8 Tips For Getting Into -- And Out Of -- A Job As A Federal Government Lawyer
Here's some helpful advice for lawyers interested in working as AUSAs or at the SEC.
How do you land a job in a U.S. Attorney’s Office or the Securities and Exchange Commission, some of the most coveted positions available to young lawyers? And after your years of government service, how can you make a smooth and successful transition to private practice?
These questions formed the focus of “Breaking Barriers: Diversifying the White-Collar Bar,” a panel at last week’s 2015 annual convention of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), featuring the following young stars of the white-collar bar:
- Rodney Villazor (moderator), a litigation partner at DLA Piper;
- Christine Bautista, an attorney in the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission;
- Ryan Poscablo, a litigation partner at Schiff Hardin;
- Seetha Ramachandran, a special counsel at Schulte Roth & Zabel; and
- Priya Sopori, a litigation partner at Locke Lord.
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The panelists, all former federal prosecutors, stressed that they were not speaking on behalf of any of their current or former employers — and, in fact, some were a little skittish about being on the record generally. So I have taken some of the points they made in the discussion, mixed them in with my own insights as a former federal prosecutor, and put them together in this handy list of eight pointers.
1. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Getting a job in a U.S. Attorney’s Office or at the SEC is extremely competitive. A single opening might attract hundreds of applications, many of them from candidates with judicial clerkships and Biglaw stints on their résumés. So if you don’t get hired the first time you apply, don’t give up; as you gain more experience, you’ll become a more compelling candidate.
2. Build the right résumé for the job.
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You don’t need to have graduated from a top law school or worked at a top law firm to get hired as an assistant U.S. attorney. There is no one single path to working as a prosecutor. At the same time, there are some things you can do to make yourself a more attractive applicant.
If you can, try to work at your current employer with former AUSAs, especially ones who have worked in the office you hope to get hired into. If you impress them with your work, they can go to bat for you when you apply — and because they know what it’s like to be an AUSA and what skills are required, their recommendation will carry weight with their former colleagues.
Also, to the extent that you can — and if you work in Biglaw, it’s admittedly not that easy — try to get as much trial experience as possible. It’s definitely something that U.S. Attorney’s Offices look for when plowing through the hundreds of résumés they receive.
3. Think carefully about where you want to work.
Not all government lawyer jobs are created equal. You should think about the type of work you’d like to do and where you’d like to be doing it.
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For example, think about the differences between working at a U.S. Attorney’s Office versus the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (aka “Main Justice”). If you want to practice and make a name for yourself in a particular city or market other than D.C., that might rule out Main Justice for you. But if you are open to living in the nation’s capital, Main Justice has some advantages. Lawyers at Main Justice earn more than their counterparts in U.S. Attorney’s Offices — there’s a separate pay scale for Main Justice — and Main Justice is also arguably better if you want to turn yourself into a subject-matter expert, e.g., a guru of civil rights or money laundering or public corruption laws, with experience working on complex cases in that specific area from all over the country.
4. Conduct research into how the office you’re applying to conducts its hiring process.
Different offices take different approaches to hiring. You should ask around to find out, for example, how many rounds of interviews the office you’re interested in conducts, how long the process generally takes, and what the interviews are like. Some offices take a Biglaw-style approach to interviewing, which is more casual, conversational, and focused on personality fit, while other offices treat it like a SCOTUS-clerkship grilling, torturing you with elaborate hypotheticals about issues of substantive law (sometimes criminal procedure issues you might be unfamiliar with if you’re coming from a civil litigation background).
One question that is almost always asked at U.S. Attorney’s Offices: why do you want to be an AUSA? With so many applicants, offices seek out lawyers who are not just capable of doing the work, but excited and enthusiastic about it. Evincing an interest in public service is a typical response — it’s common (maybe even clichéd) to talk about your desire to stand up in a courtroom and say, “My name is [X], and I represent the United States” — but it’s also important to have the work experience and other résumé items to back up that interest.
5. Have realistic expectations for the job.
Congratulations — you’ve gotten a job as a lawyer with the DOJ or the SEC. How can you prepare yourself for the experience?
It helps to have realistic expectations. You’ll often hear former AUSAs talk about how being a prosecutor was “the best job I ever had.” But these jobs, while wonderful in many ways, aren’t perfect. They have their pluses and minuses, just like any other.
The advantages: the opportunity to be in court constantly and to try cases to juries, the ability to get to know judges and law clerks, and the aforementioned privilege of standing up in a courtroom and saying you represent the United States — in other words, the opportunity to do justice or to “to wear the white hat,” as one panelist put it.
