Just like the military, large legal firms may have high turnover rates and unhappy associates, but one thing they do well is recruitment. They know the types of students they want to recruit and they make an effort to go out and get them. Sadly, this is something that public defense agencies are failing at miserably..
Given the well-deserved reputation for low salary and wholly undeserved reputation for being the last bastion of inept attorneys, public defender offices are already at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment of law students. Nevertheless, there are still three student demographics that public defense offices appeal to: “true believers,” students looking for quick trial experience, and students who just want to be involved in criminal law in some capacity.
Public defender recruitment should have three steps:
- Attract the attention of those students with an interest in public defense (see above categories);
- Narrow the recruitment pool down to those students fitting into the “true believer” category;
- Apply aptitude and attitude rankings and select candidates from there.
PD offices stumble through the first two steps, and by the time they get to the third, it hardly matters. They’ve already lost many of their best candidates. Current public defender recruitment practices are detrimental all around: would-be public defenders find (or fail to find) work elsewhere; the agencies themselves suffer high turnover rates; and defendants don’t get attorneys as good as the ones they might have received, had the agency recruited effectively.
So, how can PD offices efficiently attract the attention of the appropriate students?
First: Contact each law school’s career services department, provide your office’s information, keep them informed of new job opportunities for both attorneys and interns. This one is a no-brainer.
Second: If there is not already a criminal clinic through each law school, collaborate with the school to build such a program.
Third: Get in touch with each appropriate student group: many schools have chapters of the National Lawyers Guild, the American Association for Justice (formerly ATLA), the American Constitution Society, and similar organizations. Many of your deputy public defenders may be members of these organizations - use this to your advantage by cajoling them into acting as liaisons. Once you’re in touch with these groups, you will want to meet and speak with the student membership - but take it a step further, and actively engage these groups with programming: arrange speaking engagements, happy hours, screenings of films like The Thin Blue Line.
What’s so important about weeding out everyone but the “true believers”?
This part is a matter of using your resources efficiently. Whether you’re hiring attorneys or student interns, your office will (hopefully) be expending a considerable amount of time and money to train them. Do you want to allocate those resources to someone who is planning to take advantage of your office’s training only to leave you in three years for private practice? Or worse, someone who will wind up becoming a DA because they “just want to do criminal law,” and not necessarily defense?
If you’re situated in a major metropolitan area (and I must admit, this blog assumes as much), you should have enough law students to provide you with a sizable potential intern pool - once you select your interns, it is crucial that you establish a mentorship program. Once it’s in place, it really won’t require that much effort from your deputies, but it will aid your recruiting in two distinct ways.
First: It will build personal and emotional connections between your office and each student - few things will make students more interested in working for you.
Second: Your deputy mentors act as individual human resource managers and, in the course of the mentorship, seek to determine whether each student is the type likely to be a good investment for your office. Law students are savvy - they know the “correct” answer to interview questions - so don’t let them fool you. After mentoring them for a semester or longer, your deputies will be in an excellent position to report to you on the true nature of the student they mentored.
