Anonymous User wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 3:28 pm
Anonymous User wrote: ↑Mon Sep 04, 2023 3:22 pm
State prosecution is the obvious alternative.
That’s where I’m leaning. Besides leaving money on the table, I am not sure what downside there would be to state prosecution work over BL with my goals.
You certainly have a shot through Honors, especially if you're willing to go anywhere, but there are just so many applicants, you can't guarantee a position that way.
I agree that if you don't get into an USAO through Honors, it will be tough to get an entry-level position without any practice experience. Clerking does count as experience for the purpose of application requirements, so you could apply to openings that require 3 years or less experience and might get a bite in a high-volume border district, but again, not guaranteed.
It can also be hard to time your applications to non-honors positions, coming out of a clerkship. Many offices only accept applications when they have a specific opening, rather than accepting rolling applications, so if an office posts a job in October of your COA, it's unlikely that they'll be willing to hire you and wait for you to finish your COA. Even with offices that take rolling applications, you can submit any time you like, but can't control when they'll act on the application.
Also, if a posting says 3 years' experience required, it will literally have to have been at least 3 years from the first day of your first clerkship for your application even to be reviewed - there's no wiggle room. Most positions I see require 3 years, although some only require one, and very very occasionally they don't specify.
Since you're location agnostic and really don't want to do BL even for a few years, I agree that state prosecution is the best option. It will get you valuable trial experience, and three years of federal clerkships should assuage any concerns about your writing/research ability (one concern that USAOs have about people coming out of state prosecution).
The major benefit to doing BL is that some USAs really want to see that traditional fancy pedigree; there are offices that have a culture of hiring out of BL and training you in criminal/trial work from the ground up. But there are other USAs/offices that like to hire someone who's able to hit the ground running, in terms of working up cases and handling trials, whose overall qualifications suggest they'll be able to transition from state to federal practice relatively smoothly. So if you can cast a wide enough net, state prosecution will be a good background.
USAOs also sometimes get funding for positions designated for specific practices - gun/violent crime, opioid drug crime, health care fraud (for instance related to drug diversion), etc - and anecdotally, the people I've seen hired for those more "specialized" jobs tend to have previous prosecution experience in that area. (I put "specialized" in quotes because depending on office needs, those AUSAs often do other kinds of cases as well, but they will have a niche.)
I think the two downsides to state prosecution over BL are 1) significantly lower pay (with a few exceptions - California state prosecution usually pays really well, though not BL well, but can be hard to break into) and 2) anecdotally, I think USAOs tend to want to see more years of experience from state prosecutors than from BL associates. In part that's because they want to see that a state prosecutor has worked their way up to more complex prosecutions/investigations and to felony trials, whereas the BL associate is going to have to learn all that mostly from scratch; it may be, too, that it's harder to poach BL associates the more senior they get and the bigger the paycut they're going to take. But how much state experience you need to make the jump will depend on where you work, which USAO you apply to, and what experience you get and what connections you make.
You being location agnostic matters - I think with 2 federal clerkships and good state prosecution experience, you will have a good shot at an AUSA gig if you're willing to move around the country. If you were targeting only a couple of offices, I'd advise you to find out as much as you can about the culture of the office and whether it's a place that strongly favors BL experience before you decide on a post-clerkship path. That can change depending on the USA, too, of course, although some offices have a lot of cultural inertia.
If you want to get your foot in the door as quickly as possible, I do suggest considering the high-volume border districts. They're usually large offices, they tend to have more turnover, some hire a lot of state prosecutors, and it is possible to move from those offices to other USAOs in more desirable locations after a few years . Are you going to go from the Las Cruces office in New Mexico to SDNY? Probably not, but you don't need to stay in NM forever either (no disrespect meant to NM or Las Cruces). You have to be willing to do a lot of criminal immigration cases, which not everyone is, and culture/conditions can vary, especially depending on the country's current immigration policy, so they're not for everyone. But they can be a good starting point.
(Also. re coming out of a clerkship and getting grilled about "why you and not an ADA with 1000 felony trials" - I think that's relatively typical interview grilling. If you were an ADA with 1000 felony trials, you could just as easily get asked "why you and not someone we can train from the ground up and avoid any bad habits you've developed.")