University of North Carolina School of Law is searching for a public interest career counselor for its Career Services Office to advise law students and alumni interested in public interest careers. Additionally, the counselor will develop and market Career Services Office events, programming and seminars.

This is a great opportunity for public-interest enthusiasts and people who are interested in nonprofit management.

Check out the complete listing at PSLawNet (login required – free registration if your law school is already subscribed!)

By: Steve Grumm

One of the more interesting post-recession trends in the public interest legal arena has been the growth of full-time volunteer attorney
positions within nonprofit and government agencies. It has not been unusual, historically, that public service law offices would recruit volunteers to bolster their staffs amid swollen caseloads. But in the recession’s wake we’ve seen larger-scale efforts to recruit un- or under-employed attorneys for full-time stints ranging from 6 to 18 months. Budget cuts and caseload pressures felt by employers have given birth to creative staffing solutions, while the anemic legal job market has left thousands of recent law graduates
looking for ways to gain practice experience. Although there are certainly some upsides to this trend, some worry that these unpaid positions could become institutionalized, leaving some debt-laden, public service-minded law grads with a rocky financial path to traverse immediately out of law school.

Over the coming months I will look at the emergence of volunteer attorney positions in different types of public service law offices.   I began in this month’s NALP Bulletin with a piece on the rise of the “Uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorney.”

[W]ith Uncle Sam poised to squeeze his fiscal belt even more tightly, federal prosecutors across the country are looking for creative, effective, staffing solutions.  The Department of Justice (DOJ) implemented a hiring freeze in January of this year.  Given the current political climate, in particular the recent passage of sweeping federal deficit-reduction legislation, federal prosecutors’ budgets are likely to, at best, hold fast.  According to one Assistant U.S. Attorney whose office has recruited for uncompensated Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys (SAUSA), given the circumstances it makes perfect sense for U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to mine a talented – and nearly free – source of labor.

 A review last month of several “SAUSA Uncompensated” job listings on the DOJ’s Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management website was helpful in sketching out the nature of uncompensated SAUSA positions and applicant eligibility criteria…

MFY Legal Services, Inc., a 48-year-old nonprofit public interest law firm is looking for a staff attorney for its Neighborhood Preservation Project (NPP) to represent low-income New Yorkers in eviction prevention and tenant rights matters. Caseload will balance advice and individual representation with law reform advocacy and impact litigation on issues affecting affordable housing and tenants’ rights.

MFY Legal Services, Inc. provides free legal services to low-income residents of New York City in the areas of housing, public benefits, civil and disability rights, employment, consumer, foreclosure and family law.

MFY Legal Services has a 45-person staff comprised of attorneys, paralegals, social workers and support staff. It is a diverse, unionized, and collegial workplace.

For more information on MFY’s staff attorney position or to find out how to apply, check out the complete listing on PSLawNet.

By Lauren Forbes

As the school year gets underway (have you caught your breath?), it is always smart to think about what’s ahead–and utilize resources in order to take the smartest approach. This could not be more true than when it comes to job seeking.

There are many resources on PSLawNet that job seekers can add to their tool boxes to make the job search go as smoothly as possible.  These job search fundamentals include tips on cover letters and resumes, networking, and interviewing. Whether it is a fall or summer externship or the post-grad job of your dreams, one can never go wrong in seeking advice.

Happy hunting!

Hello, PSLawNet Blog readers!  NALP is conducting a survey to get a sense of the public interest job market.  We’ll publish a free report with our findings later this Fall.  We hope this will be helpful to law students, lawyers, and other stakeholders in the public service community. Please pass along the below to public interest and government law offices.  Thanks. 

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) is conducting a brief, anonymous survey of nonprofit and government public-interest law offices throughout the country about 1) recent law student and attorney hiring and 2) hiring expectations for the immediate future. We will use the data to produce a report about what the public interest employment market looks like now and how it may change in the near future. NALP will release the report later this fall. The report will be made freely available online. The report will NOT identify any responding organizations by name. We hope the report will benefit the public interest legal community as well as law students and attorneys who are on public interest career paths. Please participate in the brief, online survey by clicking here. The response deadline is Wednesday, 9/28/11.  Please contact Steve Grumm with any questions: sgrumm@nalp.org.

By Lauren Forbes

Calling a Managing Director! As a national immigrant youth-led organization, United We Dream Network (UWD)’s mission is to achieve equal access to higher education for all people, regardless of immigration status. We aim to address the inequities and obstacles faced by immigrant youth and to develop a sustainable, grassroots movement led by immigrant youth, documented and undocumented, and children of immigrants. We use leadership development, organizing, policy advocacy, alliance building, training, and capacity-building to pursue our mission at the local, state, and national levels.

