Public Defender Law Clerk basics
Public Defenders are attorneys paid by the county to represent clients who do not have the means to hire their own attorneys to represent them in criminal cases.
A post-bar law clerk at a Public Defender office is a position you can hold after you become an attorney but before they let you have your very own caseload. Kind of like how med students are residents after they become doctors. You're a real lawyer and everything, but you're still a newbie, so they ease you into the hard stuff.
At a Public Defender office, making oral arguments in court is where the fun is at. This is why as Law Clerks, we rarely get to do this. When we do make oral arguments, it's usually when the arguments are either really hard to win or really hard to lose. In between is the complicated stuff that we work our way up to.
In the meantime, we write a lot of motions (documents that explain to the court why, based on the law and the facts in your case, the court should do something for your client, such as drop the charges or suppress evidence that was obtained illegally). We also do all the intake, where we receive the clients who have just been referred here by the court and get their stories for their files.
A post-bar law clerk at a Public Defender office is a position you can hold after you become an attorney but before they let you have your very own caseload. Kind of like how med students are residents after they become doctors. You're a real lawyer and everything, but you're still a newbie, so they ease you into the hard stuff.
At a Public Defender office, making oral arguments in court is where the fun is at. This is why as Law Clerks, we rarely get to do this. When we do make oral arguments, it's usually when the arguments are either really hard to win or really hard to lose. In between is the complicated stuff that we work our way up to.
In the meantime, we write a lot of motions (documents that explain to the court why, based on the law and the facts in your case, the court should do something for your client, such as drop the charges or suppress evidence that was obtained illegally). We also do all the intake, where we receive the clients who have just been referred here by the court and get their stories for their files.
posted by P.D. Clerk at 3:07 PM
2 Comments:
Are post-bar clerks people who have already passed the bar or people who have just taken the bar and are waiting for their results?
Post-bar law clerks (also called graduate law clerks) can be either people who have just taken the bar and don't have their results yet or people who have already passed the bar and are in their first year of law practice.
In the area where I work, post-bar law clerks are almost always licensed attorneys in their first year of practice. This is what I am.
It works differently in different offices. Sometimes a graduate law clerk starts while waiting for bar results and stays on after passing. Some offices will ask post-bar clerks to leave if it turns out they don't pass.
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