I sat down with my law school’s career development alumni liaison (or whatever fancy title they use) this past week. She was friendly, she tried to be as helpful as possible, and (to be fair) she did give me some good ideas about my job search.

This post is not about that.

During the course of our conversation she asked me why I enrolled in law school, why I wanted to become a lawyer. I was reminded of a similar question Brian Tannebaum had asked on his blog that I tried answering while still in school.

Back then, I really didn’t know why, other than having some vague notion of wanting to help people. I saw friends and family get screwed over in ways that could easily have been avoided with the help of someone with legal knowledge and experience, and I thought that I’d like to be that someone for them.
Fortunately, all of these situations were civil matters, so I was thinking solely of practicing civilly.

Since then, however, I have become more and more interested in criminal defense work. Scott Greenfield, Mark Bennett, and Brian Tannebaum were probably the initial catalysts for this change when I started following them on twitter and reading their blawgs.

Every so often news items like these come up and highlight exactly how crucial criminal defense lawyers are in our judiciary.

Then I started interning at the Office of the Public Defenders and I have been loving the hell out of that.

When I gave the career development woman my bland answer about helping people, she called me on it; there are many ways to help people, why a lawyer?
It sounded cheesy in my mind when I said it and it sounds even cheesier now that I’m writing it down, but my answer to her was that I believe in criminal defense.

That’s why.

Working at the Office of the Public Defender is incredible.

I’m learning so much about the practice of criminal law, it’s actually pretty pathetic. I mean, you’d like to imagine that after law school and the bar you know something about the reality of criminal law.
Something.
Anything at all.

But at least I have the opportunity to actually learn. I’ve been prepping cases, interviewing clients, taking witness statements and sitting in court through the daily dockets. Once I get sworn in they’re going to give me a case, training me and working with me so I can actually stand in front of a judge and represent a client. They’ll gradually give me more cases as I get more experience and confidence.

This all with me coming in one day a week.

Over at the Unwashed Advocate (formerly the “Military Underdog”), Eric Mayer wrote a list about lessons he has learned in his private practice.
That got me thinking about things that I have learned already in my time at the OPD.

This list is by no means complete and I mean to update it as my time with the OPD goes on.

• Preliminary Hearings are a joke.
• If the client is on the street, there’s a good chance bail will be raised or revoked, so you’re usually better off waiving it.
• Even if your client is in jail and there’s no bail to lose, the hearings have become nothing more than a rote ceremony performed by the court to fulfill the requirement of having one. As far as I can tell, once the officer has read his report out loud testified, anything and everything else is no longer relevant.
• To quote House: Everybody lies.
  • Your client lies.
  • The police officers lie.
  • Witnesses lie.
• Allowing some defendants from lock up to sit at their own preliminary hearings with their hands cuffed in front of them instead of behind them is a terrible security hazard that the Assistant State’s Attorney and the judge simply can’t risk.

Like I said, I’m sure there’s a lot more I can’t think of now, so I’ll update this as it goes on.

- UPDATE — 12/14/11

Since I am constantly learning, it comes as no surprise to me that my view of the preliminary hearing is pathetically limited.
Jeff Gamso mentioned the potential importance of a preliminary hearing:

A prelim would provide discovery.  It would trap in transcript today’s version of the stories told by the witnesses.  It would provide material for cross-examination.  That’s no small thing.

Yesterday I interned at the Office of the Public Defender in district court. This was the first day of my new schedule, working my 40 hours in 4 days and taking Tuesdays off to intern at the OPD. It was frigging fantastic.

Since I’m still waiting on my bar results the most I can do is act as a law clerk, but that’s still much more than I’ve had the chance to do before now.

The more I find out about the court and its procedures (not civil, not criminal, but administrative) the more ignorant I feel. But at least it’s tempered with the knowledge that I’m in the right place to learn.
Turns out that the district court I’m working at splits up the courtrooms by district. I was assigned to one courtroom and I shadow the attorneys who work that room.

Utter chaos started the day; people all over the place, lawyers snatching conversations with clients and their families beforehand and running out of the courtroom for minutes at a time to follow up with clients afterward.
Between the two attorneys I shadowed, there were about 20 cases during the morning docket, but only 5 or so during the afternoon.

When the afternoon docket was finished, one of the attorneys asked me if I found it boring or exciting. I told him that I’m still at the point where it’s all exciting, no matter how boring it is.

This was supposed to have been easier.