UWD’s mission is to build power through local, regional, and national convening and leadership development opportunities; to provide the tools and resources to immigrant youth leaders to organize and grow their movements at every level; to create meaningful alliances with other national immigrant and education rights organizations and ensure there is a voice for immigrant youth at the national level; to strengthen anchor organizations of UWD; and to support emerging groups and provide capacity where organizing is needed but nonexistent.

This position includes full benefits as provided by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the fiscal sponsor for UWD. The Managing Director will be an employee of NILC working for UWD. Organization policies and benefits packages are subject to change during annual open enrollment at NILC and/or when this position transitions to employment directly by UWD.

The position is expected to be based in the Washington, DC, area. However, the location may change depending on outcomes of upcoming UWD strategic planning processes.

Click into the listing on PSLawNet for application instructions (login required).

By: Steve Grumm

There’s an interesting piece in today’s National Law Journal about a handful of law schools that have established incubation programs for recent grads who want the independence of hanging their own shingle without the insecurity of going it entirely alone:

[The City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law] offers low-cost office space in midtown Manhattan and staff support for up to two years to a select number of graduates aiming to establish themselves as solos or launch small firms. The program offers more than office space; participants have access to a large network of experienced solo practitioners who function as mentors, and they enjoy an internal support network among their colleagues in the incubator, which helps to reduce the isolation many solo practitioners experience.

…

CUNY’s program was the first of its kind when it debuted in 2007, but now law schools around the country have launched solo incubators, and more are on the way. The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law unveiled its solo and small-firm incubator last fall, and the University of Maryland School of Law introduced its incubator in January.

The Charlotte School of Law plans to have its Small Practice Center up and running next summer. Faculty and administrators at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Georgia State University College of Law and the University of Dayton School of Law are among those considering adding similar programs.

CUNY and Maryland both enjoy reputations as being schools with a strong emphasis on public interest work, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that their incubation programs incorporate some aspect of public interest practice.

The few solo incubators that are up and running employ slightly different models. Several have a clear civil justice emphasis, while others are more business-oriented. They vary in length from six months to as long as two years.

At CUNY, incubator participants do a significant amount of what [the program’s director, Fred Rooney,] calls “low bono” work. They earn $75 an hour for providing legal representation to underserved communities throughout New York, paid for by contracts with New York City. The work provides the new attorneys with experience and exposure, and provides representation to people who otherwise could not afford an attorney, Rooney said. Incubator attorneys take on their own cases in addition to the contract work.

The University of Maryland’s solo incubator, which lasts between six and 10 months, also promotes civil justice. Participants work in an office across the street from the law school and assist on grant-funded cases through Civil Justice Inc., a nonprofit law office that serves low-income clients.

The Law School at the University of Chicago is seeking qualified applicants for a full-time position supervising law students and representing federal criminal defendants as a Fellow, appointed with the rank of Lecturer, in the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic’s Federal Criminal Justice Clinic. The position will begin in the 2011-2012 academic year and will last through June 2014. Working with the clinical faculty, the successful candidate will supervise clinic students in pretrial federal criminal cases, representing defendants from arrest through trial or guilty plea and sentencing, and possibly on Seventh Circuit appeals, and will also be expected to assist in teaching clinical pre-trial and trial skills courses. One goal of this Fellowship is to train aspiring clinical teachers and federal public defenders.

Qualifications
Candidates must have a J.D.; must be a member in good standing of the bar of Illinois or another state; and must have at least three years of experience representing criminal defendants. Excellent writing, editing, advocacy, and supervision skills are required. Some experience representing criminal defendants in federal court, as well as familiarity with the United States Sentencing Guidelines and the current federal sentencing regime, are a plus. A demonstrated commitment to criminal defense and/or indigent populations is also a plus. The Fellow must be eligible for and able to obtain the following bar admissions/memberships: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois; Northern District of Illinois Trial Bar; Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals; Federal Defender Panel for the Northern District of Illinois.

Click into the listing on PSLawNet for application instructions (login required).

By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday/Labor Day Weekend/September, dear readers.  As summer is (unofficially) winding down this week, we wish you all a happy Autumn, and we wish the best of luck to law students, clinicians, and law school administrators who are beginning a new academic year. 

This week: the first months of the Last Resort Exoneration Project; indigent counsel reform in Tennessee(?); USAJobs due for some downtime in October; AtJ news in the Mountain State; a dispatch from the ABA’s oval office; reaction to an ACLU report about Utah’s rickety indigent defense infrastructure; in NOLA, physical altercations and officers of the court and lawsuits, oh my!; unpaid legal internships raise eyebrows across the pond; USA Today presents the short version (as always) of legal services funding struggles nationwide; changes (and hiring!) in the Massachusetts indigent defense system; pro bono on a DLA Piper salary ain’t so bad.    

