Los Angeles District Attorney - Teddy Chadwick

Going into my first year summer, I knew I wanted to work for a district attorney’s office (DA), the Attorney General (AG), or the Department of Justice (DOJ), so that is where my experience in applying is. The first ones you have to apply to are the AG and the DOJ, because they typically have deadlines of Dec. 31, Jan. 15, or Jan. 30. The way to find them is just to go to their websites and search around for awhile. The Career Services Office is not terribly helpful at finding these jobs, so I wouldn’t depend too much on their help. When you find the jobs online, you just have to see their requirements (usually it’s a resume, a cover letter, and a writing sample) and where to send your materials to.

For DA’s offices, the deadline is someone more flexible, but there are deadlines, and they differ from office to office, so you need to keep that in mind. Like for the AG and DOJ, the way I found the DA’s jobs was just to go to their websites and look around for awhile. Unfortunately, a lot of DA’s offices won’t take first year students, but don’t be discouraged, because a lot still will.

As for what I ended up with, I worked for the DA for Los Angeles County. I personally got that job less through qualifications and more through persistence. I originally sent a resume to them in late January. I followed up in late February, after not having heard from them the whole month, to discover that they had no clue who I was. So I then e-mailed their recruiter about 25 times the next couple weeks, until one day she wrote back that she had a position for me. Side note: knowing now what I didn’t know then, if you’d like to work for the LA DA’s office, the best way to do it is simply to write a little mini cover letter in an e-mail and attach a resume to the DA’s HR person, Regina Mayo (rmayo@lacountyda.org).

The experience itself was amazing. Even as a first year who couldn’t go on record or say anything in court, they still allowed me to go to court practically every day. This was tremendously helpful during my second year OCI, when I could say to all the prospective employers that I’d been to court every day last summer and know what the process is like. The other main thing that I did that was extremely helpful was that even though I couldn’t say anything on the record in court, the deputy district attorneys allowed me interview the witnesses and victims before the trial started so that when we put them on the stand, we knew what they were going to say. This skill is obviously valuable and transferrable to any job where you will be interview clients, witnesses, etc. Finally, I found the work extremely rewarding. It feels good helping out victims of crimes and telling people that we were able to get them some compensation. The only hardships are that sometimes you really feel for the defendants when they have a rough story, and that when you lose a case in criminal prosecution, it really hurts.

Working for the DA last summer opened up my opportunity to work this summer, because I was invited to work for the same office again this summer. This made OCI a lot less stressful, and is obviously very useful because, hopefully, this will open up a job for me upon graduation.
Finally, if anyone has any questions about any of this, feel free to contact me at teddychadwick (at) gmail (dot) com.

-Teddy Chadwick