The disadvantages: the possibly lower pay, at least if you’re coming from Biglaw, and the reduced ability to control your own career path. As a public servant, you will be assigned to where the powers that be think you can best serve the public. So you might want to work on white-collar cases but get assigned instead to drug cases, and there’s not much you can do about that.
6. Don’t stress too much about exit opportunities; it’ll all work out.
Ladder-climbing lawyers are conditioned to think about what’s next, and government-bound lawyers are no exception. But one theme that emerged from the panel was that exit opportunities are plentiful for government lawyers with good experience — at least right now, given the good overall health of Biglaw and high levels of activity in the white-collar world. (But see Matt Kaiser, Life After Being An AUSA.)
When is the best time to leave government service? You’ll organically figure out when the right time is for you. Maybe it’s when you take out that mortgage on a house in the suburbs, or when your third kid arrives, or when you find yourself surrounded at a Friday happy hour with colleagues who are way younger than you. If you don’t intend on spending the rest of your career in government service (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that), you will just feel when it’s your time to move along.
As usual in the legal world, networking is key. Some takes place in person, such as lunches with former colleagues who have gone before you through the revolving door, and some takes place online, through sites like LinkedIn. Luckily, U.S. Attorney’s Offices and other government offices are known for their large and strong professional networks.
Some panelists said they developed business plans as they marketed themselves to firms; others did not. Some panelists used recruiters; others did not. Recruiters can be helpful in terms of speeding up the process, but you shouldn’t delegate the entire process to them. For example, if you work in a very specific niche, you might know about opportunities that they don’t know about, or you might know better about how to position yourself to prospective employers.
7. Don’t be shy about marketing yourself — but try to do so in substantive ways.
Since this panel took place at NAPABA, there was some discussion (and joking) about how self-promotion can be frowned upon in certain Asian-American families or communities. But if you want to succeed in your law firm job search, and then later at getting clients, you need to know how to promote yourself.
You don’t need to — and shouldn’t — be obnoxious or self-aggrandizing about it. And be careful not to overpromise and underdeliver (a common problem along lateral lawyers). But you shouldn’t be afraid of talking about your experience, your accomplishments, and what you can bring to a firm or to clients.
Speaking at conferences and writing articles can be an excellent form of marketing (for more on this, see some of the past columns of Mark Herrmann). It’s a great way of putting yourself out there without bragging about your own awesomeness; instead, you’re simply demonstrating your expertise in certain issues. Some of your conference presentations or law review articles might have drab-sounding titles, but when a prospective client is doing preliminary research into that highly technical area of law, they might come across your pieces and call or email you with specific questions. That contact can be a great opportunity to build a relationship.
8. Don’t discount or rule out working as a prosecutor, even if you don’t see yourself as a “prosecutorial type.”
During the question and answer session, I asked: what about the current backlash against law enforcement? Is this a bad time to be a prosecutor, given growing public concerns about overcriminalization, excessive sentences, racial injustice, and a whole host of problems in the criminal justice system? Is it a negative that public perception has shifted somewhat and that some people (cough cough, Matt Kaiser) don’t exactly see prosecutors as wearing the aforementioned “white hat”?
The panelists offered candid responses, acknowledging that some of the work they did as prosecutors was discomfiting and even difficult. It isn’t easy to charge someone with a crime that you know will trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum, or to speak at sentencing against a defendant who’s a single mother, listening to the proceedings through an interpreter, with her young children in the audience.
And it shouldn’t be easy. Prosecutors should feel the weight of their work. Sending people to prison is no laughing matter.
Which is why, the panelists argued, we don’t want a system full of prosecutors who see only black and white or who view all defendants as “bad guys” (or gals). If you have experience as a defense lawyer or the ability to see cases from the defendant’s point of view, that will make you a better, fairer prosecutor — not just in terms of your courtroom skills, but in terms of your doing justice. So you shouldn’t rule out working as a prosecutor because you think you don’t have a “prosecutorial mindset.” Prosecution should not be the province of vengeful zealots.
One of the former prosecutors quoted the famous line from Spider-Man: “Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.” The public benefits from smart, principled, compassionate people exercising the prosecutor’s power — now more than ever.
P.S. If you’ll be in D.C. on November 16 and you’re interested in the state of the criminal justice system — and if you’ve read this far, you probably are — then consider attending Does the American Criminal Justice System Need an Overhaul?, a debate at the Cato Institute featuring Judge Alex Kozinski (9th Cir.) and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson (4th Cir.). You can read about it here and register here.
2015 Annual Convention [National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA)]
Earlier: Life After Being An AUSA
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