Today’s post on possible career routes into Inter-Governmental Organizations like the United Nations comes from Sara Rakita, Associate Director of the Public Interest Law Center at New York University School of Law.  Sara has worked extensively on human rights and the rule of law, primarily in Africa. Before joining PILC in 2006, she served as a long-term consultant to the Ford Foundation, where she was responsible for piloting and setting up TrustAfrica, a new African grant-making foundation that is now based in Senegal. Sara spent five years as an Africa Researcher at Human Rights Watch, including two years as the organization’s representative in Rwanda. Sara has also consulted for Amnesty International, Global Rights, USAID, and the Austrian development agency.  Sara holds a J.D. from NYU, an M.I.A. from Columbia University, and a B.A. in international studies from The American University. She is fluent in French and has a working knowledge of Spanish and Russian.

Lots of people would love to work for the United Nations or other Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs), but it’s not always apparent how to get there. Indeed, there is no single path.  In an effort to demystify a process that is not always transparent, this post will explain some of the main channels into IGOs. Get the scoop on IGOs after the break!

Duke Law School just announced an expansion and change to their loan repayment assistance program (LRAP), raising the salary cap for 100% forgivement from $35,000 to $60,000, and requiring students to participate in the income-based repayment plan established by the federal government as part of the CCRAA in 2008. In doing so, Duke joins 4 other schools by our count (University of Virginia, Georgetown, Northwestern, and University of California – Berkeley) in dovetailing their LRAP program with the federal system.

The 6th annual IMPACT Career Fair for law students and attorneys with disabilities is taking place at the Sheraton Crystal City, in Arlington, VA, on Friday, August 13th.  Learn more about the career fair and link to registration info here.

From our friends at the Partnership for Public Service:

The Partnership for Public Service will host its eighth annual Public Service Career and Internship Fair on July 14 from 3:00-7:00 p.m. at the National Building Museum. Last year’s event connected 78 federal agencies with more than 6,000 well-qualified and diverse candidates.

 

This fair is dedicated to providing summer interns in Washington, DC, students–both graduate and undergraduate, and recent graduates with access to agency representatives, and information about their agencies’ missions and available positions. By facilitating conversations between federal workers and promising young people, we hope to encourage entry-level talent to bring their skills and experiences to the government as dynamic federal employees.

 

Agency registration for this event is now open. Agencies that register before May 31 will receive a discount on the cost of their registration packages. The last day to sign up for the event is July 1. Visit ourpublicservice.org/careerfair to learn more and register! 

 

Registration for students and recent graduates will open on June 1. Please email careerfair@ourpublicservice.org if you would like to be added to our outreach list. 

We strive to make PSLawNet the best public interest law career site out there, with constant updates and changes to improve things for you, our users. We are thus very excited to announce a brand new resource on the site: State and Local Government Resources! This new page includes links to hundreds of state and local government agencies that hire attorneys and/or law students. It is searchable by state via an interactive map, and includes listings for many major city employers as well. Please check it out, and feel free to share feedback with us here or by email.

The PSLawNet Blog keeps its finger on the pulse of developments in federal hiring processes because we know that many law students and attorneys find federal careers to be attractive options.   (And frankly, the federal government has been seen in recent months as an employment oasis, given the dearth of job opportunities with law firms, nonprofits, and in local and state government.)  We maintain a robust library of federal career resources here. 

Here, we’re just passing along a short article from the Government Executive newsletter which takes note of the success that the NSA – and subsequently, its sister intelligence agencies – has had by using virtual recruiting.

About 18 months ago, recruiters from the National Security Agency started attending virtual career fairs — online recruiting events hosted by such diverse entities as The Wall Street Journal and Monster.com. Lori Weltmann, manager of the Recruitment Services Division at NSA, was struck by how excited her employees were after working the fairs. “It was quick. It was easy. They felt like they were really connecting with candidates,” she says. “After we did about a half dozen of these I said, ‘Why can’t we do one of our own?'” The agency could tailor a fair to draw the kind of tech-savvy candidates it was seeking, instead of wading through the more generalized community of job seekers attracted to the virtual forums sponsored by other organizations and companies, she thought.

