Prosecutors help new attorneys get more days in court

Attorney Sarah McGee waited four years before taking a case to trial for the first time, and she might still be waiting if her law firm hadn't decided to lend her to the Ramsey County attorney's office.

Within two weeks of McGee's late January start, she presented a case to a juvenile court judge, and then had three more lined up on a single day.

"I think there's no way to learn how to do it except to do it," said the fourth-year lawyer at the Minneapolis office of the international law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski.

That's the idea behind a new agreement between the county attorney and the law firm: An inexperienced associate lawyer helps the county with its pressing caseload for three months, and in return, the associate gets time in a courtroom.

It's not the first time local law firms have pitched in to help prosecutors.

Dorsey & Whitney, for example, has a longstanding arrangement to lend its newer lawyers to the Minneapolis city attorney's office for three months of trial work. The program counts Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar among its alumni.

The Fulbright & Jaworski arrangement is one of the newest, and it marks a growing national trend among law firms to provide experience for their aspiring litigators at a time when the number of trials across the country continues a two-decade decline.

Federal civil trials went from 11,280 in 1982 to 4,569 in 2002, for example, according to an American Bar Association report. Judges and lawyers attribute the drop to such things as alternative dispute resolution options and the high cost of long trials.

Fulbright & Jaworski has another reason to look for court time for its associates, said partner Chris Larus: its move toward more complicated cases over the past 20 years.

"These are very large cases, maybe taking three years of pretrial work and then only a minority ever go to trial," Larus said. "So these days we can't walk into Sarah [McGee]'s office and say, 'Go try this case today,' but the Ramsey County attorney's office pretty much can."

The firm's intent is to send a continuing series of associates as a community service, and Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said she expects her office will benefit by the gesture.

"We face increasing caseloads and declining public resources," Gaertner said. "This is one way to try to deal with those competing pressures."

McGee's first court appearance took place before a juvenile court judge. There was no jury, and it was more informal than she expected.

"But everything else went exactly as I pictured it," McGee said. "Evidence was offered in exactly the way I pictured. The judge even called us up for a sidebar [conference]."

McGee said she believes her biggest challenge is building the confidence that she did everything she could to prepare a case. She said she hopes to develop the poise in court that her colleagues demonstrate. And she has observed from them that less is more.

McGee's assumption going into this was that a good closing statement is thorough, even exhaustive. But she's learned from trial lawyers that brevity might be more effective.

"They keep it to just the points they need to win the case," she said.

For all the talk of disappearing trials, she said, the county attorney's office maintains a hectic schedule.

"From what I've seen they are overloaded," she said. "I took those three cases from an attorney who had two others that same day."

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