From our friends at Equal Justice Works:

On October 22-23, 2010, over 1000 committed public interest law students will be traveling to Washington D.C. to attend the 2010 Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair. This is an opportunity for organizations from across the country to find smart and committed law students from over 200 law schools to fill their internship, externship and long term staffing needs. Attending our Conference and Career Fair offers:

• Pre-screened candidates
  Through our system (Justice Work!) you will be able to review candidate résumés and schedule interviews prior to the event.
• Expanded recruiting reach
  By attending our career fair, you will have access to a national pool of diverse, qualified and talented candidates who are committed to working in the public interest sector.
• Specialized fields
  Our career fair specializes in all areas of public service and public interest law such as criminal law, LGBT rights, environmental law and access to justice.
• Time and cost savings
  If your organization wants to conduct outreach on a national scale to find well qualified students to fill your positions, you’ll find them under one roof at the Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair.   

One-day (Friday) Registration Fee – $250

Two-day (Friday/Saturday) Registration Fee – $325  

 Please note:  EMPLOYER REGISTRATION CLOSES ON AUGUST 27th. 

Students will start submitting their resumes Aug. 30th.  If you have questions about our career fair, please do not hesitate to contact us  at careerfair@equaljusticeworks.org.

This week: Professor Laurence Tribe proposes innovations in achieving access to justice; Missouri public defenders say “Show me lower caseloads!”; volunteer prosecutors are all the rage; Connecticut legal services providers expand use of the Internets to reach low-income residents; West Virginia does same telephonically; funding cuts portend bad times for the New Jersey legal services community; and finally, the Hennepin County (that’s Minneapolis) public defender tries to make budgetary ends meet by enticing older lawyers to retire. 

• 8.3.10 – National Law Journal – Laurence Tribe, Senior Counselor for Access to Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice, addressed the Conference of [state court] Chief Justices in late July.  He called on “…the judges to engage in a form of ‘judicial activism’ – not ideological, but rather, as he put it, the ‘opposite of passivity’ – [and]…laid out specific measures that the chief justices could take to make pro bono and pro se representation easier, as well as to enforce the rights of juveniles and indigents to counsel.”  Link to article.

• 8.3.10 – PSLawNet Blog Coverage of Indigent Defense Resource Crisis in Missouri – last week we documented moves by some public defenders in the Show-Me State to refuse new cases on account of excessively high caseloads, and pushback by some prosecutors.  This week, we’ve aggregated the ongoing media coverage and posted a summary of developments.   We’ll keep updating as events unfold.

• 8.3.10 USA Today – state and federal prosecutors’ offices throughout the country are taking on volunteer lawyers to augment the work of their (often overextended) paid staffs.  “Despite the financial downturn and, in some cases because of it, state and federal officials said the work experience alone offered by the prosecutor jobs is drawing unexpected numbers of willing applicants to positions across the country.”  Link to article.

• 8.2.10 – Hartford Courant – the Connecticut legal services community has launched a new website – Connecticut Network for Legal Aid – to assist low-income residents who are seeking free legal services or who need help navigating the court system as pro se litigants.  Link to announcement.

• 8.2.10 – Press of Atlantic City – South Jersey Legal Services plans to lay off “about a third of its employees – including about a quarter of its attorneys – by the end of the year.”  The organization has been hit hard by falling IOLTA revenues and a recent state budget cut to legal services funding.  Link to article.  [Ed. note: we covered the state budget cut in our July 30 Public Interest News Bulletin (Item 2), and our July 23 Bulletin (Item 10).  Last week John D. Atlas, former executive director of the Passaic County Legal Aid Society, blogged an opinion piece critical of the state budget cut.  He further noted that “quality legal representation, especially for the poor, is one of the lynchpins of a fair and equal justice system.  Concerned citizens should fight back but we should also take this opportunity to rethink how to help the poor.”  Atlas argues that since there will never be enough legal services lawyers to directly represent all of the poor people who need help, legal services programs could partially refocus their delivery models to support other social services providers that work to stop problems plaguing poor communities before they start.]

• 7.31.10 – Star-Tribune (Minnesota) –  the Hennepin County public defender’s office is already short-staffed, but in order to comply with a county request to cut budgets by 5%, the defender “plans to offer $400 tax-free for every year of service to veteran county employees who retire or resign this fall.”  The staff-reduction idea comes with an obvious downside: “Diminishing the ranks of an office that handled 54,000 cases last year and now has 116 lawyers – who already carry double the caseload recommended by the [ABA] – is a sobering prospect.”  Link to article.

• 7.30.10 – State Journal (West Virginia) – “The West Virginia State Bar and Legal Aid of West Virginia are partnering together to launch Lawyer Information Service.   The service is a collaborative effort to provide legal information and services to West Virginians who need legal advice and help but cannot afford to pay for it.”  Volunteer attorneys will staff phone lines once a week to speak to those with legal problems.  “Legal Aid said the Lawyer Information Service cannot guarantee legal representation, but it does offer people the opportunity to speak with a lawyer who can offer up legal information.”  Link to announcement.

We wanted to share with you a new article from this month’s NALP Bulletin on E-Professionalism and social media. The article provides a great 5-step process to ensure that your online presence (pdf) is coherent, professional, and can be actively useful in networking and job searching.  The article is a preview of an exciting new resource that should be unveiled this fall – an online guide called “From Law Student to Lawyer: The E-Guide to E-Professionalism,” which will contain even more useful information!

