot of back and forth, as you can imagine. Right now is a great time to be able to absorb that and just kind of be a sponge and take in as much of that as I can.