When I first starting working, years before I started law school, I ran into the same problem everyone runs into when trying to find an entry-level position anywhere — how do you get work experience without already having work experience?
I was fortunate enough to get an interview with SSA back when they were still hiring anyone with a pulse. Now, nearly seven years later when I’m looking for a job in the legal profession, I was hoping that having seven years of work experience would count for something.

I will now allow you to wipe up whatever it was you were drinking that you spewed all over your keyboard after reading that.

I know… how naive could I be?

So, after the initial flurry of job applications and the resultant responses of silence and apathy, I am left to face the sad reality that I am starting over with no experience.
I can’t possibly take a full-time job that pays less than my current job, and, strangely enough, employers seem loathe to pay greater than entry-level salaries to pathetically inexperienced recent grads. Which led me to my current plan.

Starting in October (thank you federal government bureaucracy with your byzantine paperwork procedures) I’ll be working 10-hour days 4 days a week at my full-time IT job, and with the one day off that gives me I’ll be interning at the Public Defender’s Office in Baltimore City.

Fortunately, these will be shorter days than I dealt with while in law school, but I was enjoying actually seeing my kids before leaving to work in the morning.
Oh well, at least I’ll be home for dinner and evenings; that’s my work-life balance right there.

Over a year ago, I helped a local attorney on a criminal appellate case. I did some legal research and helped draft the arguments for the client’s appeal to the MD Court of Special Appeals.

In October, I sat in the courtroom after meeting the client and listened to oral arguments on the case. I was still involved enough that I was mouthing answers to the court’s questions from my seat against the wall.

Finally, yesterday, the court posted their opinion — a surprise, since the Court of Special Appeals doesn’t often report decisions. Reading the decision was gratifying and instructive on many levels. Most importantly, our client’s conviction was vacated and remanded for a new trial. Sure, we would have been happier if it was simply reversed as a matter of law, but a new trial isn’t the end of the world; especially since several jurors told the attorney after the trial that they would have decided otherwise if they were given instructions that allowed it.

The process was incredibly enlightening. Aside from getting a kick out of seeing my arguments and words referenced in a court’s opinion, this crystallized my feelings that I want to practice law. Until now, the little voice that some of us have in the back of our minds has been asking me if becoming a lawyer is really something I want to do, or if it just looks like a good idea in theory.

I’m looking forward to doing this again.

I had an idea the other day for a service twitter should offer to corporate/registered accounts.
One thing people have noticed is that twitter seems to have very high search engine ranking; so that if I were to Google my name, one of the top links is my twitter page. That has raised some concerns in the past about how a lawyer can be viewed by potential clients who look the lawyer up online.
My idea is to allow firms to leverage this strong search engine ranking of twitter. A firm can have its own twitter ID, but, as any social media guru will tell you, it’s better to have an individual face people can relate to. So a firm will appoint an individual to be the face of the firm on twitter (and whatever other social network it deems necessary). That’s pretty darn straightforward.

The twist came when I started thinking about personal brands in the context of the firm’s larger brand. What if a firm hires someone with a strong and respected personal brand, such as a lateral hire or — I’ll be completely honestly self-centered — a recent law school graduate who built relationships with other legal professionals using social media.
What if twitter would allow a registered account to link or associate an existing individual account to the firm’s account, thereby allowing a search of the firm’s name to also turn up the individual’s twitter account?
The registered account holder would start the process off requesting an account to be associated with it. Then twitter would have to act as the gatekeeper, requiring proof from the requester that there is a valid rationale to associate the individual account with the registered account. Something like proof of employment should do. Then the registered account holder can determine when it it time to disassociate the individual from the registered account.
Revolutionary? No. but I think it could be very useful.

Dear World,

Social Media.
Social.
Media.
Why do these two words confuse the hell out of so many people? I don’t just mean confuse in the whimsical way your parents might be confused about how to open a file in an email. I mean confused — to the point where people end up doing things completely bass-ackwards and screwing themselves over.

Yesterday, Scott Greenfield and Brian Tannebaum posted excellent, somewhat related and extraordinarily relevant statements regarding the need for lawyers to subscribe to and follow an ethical guideline. The overlap between them lies in a lawyer’s online presence, and since I am so obviously steeped in online reality that I instantly associated those verbs as online colloquialisms (“subscribe” to a feed and “follow” on twitter) I will focus mainly on the online aspect of the issue.

