Given the fact that the court posts a job ad with Emory every other month, you would think that they wouldn't be so ticky as to who they offer interviews to. In my opinion, the frequency of their posts indicates that the court has some type of retention problem. You'd also think that they'd be looking for employees who are willing to stay over a month in this economy, no matter what their employment background, not just employees with fancy resumes who are going to be snatched up by some fancy law firm a month after they are hired.
You would think wrong. I got a call from them the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. They were questioning the so-called gaps in my resume. They wanted to know why I didn't have a legal job during my summers in law school. Uh, try because I couldn't get one. God help me, I tried to get one. I had more on campus interviews than I could count. I could just never get a call back interview. After awhile, with rent and other bills hanging over my head, I had to settle for a temporary office job that paid rather than continue to hold out hope that a law firm would hire me or want me to work for free.
I told the lady who called this, but she said that my situation was very unusual/nontraditional. Seriously? I can't be the first person in the history of law school who couldn't get a summer job. After all, I was in the top 25 percent of my class at a top tier school and couldn't get one. What happened to all those people in the bottom 25 percent of their class at a bottom tier school? Are you telling me that they all got legal jobs in the summer? I doubt it. They may say that they did, but I'd be willing to bet that if their prospective employers checked up on that statement, they would find that the only firm that these students worked at was B.S. & Associates, No Such Attorneys at Law.
The lady who called also questioned what I had been doing since my last job. Uh, trying to get a new one. Duh. If I had a job since that clerkship, I would have listed it on my resume. I mean, isn't that what resumes are for, to list your work-related experiences? If they're not, then someone sometime ago completely misinformed me.
After I gave the lady this information, her tone quickly changed from friendly to aloof. She told me that she would now process my application and ended the conversation. I hope that I'm wrong, but the way that she said it sounded like, "Don't call us. We'll call you." In other words, three strikes, and I'm out. Have a nice day.
I want to say that it is the Court of Appeal's loss and just go about my not-so-merry way, but I can't. The thing is I know that I'm more than qualified for the job. In fact, I did that exact same job for 4.5 years, only at the state court level. Yet the Court of Appeals cares more about whether I spent my summers in law school locked in some dark file room in some random law firm, learning absolutely nothing about being a law clerk/staff attorney, than they do about the fact that I've already done the job and done it well. In other words, for them a flashy resume trumps professional experience anytime, and they wonder why they can't keep anyone for more than a few months.
Maybe I should just find me a bowling alley to work at and become the bowling alley lawyer like that guy on that TV show that used to come on NBC. Of course, I probably wouldn't be qualified for that job either, not unless being an expert at Polar Bowler and Elf Bowling counts as a job-related experience.