…

Agency leaders liked the idea, and in February 2009, four months after Weltmann first pitched the idea, NSA hosted its first virtual job fair.It was so successful, Ronald Sanders, then the chief human capital officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, asked NSA to brief other intelligence agencies about the effort. In March, using NSA’s experience as the benchmark, nine agencies, including NSA, cooperated in hosting the first virtual intelligence career fair.

If you have a PSLawNet account (and if you don’t, you probably should), then hopefully you know about our useful email alert system – you can set a search to run daily or weekly and you receive emails with new matching jobs. Well, our system was doing such a good job that it was starting to overwhelm our servers, so we’ve made some minor changes. We have changed our email alert system so each created alert will last for six months, then expire. The alert will not be deleted, so you can continue to receive updates by logging in and clicking “Renew” next to the expired or soon-to-be-expired alert. For current alerts that were created more than six months ago, you will receive an email explaining the upcoming expiration and providing a link to renew the alert if desired. If you have any questions, please email us.

We hope this change allows us to continue to provide excellent, uninterrupted service.

It’s not too late to apply for the Equal Justice Works Summer Corps program, but the deadline is this Friday! EJW had a great post on their blog yesterday about how Summer Corps alumni have used their EJW experiences to jumpstart their legal careers – go check it out!

The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration released a white paper urging the federal government to overhaul hiring practices to allow more non-competitive hiring of graduate students (including law students for programs other than Legal Honors Programs). Government Executive had the story, and does a good job summarizing the recommendations. Two suggestions were expanding the Presidential Management Fellows program, or supplementing other internship programs such as the Federal Career Intern Program, but in a coordinated way across agencies.

It would be interesting to see how these changes would affect law school grads, since attorneys are already exempt from the competitive hiring process. However, many law school grads are working in the federal government in non-attorney positions working on public policy and enforcement issues. As always, to learn more about federal employment, check out the PSLawNet Federal Government Resources page.

In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law.  (The report press release is freely available, as well as the executive summary (pdf)). The report found that while law schools do an excellent job of training students to “think like a lawyer,” they pretty uniformly struggle to provide “strong skill[s] in serving clients and a solid ethical grounding.” The Report made seven recommendations to integrate practical skills and ethical training with doctrinal education, and called for an

“integrated, three-part curriculum: (1) the teaching of legal doctrine and analysis, which provides the basis for professional growth; (2) introduction to the several facets of practice included under the rubric of lawyering, leading to acting with responsibility for clients; and (3) exploration and assumption of the identity, values and dispositions consonant with the fundamental purposes of the legal profession.”

Remember, this was all in 2007, before the economic collapse and ongoing restructuring of the legal profession. The recommendations are taking on more weight these days though, and were discussed as part of a conference this weekend on potential new models for legal education. The National Law Journal reported on the conference and both old and new suggestions, writing,

“The deficiencies cited in the Carnegie report have only been exacerbated by the downturn in the legal economy, which has slowed law firm hiring and prompted some clients to revolt against paying for the on-the-job training of first- and second-year associates.”

So it may be that where law schools were unwilling to make drastic changes for the sake of improving an educational system, they may be forced to make them to ensure their graduates are viable hires in this economy. The speakers at the conference certainly pulled no punches when discussing the current state of legal education. Paul Lippe, CEO of Legal OnRamp, said

“Law school is not simply incomplete, it’s directionally wrong in many respects because it’s misaligned with where the world really is. In my opinion, most of the things I see that are problematic in the profession right now are rooted in law schools.”

The conference is part of a year-long series focusing on changes in legal education sponsored by Harvard Law School and New York Law School, and we will strive to keep you updated on all the news coming out (a follow-up meeting is scheduled for October, with final recommendations and plans scheduled to be released in April 2011). It will be particularly interesting to watch if or how reformers discuss legal education in relation to public interest and public service work.