"Building Community in the Trenches": A Kōrero With a Recent AUT Law Grad
NEWS | INTERVIEW | MAHI
Written by Danielle LeGallais (she/her) @thesecretlifeofdans / @sundayblessingsakl | Contributing Writer
How the fuck do you get a job in law?
I was lucky as I met my current employer in 2018 when he volunteered with me at an Xmas event serving our street whanau. His wife rang me up in 2022 and asked how my law degree was going, as she liked what I was doing for the community. I talk more about getting your name out there later, because unless you’re blessed with connections to the profession through whanau and friends, securing employment in law can be very hard. Here’s some tips that may help:
Visit AUT City Campus Employability Lab for help with your CV and Cover Letter. They are there and paid to help students get their shit together in this respect. Lean on them. They will also keep you updated with law-specific events you can attend. The AUT Edge Award is another kaupapa that can help make you look more employable as you get recognised with a certificate for volunteering. Check it out.
After you have your CV and Cover Letter apply for roles in law, including volunteer and/or admin roles in firms, immediately. Getting your foot in the door is the most important step in securing a paid graduate lawyer role further down the track. I’d wait till 2nd or 3rd year till I applied for paid law clerk roles (just so you know more), but even those are competitive. If you’re already known at a firm, an employer seeing you as a good fit in their team will put you ahead of other candidates. Interviewing and training up people take away hours they can bill. Many want to avoid that shit where possible.
Your grades matter, but not as much as you think. For the big firms and clerking roles for the District and High Court Judges, you do usually need to be hitting that A range for an interview. Good grades will get you a foot in for an interview. But for the smaller firms, they will assess you more holistically. Get involved in other things like the AUT Edge Award to build your profile, especially if your grades are less than ideal.
Physically show up to recruitment events and speak to recruiters and guest lecturers from the profession as much as you can, even when nervous. They will be more likely to remember you, especially if you include in your cover letter to a firm that you met their recruiter or a guest speaker lawyer or whatever, who inspired you to apply for this job. Also, practising building rapport with other legal professionals is helpful.
There are papers you can take at AUT where you have to go out into the field and engage with people in the profession (again, foot in the door!!), then you write a reflection and receive academic credit for it. Some of these papers are: LAWS776, LAWS736, and LAWS755. I recommend using papers like these to get connected to people in the profession and proactively emailing those you meet with your CV afterwards.
Less of a pro tip, but more of a summary of my friend group’s experience, who all had jobs in the profession before we graduated. We got our jobs by being proactive with applications, by constantly sharing in all spaces we went to that we were law students interested in whatever field we were leaning towards, by doing cool community shit and including it on our CVs, by leaning on AUT staff and lecturers for their connections, by saying yes to attending events in a firm that through networking later led to quality paid employment as a graduate lawyer, and so on. It’s not easy, but if it was, everyone would do it.
What was your experience transitioning from law school to the profession as a woman of colour?
It's helpful when getting your foot in the door, but if they are social washing, which many are, you may be entering an unsafe space....Most organisations want to genuinely, or pretend, to look like they are empowering marginalised communities such as women of colour. It makes them look good when they play the “we are so diverse” card.
Once in the profession sometimes you do need to hold people accountable if they have not made a safe space for women of colour, or other marginalised communities. One awesome thing about a law degree though is your building your toolbox or kete with the tools you need to be a strong advocate in spaces of injustice. Unfortunately I’ve used these tools for myself and for others who have been overlooked in the profession, and you’ll be ready to do that soon.
Another thing on this point I will say that with the exception of Judges, the Courts have a shit tonne of women of colour and Pacific Islanders working in them. If I’m having a tired day, I visit my new mates over there with kai and I am instantly uplifted and supported. I feel we are building our own community within the courts, because we work together really well, which I’ll touch on again soon.
Does knowing how complicated and stubborn the law is make it harder to have faith in true systemic change?
When I first entered the profession, I was so overwhelmed with learning I lost faith in my ability to bring about systemic change working as a criminal defence barrister. Now I have learnt so much about court process and I’m building my community in the trenches in there, I see that there is huge scope for system change through influencing the judiciary, which we all know is still a branch of the government. The court community we are building, which includes members from defence and prosecution, communication assistants, registrars, Police, Corrections, forensics, the non-adversarial court members etc, are working together for better outcomes for victims, offenders, and even us as players within the court because we are not fighting each other. I think working together we can be the change.
How do you manage dealing with cases that clash with your own personal morals/ethics?
