Summer Durant joined Ropes & Gray’s health care group in Chicago in 2025. Before joining the firm, Summer graduated magna cum laude from Howard University School of Law as the salutatorian of her class. Her academic excellence was recognized with several CALI awards and she was the recipient of the Wiley A. Branton Award in 2023, distinguishing her as having the highest grade point average in her 1L class.
While at Howard University School of Law, Summer worked as a summer associate in both Ropes & Gray’s Washington, D.C. and Chicago offices in 2024, where she handled matters in privacy and health care, and even employed her French proficiency on a pro bono case for a francophone client. Summer also served as the Executive Solicitations and Submissions Editor for Volume 68 of the Howard Law Journal and as a student attorney in both Howard Law’s Patent and Fair Housing Clinics where she provided direct legal representation to clients. Additionally, Summer was chosen to be both a Civil Procedure and Property Law Teaching Assistant.
Prior to law school, Summer obtained her Master of Science in Law from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 2020 and her B.A. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 2018. She is originally from Washington, D.C.