• 9.1.11 – the new Last Resort Exoneration Project, housed at the Seton Hall University School of Law, is complementing the work of the Innocence Project.  While the Innocence Project operates nationally and primarily uses DNA evidence to free the wrongfully convicted, Last Resort operates only within the Garden State and focuses on cases in which DNA evidence is not in play.  Check out this profile of Last Resort, which began operations this past February, on MyCentralJersey.com.

• 8.31.11 – is change afoot in the way that Volunteer State public defenders are assigned?  The Tennessean reports on a proposal being kicked around by the Tennessee Supreme Court: “To rein in the state’s fast-growing indigent defense fund, the court has drafted an amendment to its rules that would allow the cash-strapped state Administrative Office of the Courts to solicit bids and award contracts to lawyers or firms ‘to provide legal services to indigent persons for a fixed fee.’ The proposal has come under a barrage of criticism from lawyers, judges and state and national legal organizations who warn that flat-fee contracts will put many lawyers out of work, undermine the authority of local judges and deny poor people the effective assistance of legal counsel.”

• 8.31.11 – heads up, federal job seekers!  Government Executive reports that USAJobs will go down temporarily in October while Uncle Sam readies a new version of the website: “The Office of Personnel Management will take the government’s job application platform offline in October to transition to a new system. USAJobs 3.0, designed to make the process smoother for potential hires and federal recruiters alike, will debut on Oct. 13. Agencies will have to close all open job announcements before Oct. 6, when the system will be made unavailable to all applicants for nearly a week. The downtime will allow agencies to transition data to the new platform built by OPM and create a level playing field for job seekers and human resources staff, said Angela Bailey, the agency’s associate director of employee services.”

• 8.30.11 – two access-to-justice developments in West Virginia. 
• First, the Journal reports on hearings held by the state’s 2 year-old AtJ Commission to explore the problems that low-income West Virginians confront in navigating the justice system: “A shortage of funding for more Legal Aid attorneys [and] the difficulties citizens face when trying to hire an attorney…were among several issues discussed Monday night in Martinsburg during the second of six statewide public forums on the issue of access to the state’s civil justice system. The forum was held by the West Virginia Access to Justice Commission, which was formed two years ago.”  Here’s a troubling statistic (emphasis mine): “There are only 52 Legal Aid attorneys for the state’s 55 counties.”  And of course many of those attorneys are concentrated in population centers, which makes things very difficult for would-be clients in rural locales.
• Second, on a more positive note the Record reports that Legal Aid of West Virginia has launched a LawHelp site to empower litigants with self-help resources.

• 8.30.11 – In a letter to editor of the New York Times, new ABA president William T. Robinson, III offers perspective on a recent NYT editorial which presented solutions to narrow the civil justice gap. The letter supports the Times’s view that LSC funding should be expanded, but takes issue with the Times’s call to deregulate the delivery of legal services.  Writes Robinson: “[A] rush to open the practice of law to unschooled, unregulated nonlawyers is not the solution. This would cause grave harm to clients. Even matters that appear simple, such as uncontested divorces, involve myriad legal rights and responsibilities. If the case is not handled by a professional with appropriate legal training, a person can suffer serious long-term consequences affecting loved ones or financial security. It also could lead to a violation of the law.”  (Personally I’d look at unbundling – i.e. limited-scope representation – innovations before farming traditional lawyer work out to nonlawyers.  In practice, those outfits that market to low-income clients by offering quasi-legal services have patchy records, and are certainly not substitutes for legal services providers.  Although I grant that it’s the people who are over-income for legal services but can’t afford to retain counsel who present a very difficult challenge.)

• 8.29.11 – in Utah, a Deseret News editorial reacts to a recent ACLU of Utah report on the state’s indigent defense system: “This week, the ACLU released an in-depth study of criminal defense for the poor in Utah, and found the state system woefully inadequate. Utah is one of only two states that doesn’t fund public defenders, requiring counties to foot the bill and resulting in a funding rate of $5.22 per capita, less than half the national average of $11.86.  Attorneys [in rural counties] are ‘chronically underfunded and overworked,’ according to the report, receiving an average of just $400 per case…. There are several things the state can do to remedy the situation, and not all of them require money. For starters, public defenders should be granted greater access to the state’s crime labs, on par with that of prosecutors. It should also institute statewide standards for selecting public attorneys, eliminating conflicts of interest, and provide more oversight of county justice systems. But ultimately, funding for public attorneys must increase.”  Here’s a link to the ACLU report: Failing Gideon.