Which brings me back to Social Media. How complicated can it be? Why are there Social Media Gurus for hire, who obviously are certified via Social Media Certificate programs? How on Earth can something that is based on the most natural activity in the world — talking to someone — become so overwhelming that people feel the need to pay for people to do it for them? Networking existed for centuries, long before Social Media came around. Is it the “Media” that’s throwing people off? Do people feel like they need to follow someone else’s instructions or outsource their online presence because they don’t feel comfortable dealing with media?
Because it’s not media. It’s online networking. It’s like walking into a room full of people, except it’s online. There is nothing mystical or confusing or difficult about this concept.
People didn’t have a problem understanding chat rooms; but as soon as it has a Title people drop everything they might have known about social interaction online.

My personal opinion is that Social Media is a straw man. Yes, it is missing a brain; but more importantly, it diverts the attention from the real issue — the issue that Brian Tannebaum focused on in his post.

All too many people, not just lawyers, don’t worry about the ethical considerations of their actions. Social media is just new enough that it’s an environment where these people can slip into what they feel more comfortable doing — trying to game the system.

The sleaziness online won’t last, but it sure is annoying in the meantime.

In case anyone who reads this blog is unaware, I’m a non-traditional law student. I work full-time and attend classes in the evening. The normal timeline for evening students at my school is 4 years until graduation; I’m an impatient type, so I opted to take a full course load each summer as well. This decision — not necessarily good for my sanity — cuts down the time it will take me to graduate by 2 full semesters (roughly one year).

Now that that’s out of the way, allow me to get to the point: I participated in my schools Intellectual Property Clinic this summer. Formerly based in an incubator (it has since moved to a school campus), the clientele ranged from authors to web-based business to bio-engineers to financial auditing contractors.

When I first applied to the clinic, I was not aware of the amount of time that it was going to take. Taking the clinic for 5 credits, I had to clock in 28 hours a week (not “billable” hours, simply work hours) — students taking 7 credits had to clock in almost 40. I cannot consider taking a clinic again, since I simply cannot commit that amount of time to it again — it was a stretch this past summer.

That being said, it was the single most informative and educational experience of my law school career to date. I met with clients; I drafted agreements; I performed trademark searches; I was exposed to the kinds of issues that are common in the realm of real business — there was no mention of acres of any hue!

My class was eligible to petition for a journal this past summer, but I knew that I would have time to either petition or attend the clinic. I might have committed career-suicide by opting for the clinic over the journal, but I don’t regret the decision; if an interviewer asks about it I’ll simply answer in good Jewish tradition with the question: “Which is more important: being on a journal or actual work experience?”

I work in IT. I’m not a programmer, so I end up doing the odd jobs that no one else has any desire to do nor any idea how to do.  One item on the long list of my de facto responsibilities is troubleshooting. I help troubleshoot code that is still in development; I help the validators troubleshoot while they test the supposedly finished code; I troubleshoot security issues that come up in the field across the country when the official support personnel are out of ideas.

I would like to leverage that experience on my resume — highlighting the dynamic, problem-solving aspect of the job and downplaying the technical knowledge/experience aspect. Take two hypotheticals:

“I have experience troubleshooting software throughout all stages of its development and I support production personnel in troubleshooting end-user issues.”

“I have experience troubleshooting issues that come up across all levels of my team and our clients. I dynamically utilize my problem-solving skills by thinking outside the box to achieve business results.”

The first one is dry and more attuned for an IT job. The second makes me sound like a pretentious jerk with a thesaurus.

How do you translate what you do into resume-speak?

I met with the Dean of our Career Development Office (CDO) last week. That’s not to be confused with the Office of Career Development (OCD). She is an extremely friendly person who is more than willing to go out of her way to help students; however, there is only so much anyone can help students — particularly non-traditional students.

I laid out the facts for her and saw her face tighten; I could almost hear her mind shrieking in frustration. Full-time work; no weekends available; minimum salary requirements; IT background… it just kept getting better. At one point I responded to the look of resignation on her face by laughing and commenting how I’m all over the place.

And then something changed. She straightened her shoulders, looked me square in the eye and told me that it can work. I mentioned how I’m rearranging my work schedule this coming semester for the mediation clinic, since there will be daytime mediations. That was all she needed to work with. I was given suggestions of paths to follow, suggestions of how to approach people regarding part-time internships and names of judges who enjoy hiring evening students as clerks.

Most importantly, however, was the fact that she was now aware of my situation and that I am actively looking for experience. When she expressed her hopes that she was being helpful, I honestly replied that I hadn’t expected any options to be available to me. She answered that there are always options; but she’s not entirely correct.

There are only options if you open yourself up to the possibility that options exist and take the first step.