National Jurist - March 2009 - (Page 34) Judicial internships and externships provide perspective, humility By Jon Peters “[Roger] Faulkenberry sold to the investing public a bill of goods. He made material misrepresentations about what he was selling, about the health of the company. He knew the problems that arose with the scheme and he knew about the falsified reports,” said U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley, fixing his eyes on the flushed defendant. Faulkenberry, 47, was the fourth National Century executive sentenced for his role in a fraud scheme that cost investors roughly $1.89 billion. He had been convicted months earlier of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud; substantive securities and wire fraud and substantive money laundering. I had followed the case since February, when the trial began. It had spanned about a month, instantly generating interest and grabbing headlines, many of them damning the avarice of the executives. I remember the details originally baffled me. Something about buying receivables from health-care providers, packaging those receivables as asset-backed bonds, and selling them to investors. Which to me, a novice to business, sounds like a rip-roaring good time. At any rate, now here I am, several months later as a rising second year, an intern to Judge Marbley. I’m sitting four feet to the right of the bench, flanked by law clerks at the courtroom desk that hugs the west wall. Faulkenberry sits 10 feet to my right, his hands resting in his lap, pinned together by handcuffs. We both listen as the judge hands down the sentence. Unlike some federal officials, U.S. District Judges do not have bloated staffs and endless resources. So I worked for free and I did a lot of work, substantive work, for which I was grateful. Because much of my job involved drafting opinions and orders, something I had not done in law school, I very quickly had to learn that craft. My tenure included two trials, one civil and one criminal, which meant that I spent a lot of time, aside from drafting opinions, researching evidentiary issues. Having no formal training in evidence, I was adrift in uncertainty. It was a privilege to intern for Judge Marbley. I deepened my understanding of the law and the legal system, I sharpened my writing and editing skills, and I matured professionally. And I’ll never forget Faulkenberry, his hands resting in his lap, pinned together by handcuffs; his wife crying, his mother looking away. He was a man scorned, a warning to others. Just as I was an intern humbled. The current state of firm recruiting Employers issued a median of 40 and an average of 86 callback invitations to current second-year students for summer 2009 programs, according to the National Association of Law Placement. Nationwide, 74 percent of these callback invitations were accepted. Overall, not quite 47 percent of callback interviews resulted in an offer, with a median of 10 offers per employer. About 33 percent of the offers made to Class of 2010 students for 2009 summer programs were accepted, a figure that rose by over 3 percentage points in 2008. This figure had been trending down since reaching 35 percent in 2002, and is now at a level similar to that of the mid-1990s. This level of callback activity is somewhat lower than in 2007, when the average and median number of callback invitations were 93 and 46, respectively. This downturn ended the generally upward trend seen between 2002 and 2007. For large firms of more than 500 lawyers, about half of callback interviews to secondyear students resulted in offers, compared with about 31 percent in firms of 100 or fewer lawyers. However, acceptance rates were higher at firms of 100 or fewer lawyers, over half, compared with about 31 percent in firms of more than 500 lawyers. About 25 percent of survey respondents, or 105 employers, reported recruiting of third-year students not previously employed by them. This level of activity is off from that of the previous four years, which in turn did not match that of 1999 and 2000, when almost two-thirds of respondents recruited third-years. 34 THE NATIONAL JURIST March 2009 http://chinaprogram.tjsl.edu http://chinaprogram.tjsl.edu
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