Meredith Emerson Ritchie got her first courtroom experience as an intern at a small radio station in Waukegan. Covering cases and writing stories from the Lake County Courthouse was a thrill for the Hamilton College junior pursuing a broadcast journalism career in the mid-1980s. But her first law job — a paralegal for a solo practitioner in Chicago — was a result of the tough reality facing even the most ambitious broadcast journalists: You don’t start your career in a big city. The Chicago legal …