• 8.28.11 – now this is an adversarial justice system.  A New Orleans Times-Picayune opinion piece looks at the recent, bizarre goings-on between NOLA public defenders and court staff.  “Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton was getting a bit worried a couple of years ago because his attorneys were coming back injured after appearing before Judge Ben Willard.  First Steve Singer had to have surgery for a torn ligament after Willard ordered sheriff’s deputies to kick him out of the courtroom. A few months later, Stuart Weg also needed medical treatment following a similarly unceremonious departure, and Bunton asked for a Judiciary Commission investigation.”  This quoted passage notwithstanding, it does not appear as if the defenders are entirely without blame.  They seem to take seriously their responsibilities as zealous advocates.  (On a related note, the PSLawNet Blog interviewed Mr. Bunton several months ago.  He struck us as one cool cat.  Let’s hope cooler heads prevail in the Big Easy.)

• 8.29.11 – a little legal internship hullabaloo across the Pond.  A piece in the Guardian laments the increased number of unpaid legal internships in both public interest and for-profit law firm settings.  The author argues that some “employers” may be skirting regulations that distinguish paid employment relationships from volunteer learning opportunities, and that blossoming lawyers are too vulnerable at this early stage in their careers to raise a stink.  The author further contends that the entities charged with regulating the legal profession are not paying sufficient attention to the issue.  It’s hard for me to draw parallels with the U.S market because it seems that our labor regulations may be a bit more permissive, particularly in allowing government and nonprofit entities to take on unpaid interns. Nonetheless, it’s an issue worth watching in the U.S. given the glut of law graduates looking for practice experience.

• 8.29.11 – a piece in USA Today highlights the deteriorating condition of the nation’s civil legal services infrastructure, especially as the Legal Services Corporation is threatened with a 25% funding cut by congressional appropriators.  Some notable data points:
• “The House Appropriations Committee has proposed slashing…$104 million [from LSC’s budget] for fiscal 2012, rolling back funding to $300 million — a level not seen since 1999.”
• “The number of people eligible, based on income levels, for LSC programs across the country has gone up 27% since 2007. About 64 million people qualify [according to LSC president Jim Sandman].”
• “Idaho Legal Aid Services has started unpaid monthly furloughs, and offices are closed one day each month. Several employees have been downgraded from full-time to part-time status.”
• “Legal Services of New Jersey plans to lay off 100 employees by the end of the year.”

• 8.28.11 – big news on the indigent defense front in Massachusetts, including some new public-defender hiring.  From the Milford Daily News:  “Leaders of the state’s public defender system will soon detail a plan to hire more staff attorneys to represent the poor and contract less of that work to about 3,000 private lawyers across Massachusetts. The cost of defending low-income people came under the spotlight on Beacon Hill this year when Gov. Deval Patrick proposed hiring about 1,000 new state attorneys and ending the use of private attorneys altogether….  After lawmakers offered less sweeping proposals of their own, Patrick ultimately signed a state budget last month that makes less ambitious reforms. It requires at least 25 percent of cases with indigent defendants to be handled by state attorneys by next July, up from about 10 percent now…. Lisa Hewitt, the committee’s general counsel, said the plan will likely require hiring 346 new full-time employees, including attorneys, support staff, social workers and investigators.  A final number is still in the works, she said. The state now has 252   public defenders on its payroll.”

• 8.26.11 – DLA Piper creates a pro bono immersion program of sorts for public-interest minded associates.  From AmLaw Daily: “DLA Piper unveiled a program…that creates what many first-year associates might call a dream job–the opportunity to work on pro bono cases while taking home a six-figure salary unheard of at most public service organizations.  Starting in January, two incoming DLA Piper associates each year will be selected to do exclusively pro bono work for a year as part of the firm’s DLA Piper/Krantz Fellowship Program.”

Autumn being my favorite season, I leave you with this pop music gem from one of the most unlikely songwriters to write a cartoon movie soundtrack.

The Vera Institute of Justice, founded in 1961, is an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization that combines expertise in research, technical assistance, and demonstration projects to assist leaders in government and civil society, examine justice policy and practice, and improve the systems people rely on for justice and safety. Vera has offices in New York City, Washington, DC, and New Orleans, and its projects and reform initiatives, typically conducted in partnership with local, state, or national officials, are located across the United States and around the world. Vera is an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity in the workplace.

Vera’s Center on Immigration and Justice seeks a Program Analyst to work primarily on three federally-funded projects that aim to improve police-immigrant relations through researching the impact of cultural and language barriers, identifying promising practices, and training law enforcement. One of these programs specifically focuses on law enforcement relations with Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities in the post-September 11th environment. Vera has a long history of collaboration with community stakeholders and law enforcement to improve public safety. Vera is widely acknowledged as one of a few national experts on police-immigrant relations. Our work positions us at the forefront of the policing field’s growing interest in police-immigrant relations. The Program Analyst will have a key role in our currently funded projects, as well as in identifying gaps to be covered in future projects.

Click into the listing on PSLawNet for application instructions (login required).