There is a misconception, particularly for criminal defence lawyers, that we are morally corrupt if we represent a person who has committed serious harm in the community, but it’s an uneducated view.
A criminal lawyers job (as one example) is to help maintain the integrity of the justice system. Helping maintain justice includes making sure someone has been charged correctly, that they were treated fairly whilst in custody, that the Police obtained enough evidence to lay the charges, to highlight what is going on behind the scenes for an offender to actually stop committing crime, etc etc. We also have strict ethical and professional conduct codes we must adhere to when it comes to representation.
On the other side of this, however, we are all human and sometimes you need to practise resilience when reading facts and going through evidence for particular clients. When I first started, I did feel weird about certain behaviours not aligning with my own values. But now, two years later, after seeing that in most serious offending, the accused were once or are victims themselves, it's now not as simple as someone’s behaviour clashing with my morals/ethics. My goal is to reduce harm to the community, and often the criminal justice system can be a place of closure and healing, even in horrendous cases.
How I stay strong in pursuit of justice is I look after my physical health and I am very careful where and who I spend my time with if I’m involved with a tougher case, and this helps maintain my strength.
How much of law school is actually useful?
It is very useful. Getting through law school requires commitment to work that sometimes bores you and a high level of comprehension. Both of these are required in the profession because being a graduate lawyer is not glamorous. It is lots of listening, reading, writing, re-writing, admin, fucking formatting, and you need to be able to understand points of law to a high degree. You may not transfer exactly what you learn in law school to your employment, but again you do walk away with the toolbox you need to be a lawyer. One cool point for fellow formatting phobes, is that referencing in submissions to the court is so much more basic than what we have to do at law school, so ride that practise out for academia. You won’t need to endure referencing to that high level again if you practise in criminal law, at least.
Another useful feature about studying at AUT and then practising in Auckland is I have more good relationships with members of the court, on all sides of the room, than my peers who graduated from Vic or South Island universities. This is very helpful as when I need to ask Police to negotiate down on charges, or get paperwork signed for bail variations for a client or get an email response fast or whatever, the people I used to study with are awesome. Also it’s cool to stay in touch with have support from law school mates as we navigate the highs and lows of the profession as new graduates. We have an AUT alumni social justice group of lawyers working across the profession in criminal, property, youth, employment and Māori issues who meet up on a Friday night, join us, haere mai.
And finally, I can’t leave this question without acknowledging the non-justiciable international law frameworks I learnt in law school just piss me off at this point. Are they useful? One day soon I hope. Free Palestine.
What are the highs and lows of the profession?
The people and the people. I have touched on it before, but you really do build a community within the profession. I’m in defence, but my closest lawyer friend (another AUT alumni) is in prosecution at Meredith Connell. In court it is a pleasure seeing my colleagues regularly. There is another misconception that it is “us and them” between defence, the Police, Corrections, prosecution and so on.
For the most part we are all under-resourced in the courts and seeking the most just outcome for all parties together. There are also more good people than fuckwits in the courts, but the fuckwits are hard and seem to have a reputation known on all sides. I’d say that if you’re getting into this profession to be a bully, it’s highly likely people will talk about you.
A high is serving some of our most marginalised communities with a type of access to justice that is almost healing. Through court ordered programmes, victims and offenders often get access to rehabilitation programmes that help address addiction, violence, housing, barriers to a youth offender getting their licence, and a shit tonne of other awesome wrap around support. It's awesome.
One big low is poor graduate pay. Prepare yourself for this, it will last a few years. It blows ass.
And finally, the shit fuck conditions at the courts, specifically the duty court lawyer pay and the cells, are a horrendous low. Both sides of the interview rooms at the cells are bad for all parties. Successive governments SUCK for not maintaining working conditions in the courts to a reasonable degree. Boo.
Danielle LeGallais is a LLB graduate and current BBus student at AUT. She is a 3 x AUT scholarship recipient, 2023 Winter Graduation speaker, BBus and LLB mentor, and Uniprep tutor. She is currently a Criminal defence Barrister at Hamlin Law. She worked for Philip Hamlin for 2 years, first as a volunteer, then as a paid clerk and a barrister from February 2024 with a practising certificate from March 2024. Her community mahi includes as Co-founder and head of Sunday Blessings, an Auckland Rowing Association Board member, and a few more community-centred volunteer roles. She’s Cook Island Māori and a single Mum of two boys and two dogs.
Questions submitted by current law students.
Comments