Erika Nicole Pont

Erika N. Pont is an Associate Professor in the Fundamentals of Lawyering (FL) Program and currently serves as the Program's Associate Director. In this capacity, she is FL's liaison to GW's Gambrell award-winning Inns of Court Program and is responsible for incorporating principles of professional development and professional identity formation into the FL curriculum. Professor Pont also directs the Dean's Fellow program, supervising and teaching upper level students who support FL professors and 1L students.

She joined the Fundamentals of Lawyering faculty in its inaugural year after nearly twelve years of teaching at GW as an adjunct professor. Professor Pont has taught legal research and writing, introduction to advocacy, scholarly writing, and independent legal writing. In teaching and in practice, she has mentored numerous students and junior associates and been influential in their professional development. 

Prior to joining GW Law full time, Professor Pont spent over a decade in the litigation department at McDermott Will & Emery. She has experience in all aspects of complex commercial litigation including bench and jury trials. Professor Pont's pro bono practice focused on immigration and death penalty issues. In this capacity, she first-chaired immigration hearings and filed amicus briefs on behalf of the American Bar Association and the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. At McDermott, Professor Pont served on office and firm-wide professional development committees, designed and presented firm-wide trainings, and was active in firm hiring including on-campus recruiting. 

As a student at GW Law, she served as a Dean’s Fellow, Executive Notes Editor of the International Law Review, and helped launch the Scholarly Writing Program in its first year. Professor Pont earned a BA with high honors in government from Smith College in Northampton, MA. Professor Pont is also certified as a Mental Health First Aid Provider by the National Council on Behavioral Health and holds a certificate in the Psychology of Happiness from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the intersection of psychology and law school pedagogy, metacognition, and lawyer wellness. Professor Pont is particularly interested in curricular innovations to assist in professional identity formation in first-generation law students.