Blog 2 - Summer Mentorship

1. List the contact name, phone number, and organization of the person with whom you volunteered.
• Sharon Bernal
• (909)-622-0719 
• California Department of Industrial Relations Division of Workers' Compensation
2. What qualified this person as an expert in your topic choice?   
• Sharon Bernal has 25 years of experience in Workers' Compensation field. She had a reputation for being a very good attorney, but tough for 22 years. She now has served as a judge for the last three years, and still maintains her reputation for being tough, but fair.
3. List three questions for further exploration now that you've completed your summer hours.
• How does a judge decide what the value of the case is worth? 
• What are the key components that a judge looks for in a case? 
• How does a judge determine whether the case goes to trial, or is settled?
4. What is the most important thing you gained from this experience? Why?
• During my mentorship hours, the most import thing I gained for this experience, is communication. While I was at my mentorship, I would listen in to cases and hear the issues the attorneys had with the case. There were many times attorneys would ask a few questions and then come to an agreement within a matter of 10 minutes. If the attorneys would have just spent the 10 minutes and communicated with each other over the phone, they wouldn't have to go through the whole process and waste time and money.
5. What is your senior project topic going to be?  How did mentorship help you make your decision?  Please explain.
• My senior project is going to be on Workers' Compensation Law. This mentorship has helped me decide that Workers' Compensation Law is a fun and interesting topic to pursue. I went into this mentorship not quite sure if I wanted to use this as my topic, because of how big Workers' Compensation Law is, and how much knowledge is required to understand the field. But after visiting my mentorship and talking to my mentor, I have been able to focus in and realize that it is a topic I can handle, and is fascinating.