Here’s an excerpt:

How competitive is it to get a job with the Justice Department?

Highly competitive. Highly, highly competitive. You may send a resume to any USAO and it will be placed in an applicant file. Hopefully, your resume will have that something-special, i.e., bi-lingual, information technology expertise, outstanding trial work-qualifications that will put you high on the list. Openings now are generated primarily by attrition. When a “slot” opens, the U.S. Attorney has the applicant files pulled for review by several staff AUSAs, who begin the resume weeding-out process. Some offices may have 200 applications for one slot, others may have close to 1,000. Whether they winnow it to 10 or 25, several prospects are called in for intensive interviews, usually by several members of senior management. That interview may be the most important “jury trial” of your career. Here’s a caveat: if you don’t have an ego, don’t even try.

Then, perhaps, to three, then one. Every office has a procedure, not necessarily the one I described, but something similar. But this is where personality, prosecutorial experience, and high-level recommendations become the deal-maker or deal breaker.

For the complete article, visit the Art of Manliness.

 
This year the average passage rate for the public schools in Texas is 87.4%. (Houston, Texas Tech, Texas, and Texas Southern). The average bar passage rate for private schools was 90.1%.

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Examinees who passed the July 2009 Texas Bar Exam

1. Be sure to select someone knows you well and is familiar with your work.
2. Ask the potential recommender if they are willing, and have time, to complete a letter of recommendation for you. Understand that your potential recommender is busy, so be sure to approach the potential recommender as early as possible.
3. Follow up with the initial conversation to provide the recommender with specific information about the requested letter, including who the letter should be addressed to, when the letter is due, and what qualities the selection committee or recipient is looking for.
4. Provide the recommender with a copy of your resume.
5. Let the recommender know, in a couple of sentences, why you are an ideal candidate for the position or award you are applying for. You need to be able to articulate this before you expect your recommender to.
6. Include a list of items that you have worked on that the recommender has reviewed so the recommender can comment on specific tasks that you have completed.
7. Consider providing the recommender a copy of your transcript, especially if the recommender is a professor or will be addressing your potential for academic success.
8. If the letter needs to be mailed, provide the recommender with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. This ensures the letter will be mailed without delay. If the letter needs to be uploaded, faxed, or sent electronically, provide clear instructions to do so.
9. If the letter is not made out to a specific individual or group, consider asking for more than one undated, original copy of the letter. This allows you to have an original letter of recommendation on file that you can use at a future date. Be sure to get the recommender’s permission before you use any additional copies of the letter.
10. Finally, send a letter thanking your recommender for taking the time to write you the letter of recommendation. Let the recommender know if your application was successful so that they know their letter was beneficial to you.

The second candidate slated for an on-campus interview, Professor Richard Gershon, (Charleston School of Law; Tax, Estate Planning, Property) served for five years as the Dean for Texas Wesleyan School of Law. He went on to become the founding Dean of the Charleston School of Law from 2003 to 2007. Charleston has been provisionally approved by the ABA.

Professor Peter Rofes (Marquette School of Law; Constitutional Law) is the final candidate that is currently scheduled for an on-campus interview. Although Professor Rofes lacks ties to Texas, he has taken on leadership roles at Marquette, having served as the Director of Part-time Legal Education and currently serving as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

The on-campus interview schedule will be as follows:
Professor Brian Shannon October 6-7;
Professor Richard Gershon October 8-9;
Professor Peter Rofes October 13-14.

Letters of recommendation or support can be directed to the following members of the Dean Search Committee:

Search Committee Chair
Dean Fred Hartmeister (Dean of the Graduate School)
PO Box 41030
Lubbock, TX 79409-1030

Vice Chair
Professor Jorge Ramirez
1802 Hartford Avenue,
Lubbock, TX 79409

Members
Provost Bob Smith
PO Box 42019
Lubbock, TX 79409-2019

President, Guy Bailey
150 Administration Building
PO Box 42005
Lubbock, Texas 79409-2005

Chancellor Kent Hance
124 Administration Building
Mailstop 42013 Lubbock, TX 79409

Passage Rates:

• BAYLOR 97.06%
• UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON 89.19%
• TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY 88.57%
• ST. MARY’S 87.50%
• S.M.U. 83.61%
• TEXAS 83.33%
• SOUTH TEXAS 80.67%
• TEXAS WESLEYAN 77.36%
• TEXAS SOUTHERN 40.74%

.

State Average for February 2009: 81.52%

Donald J. Guter served as dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh between 2005 and 2008. Prior to his service there, he served as Judge Advocate General in the Navy, leading a group of 1,800 lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. By comparison, in 2007 South Texas College of Law had 1,252 students enrolled. The school, located in Houston, is known for its trial advocacy program.  The only other Texas law school currently searching for a dean is Texas Tech.  Dean Walter Huffman, who is currently the dean of the law school at Texas Tech, will be retiring at the end of the semester.

A new website named AcademicEarth aims to provide just that. AcademicEarth has lectures from renowned professors from universities including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford. There are courses from a wide array of subjects ranging from Economics and History, to Physics and Religion. There are even a few courses in the law section including a copyright lecture from MIT and a class on climate change law and policy from Berkeley. The videos are free to watch, and can be viewed without registering.

LectureFox, a site focused primarily on science lectures, does remarkable job of aggregating free lectures and organizing them so they are easy to access.

What other online lecture sites do you use?

Textfixer.com, a website originally designed for web developers who were editing code, offers a text-editing tool that is useful to anyone who regularly cuts and pastes text between documents: a line break remover. Line breaks are the broken lines of text seen when text is pasted between documents that are formatted differently. For lawyers and law students, this is most often seen when cutting text from a dual-column PDF document, such as a statute or case prepared on WestLaw or Lexis, into a word processing document. Unlike most formatting problems, pasting text as “plain text” does not get around the problem of line breaks. Although line breaks can be removed manually or by a “find and replace” command, using textfixer.com seems to be the quickest and easiest way to ensure properly formatted pastes.

Additionally,Textfixer.com preserves paragraph breaks while removing only the line breaks from the text. To use the line break remover, simply cut and paste the text from the source to the website, hit the “Remove Line Breaks” button, and then cut and paste the resulting text into the document you are working on.

Headline Image Credit: Immortal412