Anonymous User wrote:Anonymous User wrote:Anonymous User wrote:Does anyone have a sense of what the consequences might be of pulling out of the clerkship in order to accept a later-received offer elsewhere? I've signed and submitted all the paperwork to EOIR, but have an interview for my dream job in a couple weeks. Obviously this is NOT the ideal situation, and I'd like to burn as few bridges as possible. If I am offered the dream job, it's going to be a very hard call... Thoughts?
The typical response is to take it as a personal affront and be as vindictive as possible. They might call your law school, the bar, and threaten lawsuits. If you have any contacts in EOIR that they learn about, they will tell them to have no further contact with you in light of the possibility of legal action.
That all might not amount to much, but you can forget about not burning any bridges. If you pull out, they'll see to it that the bridge is burned, then they'll tear out the bridge supports and blow the dam upstream to make the river impassable.
Do you have an experience with this that you'd care to reference? It strikes me as very unlikely that EOIR or anyone else in the federal government has enough time/energy to get that invested in and dramatic about burning one former potential hire...
My statement is based on witnessing one individual pull out of an offer late in the hiring process, witnessing two individuals leaving their clerkships before finishing their two-year terms, and general knowledge gathered while being employed by the agency. People dropping out because they get a better offer is endemic among EOIR Honors hires, so they have made it a point to have the time, energy, and inclination to be that dramatic in the hope that the word spreads to those who are inclined to treat EOIR as a backup plan or not take the two-year term thing seriously.
In the past, they've had over a dozen JLCs—from a class of only two or three dozen to begin with—ditching either before they show up or before their two years is up. That's a big problem because they can't replace JLCs until their term is up, regardless of whether they're there or not. Thus, they don't see a person dropping out as being "one former potential hire"; they see him or her as a contributor to the single largest issue facing their largest administrative headache every year (there is virtually no turnover in EOIR aside from the fact that half the JLC corps refreshes every year; the entire HR and security departments basically exist to deal with JLC and intern hiring, and the interview and hiring process is a big operation for an agency as small as EOIR), and a contributor to the agency's issues with meeting the statutory deadlines and managing its caseload (the stuff that tends to make the papers).
Many other federal agencies probably wouldn't care very much, but they are not EOIR.