Equal Justice Works is offering a webinar Monday, Aug. 2 at 10am Eastern for people interested in their post-graduate fellowship program. You can register online for the webinar, which will cover

• Who is eligible to apply for an Equal Justice Works Fellowship (Candidate, Project, Host Organization)
• The benefits of a Fellowship and the Host Organization’s responsibilities
• How the application process works
• Tips in creating a successful application that cover Project Description, Candidate Background, and Host Organization Background.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, now is a great time to go read some of the PSLawNet resources on fellowships. We’ve got a great blog post from a successful sponsored fellowship applicant, an earlier blog post with a lot of advice and resources – including the PSLawNet Fellowship Application Tip Sheet. We also have a good Q&A page with information not just on sponsored fellowships but other types as well. Finally, please remember that you can search for organizational sponsors through PSLawNet itself by selecting “FELLOWSHIP – Sponsor” as the job type in your search.

Do you  know an amazing law student who has demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to public service? Consider nominating them for the 16th Annual PSLawNet Pro Bono Publico Award! The Award seeks to honor students who have made an exceptional contribution to under-served populations, the public interest community, and legal education by performing pro bono or public service work. While anyone at a PSLawNet subscriber school can nominate a student, we encourage you to work in conjunction with your public interest and/or career services office to submit a comprehensive application (nomination forms are available online – pdf). Applications are due by Thursday, September 9. The award winner will be invited to Washington, DC to be honored during an Award Luncheon at NALP’s Public Service Mini-Conference on Thursday, October 21, 2010.

We thought 6 months into this blog’s life would be a good time to remind all you lovely readers that we exist elsewhere in the social media universe too.

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As we noted in May, the Partnership for Public Service is hosting its 2010 Public Service Career & Internship Fair in downtown Washington DC this Wednesday, July 14.  Registration is still open via the Partnership’s career fair webpage.  From that page:

Don’t miss your opportunity to network with representatives from more than 75 federal agencies across government during the 2010 Public Service Career and Internship Fair, hosted by the Partnership for Public Service. This year’s event will be held on July 14 from 3:00-7:00 p.m. at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Admission is FREE!

Agencies will be recruiting for a variety of internships and entry-level positions including special agents, engineers, program analysts, financial specialists, environmental scientists, IT specialists, economists, contract specialists and more. Check out the list of registered agencies, learn more about what to expect and view our event map ahead of time to maximize your participation in the Career Fair

From our friends at Equal Justice Works comes this time-is-of-the-essence news (mentioned here back in May): Five million dollars is now available for distribution to qualified civil legal assistance attorneys.  The online application is accessible here:  http://studentaid.ed.gov/students/attachments/siteresources/CLAARPapp.pdf and applying as soon as possible is critical because the Department of Education will commit these funds to eligible civil legal assistance attorneys on a first-come, first-served basis.Completed and signed applications can be returned to the Department of Education as follows:  

• Fax Number: 1-315-738-6674
• Mail:
  U.S. Department of Education
  Civil Legal Assistance Attorney
  Student Loan Repayment Program
  PO Box 4399
  Utica, NY 13504
• Overnight mail: Call 1-877-699-1834 for courier/overnight addres

Complete and signed applications will be date and time stamped and processed in the order they are received.  Do not submit an incomplete application–  if the application is denied because it is incomplete, the Department of Education will send a letter explaining the reason it was denied, and a resubmitted request will receive a new date and time stamp. 

This new program, the Civil Legal Assistance Attorney Student Loan Repayment Program (CLAAP), repays a portion of eligible federal student loan debt for civil legal assistance attorneys who are employed full-time.  Attorneys are advised to understand the program requirements, and to carefully consider the Ineligibility for Double Benefits provision before determining whether or not to apply for CLAAP.

This comes to us courtesy of Jen Thomas at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (who blogged for us way back in January). It sounds like a great opportunity for any law students who are in the DC area this summer and are considering indigent defense work.

Public Defender Advocacy, Training & Hiring Conference (PATH):  This biennial conference will take place at Georgetown University Law Center on Saturday, July 31, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m.  Immediately following the conference, we will have a networking happy hour at a local venue. Students can register for the conference at http://www.pdsdc.org/LegalCommunity/CalendarItem.aspx?TrainingID=75.

PATH is a free conference for law students committed to, or interested in exploring careers in, indigent criminal defense representation – the ‘PD committed’ and the ‘PD curious’.  I conceived of the conference in 2008 as a way to help students navigate the very specific recruitment and hiring processes of public defender offices.  In this vein, students may choose from 12 sessions on the Advocacy, Training or Hiring tracks to self-direct their learning.  Although the conference is PD-specific, there are panels that will be of interest to students who are focusing on civil legal services work with low income, low wealth clients. Those students should feel free to register for PATH. You can check out the schedule for the conference online as well (pdf).

The 2010 American Constitution Society National Convention was held this past weekend in Washington, DC. The convention featured panels on myriad topics (from immigration to environmental protection to access to justice) with many high-powered guests, and for those who couldn’t make it in person, audio recordings of most panels are now available on ACS’s homepage. One of the panels featured Laurence Tribe in his new(ish) role as head of the Access to Justice Initative at the U.S. Department of Justice, and while audio isn’t available for that one, the Blog of the Legal Times provided a brief summary on Saturday.