A Teacher at Heart: Welcome Sarah Klim
Sarah Klim joined Mercer School of Law in January as an assistant professor of law.
Klim earned her bachelor’s degree in English (creative writing), magna cum laude, and a Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate from Florida State University. Her father was director of communications at Stetson University College of Law and for years encouraged Sarah to consider law as a career path. But after graduation, she decided to teach English as a foreign language and landed at Koҁ University in Istanbul, Turkey, where she worked during the school’s summer semester. She then decided to pursue an opportunity teaching English in Japan and “fell in love with living there. After about three years in Japan I felt like there was something missing. Although I loved teaching English, I wanted to challenge myself further and reconsidered my father’s idea of going to law school. It was an excellent decision that I have never regretted.”
Klim earned her JD from Boston University School of Law, where she completed intensive business law-focused coursework as part of the school’s transactional practice concentration, participated in the school’s Homer Albers Prize Moot Court Competition, and served as student editor of the Review of Banking & Financial Law, vice president of the First Generation Professionals student organization, and Class of 2023 student orientation co-director. During law school, she also worked as a judicial intern to the Honorable Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson at the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, research assistant to the esteemed Professor William Park, and summer associate at Day Pitney LLP in Miami.
In 2022, Klim earned her LLM in International & European Business Law from the Comillas Pontifical University of Madrid, Spain. There, she received the school’s Award in Excellence, which recognizes the highest grade point average earned in the LLM program for the 2021-2022 academic year. Her thesis, “The Emerging Framework for the Recognition & Enforcement of Annulled Arbitral Awards in US Jurisprudence” is forthcoming in the spring 2025 edition of the Ohio Northern University Law Review.
After law school, Klim served for almost two years as a commercial litigation attorney at Day Pitney LLP in Miami, where she represented sophisticated corporate clients in complex commercial disputes.
“Although I loved practicing law,” Klim said, “I am a teacher at heart. Not only do I love to teach myself about different subjects, but I really love helping others understand complex information and instilling in my students the confidence to learn and master new material. With both language learning and the law, confidence can be a huge impediment to mastery, so it is incredibly important to me that my students feel comfortable in the classroom and not afraid of making mistakes. There’s a saying I love: ‘The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.’” At Mercer Law School, Klim teaches legal writing 1 and an advanced writing group.
Klim said that when she first visited Mercer Law School, she knew it was the perfect fit for her. Not only was she struck by the beautiful law building, close-knit environment, and kindness of the students, faculty, and staff, she was also impressed with the school’s outstanding advocacy program, commitment to excellence in legal research and writing, and efforts to give back to the community. Further, while attending law school in Boston, she confirmed she does not like cold weather, saying she was grateful to return to her home state of Florida to practice law, but prefers living in Macon over Miami “because I love being closer to nature.”
Klim is a first-generation law school graduate and second-generation American. Both of her parents were the first in their families to graduate from college, and she is the first in her family to graduate from a professional school. Her father was born in England to a Polish father and Irish mother and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s.
Klim is married to Zach Weinfeld, a cybersecurity engineer at First Citizens Bank. The couple likes birding, watching Jeopardy!, and speaking Japanese together. She is also an avid chess and Dance Dance Revolution player and paints Pokémon fan art in her spare time.
