usc law family
A Pathway Into Practice for Lawyer-Immigrants A small-but-impactful transfer program lets a few outstanding international LLM students enter the JD track. Meet three alumni who took the journey. By Diane Krieger
Little did German lawyer Peter Steinwachs imagine he’d one day be an American Big Law corporate attorney, let alone a go-to guy for legal advice on managing the world’s secondlargest university endowment.
In December 2018, Jonathan Jimenez (LLM 2016, JD 2018), pictured center, celebrated passing the arduous California bar exam with his classmates.
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Born in Köln, raised near Frankfurt and educated at the University of Mainz, the 43-year-old Steinwachs is today associate general counsel with Yale University’s Investments Office, the team looking after the Ivy bastion’s nearly $30 billion portfolio. Previously, he was a corporate associate with Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York and London. How did this happen?
Simple. Steinwachs (LLM 2008, JD 2010), is a USC Gould double-alum—and the first person to go through the school’s elite LLM to JD transfer program. Introduced in 2007, the pathway lets a few exceptional international students move into the JD program and finish in as little as two years. They do so by taking their 1L classes out of sequence and transferring up to 30 units of upper-division LLM coursework. Most years only one or two LLM students are admitted, though 20 or more apply, according to USC Gould Associate Dean and Chief Program Officer Deborah Call.
