What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Prosecutor
- You will spend more time trying to sort out people’s family problems than putting criminals in prison.
- You cannot give those people legal advice to sort out those problems.
- They will 100% still expect you to be their personal lawyer.
- When you’re not sorting out family problems, you’re probably reducing speeding tickets.
- You will not be “doing the noble work 24/7.”
- You will be signing discovery notices for shit you probably haven’t even read yet; calculating the days until you can receive student loan forgiveness; eating your feelings on random court breaks; telling law enforcement how to investigate a case because you’ve been doing this for 10x as long as most of them; and placating the egos of others for the sake of the long game.
- You will care more about your cases than 70% of your victims do.
- All that legal research you learned how to do, you’re probably not going to use it. You will use Google like the rest of the world and hope someone smarter than you has already written a legal blog about your specific topic. (When you find this unicorn of a blog post, you will want to kiss the person who researched it for you, bless them.)
- You will lose good cases because juries think we should all have Abby in the back room running tests for free and Stabler beating confessions out of people.
- Also, jurors are just average everyday people. Some of them are just as big of morons as the people you encounter in your every day life.
- You will likely lose that sense of wonder and purpose you started with. It will be replaced with cynicism and loathing.
- You will not know the answer to every question, EVER. There will never be a point where you know it all. The sooner you accept this, the happier you will be.
- In that same vein, you will ask your colleagues for help, A LOT. You won’t want to at first, but you will, because after you spend some time trying to reinvent the wheel, you’ll realize that you don’t have enough time in your case load to be a super hero.
- You will fuck shit up. Notices, you’ll forget to file them. Motions, you will leave glaring errors that make you cringe even now, years later. Objections, the court will ask you to respond and you’ll stand there, blank eyed, while trying to recall some case you read about during the last legal update that slid right through your brain into the recycle bin without leaving a trace of its meaning behind.
- You will constantly have to deal with the real life ramifications of laws and legal procedures handed down by politicians who haven’t seen the inside of a courtroom for more than two minutes of their lives.
- You will never be as organized or on top of things as you’d like. New cases happen constantly; new case law comes down every day. Nothing is constant except for death and taxes.
- There will be rewarding days and demoralizing days, boring days, tedious days, long days, and longer days. I’d be lying if I told you the white knight days outweighed all the others.
- You will feel sympathy for shitty people, no matter how hard you try to bury it.
- You will be chastised by judges for things you didn’t do, and rarely praised for things you did actually do.
- You will never ever get out of student debt without debt relief unless you are independently wealthy or smart enough to have gone to a cheaper school.
- You won’t get your name in the paper or your face on the news. Unless you become the big boss, no one will ask you for an interview; no reporters will be waiting on the courthouse steps to hear what you have to say.
- You won’t be a super hero or a crusader for justice, you will be overworked and underpaid with tons of cases and more trial experience than you know what to do with.
- It may wind up being worth all the fine print, that depends mostly on you and what you make of it.
I’m sure other prosecutors will have additions, subtractions, and comments as well. These are just my experiences after half a decade shackled to the service of the man.
Spot on
