Brooks Pierce is pleased to announce that MaKenzie Leonard and Rachel Lin have been selected as the 2025 recipients of the firm’s Chief Justice Henry E. Frye Diversity Summer Fellowship.
The Frye Fellowship includes a salaried Summer Associate position in the 2025 Summer Program for a student (10 weeks), resident in any of the firm’s three offices. The Fellow will also be awarded a $10,000 scholarship following successful completion of the firm’s 2025 Summer Program. The Fellow will also be awarded a $5,000 scholarship following successful completion of the firm’s 2026 Summer Program and a $25,000 stipend upon joining the firm as a first-year associate.
Leonard is a first-year student at the University of North Carolina School of Law. She received her bachelor’s degree from Davidson College. She is a 1L representative of the Black Law Student Association. Leonard is also a member of the Corporate and Transactional Law Association, the Faculty Selection Committee, and Alumni Relations Committee.
Lin is a first-year student at the University of North Carolina School of Law. She received her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a 1L representative of the Carolina Intellectual Property Law Association and the Sports & Entertainment Law Association. Lin is also a member of both the Faculty Selection Committee and the Multicultural and Diversity Committee of the Student Bar Association. Prior to law school, she was a paralegal for two years at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC.
Frye, who retired from Brooks Pierce in 2016, broke many racial barriers during his long and storied career. In 1963, he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of North Carolina as one of the first Black federal prosecutors in the South. Justice Frye won election to the North Carolina General Assembly in 1968—the first Black person to do so since 1899. After serving in the NC House and the Senate, he was appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1983. Justice Frye was the first Black jurist to sit on the state’s highest bench. In 1999, he became the court’s first Black chief justice. After seventeen years on the bench, Justice Frye joined Brooks Pierce in 2001. Now retired from private practice, he remains actively involved in vital community efforts. He continues to advise and inspire each of us at Brooks Pierce. We hope that the Frye Diversity Fellowship will inspire a new generation of law students to pursue excellence and dare to be first.
For more information on the fellowship, click here.