How to get an interview at the Suffolk County D.A.'s office

At this point, I want to be a D.A. more than just about anything.

I know it doesn't fit the traditional social justice/public interest model, but I've come to believe that good (and by "good," I mean "fair") prosecutors are more essential to the proper functioning of our criminal justice system than good defense attorneys.

Forgot to mention earlier that I've scored an interview at the Suffolk County D.A.'s office. I did this by:

1) Sending in my resume, cover letter, transcript, etc. in a timely manner.
2) Calling every couple of weeks to see if they had it on file yet.
3) Having the good fortune of having them somehow lose my application.
4) Calling again to let them know I'd passed the bar and to ask if they'd found my resume yet.

I was given an impromptu screening on the phone ("Where'd you go to school?", "How'd you do?") and was scheduled for an interview for January. I think I'm very fortunate. Even though it's traditionally paid pretty terribly--they finally just got a $10K raise this year--this is one of the more competitive law jobs in Boston for those of us who aren't interested in or immediately qualified to work for large firms. Word is that there are more openings this year, but I'm also told that over 700 people applied for 27 spots last year. So.

"I will delay no man for lucre or malice..."

I don't have the top of my head photographed too often. That bald spot is kind of alarming.

One of the most pervasive moldy-rye-induced hallucinations suffered by the accusers in the Salem witch crisis of 1692 was that of Satan (Mary Beth Norton makes a convincing argument that the overall descriptions made the Father of Lies out to look like a member of the much-feared local Wassachusett tribe) appearing to them and imploring them to sign his large black book so that he could have their souls. I couldn't help feeling I was living something like that today when I bent down over a table in Fanueil Hall to add my name to the official roster of Massachusetts lawyers and formally joined the ranks of the oldest judiciary in the Western Hemisphere. Very sobering to be taking the same oath and signing the same roll in the same place under the same state Constitution as John Adams, Louis Brandeis, Daniel Webster, and so many of this country's other greatest legal thinkers. Plus, free pen.

Meantime, of course, I'm sending out more resumes and cover letters and hoping that my bar admission speeds the process up.

I should add a special shout-out to the commenter on my last post who took me to task on going to "graduated" school "write" after college. Good luck with that GED!

Sir Tempsalot rides again

As of Monday afternoon, I will officially be qualified to appear in Massachusetts courts on behalf of whomever might be stupid enough to retain an attorney the day he was sworn into the Massachusetts bar. The ceremony is in Fanueil Hall, and it might take up to three hours. I got myself a new suit for the occasion. (H+M. I have an H+M problem.)

My storied temp agency found me a position "extracting" commercial real estate leases, a job that couldn't have been more poorly-tailored for me. Apparently the client had requested someone with a JD because the job "involved contracts." It did, I guess, but it mostly involved numbers and spreadsheets and numbers and formulas and numbers and databases (did I mention numbers? I think I probably mentioned numbers) and I almost cried when I realized that I was slated to be doing this for at least two months. Really, I almost cried.

Like most people who went to law school, I graduated satisfied that whatever I was going to be doing in the future, at least it wouldn't involve numbers. I have a visceral fear of large groups of numbers, especially regarding tasks that require juggling and organizing them in groups. This isn't just a phobia, dear readers: it's a terror so gripping that it eventually results in physical symptoms (headaches, nausea, worse) after prolonged exposure. I know that I'll be getting the usual sniping from Hostile, Mass. for this, but a man's gotta know his limits. I finally had to ask the agency if maybe they could find someone with an accounting background to deal with this, because it just wasn't going to work for me. I can handle unpleasant work (and, trust me, this was unpleasant), but really only if I'm actually capable of doing it without annoying a lot of people. That just wasn't happening here. It's the first job in my life that I've ever quit, but I also have the assurance of knowing that it's one that I never would have applied for. I'd call that a draw.

Space travel is boring.

So passing the bar is like any other life achievement: all the fun seems to be in getting there. And I never thought I'd say this, but I really did enjoy getting there--one of the best summers of my life. After all that, though, it's just hard to get too excited about passing something that 85% of first-time takers also passed.

My illustrious legal temp agency finally found me some work last week doing document review on a huge asbestos case. It was pretty tedious, but I made some friends and inadvertantly learned a lot of stuff that I'm now sworn not to repeat regarding basic standards and practices in the asbestos industry in the '80s. Although their name is public record, I'll mention only that the defendant happens to be one of the deep pockets responsible for giving all of those kids leukemia in "A Civil Action," one of the many books that inspired me to go to law school. Can't say I enjoyed being on the defense side of things on this one.

Fellow unemplawyed MA entry-level attorneys might want to check in with this guy, who wants to get us together for--well, not networking, I guess (obviously, none of us know anyone useful or we'd be employed by now)--some kind of group therapy, maybe? Can't hurt.

the ballad of how you can all shut up.

As noted earlier, there are worse things than being unemployed. Like renting yourself out as beer-guzzling, Kanye-West-style live performance art. Or spending an hour eating margarine. The Craigslist "etcetera" job section never lets me down.

Good interview. I liked the place immediately (it helped that it's in the heart of Harvard Medical School--top floor of the library, actually), and it all went pretty well. Coming from a legal background didn't seem to hurt my chances (probably the opposite, although it was really hard to tell) and I decided by the time I'd left that this would be the perfect interim job while I keep looking.

The job itself doesn't involved as much editing as I'd like, but it does involve taking manuscripts from submission to publication. Plenty of author relations and opportunities for me to practice my phone and diplomacy skills, two things I'll really need to have in force before I'm a lawyer.