Reporting Your Volunteer Hours FAQ

Q1: When must my hours be reported?

A1: Monday April 5, 2010.

Q2: My form says hours are due April 2, 2010, are you sure they are due on Monday?

A2: I am sure, you hours are due Monday April 5, 2010. Do not panic; if you ask nicely, and you completed your time before April 1, Bill will probably accept your form later, but you might not be in time for the awards lunch.

Q3: Form? Where do I get a form to report my hours with?

A3: http://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/download/?id=97

Q4: How many hours do I need for an honors award?

A4: 30 hours.

Q5: What do I get if I report 30 or more hours?

A5: You receive an honors certificate (suitable for framing), recognition in the graduation program (suitable for impressing parents), designation on your transcript(suitable for noting on your resume), and lunch at noon on April 15th (suitable for eating, it is delicious Indian food).

Q6: I do not have 30 hours and I am thinking of not bothering reporting my hours, should I report them?

A6: Yes, you should report your time even if you have less than 30 hours. Your time counts toward the school's annual total reported to the Oregon State Bar--if enough people report, we can beat University of Oregon in total hours given. Also, you time can be accumulated toward the Public Interest Certificate if you are headed in that direction. Plus, if you report your hours, Bill will be happy and you will feel like a pillar of your community.

Q7: What counts?

A7: Almost anything that you do for a non-profit, church, social group, court, bar association, government office, or campaign will count as either community service or pro bono time. Have someone sign off on the time you have put in, and Bill will sort it out.

Q8: I volunteered all last summer, does that count?

A8: Yes, report your time.

Q9: What about time I put into the PILP Auction or for another student group?

A9: Generally, student group work does not count. The exception is, if the work has primarily an off-campus effect, then it can count. Things like project work for NEDC, NLG legal observing, some projects with EJA and SALDF, mentoring and supporting the mentoring program through BLSA and MLSA, putting in extra hours at the clinic, and helping with the VITA tax program count. If you can point to someone off campus who directly benefits from your work, you can probably convince Bill that it should count.

Q10: What if I put in more hours than required by my paid internship or more at clinic than required for credit?

A10: If you put in extra time and you do not receive pay or credit for that extra time, it counts and you should have your time signed off on.

Q11: I keep getting eaten by the Grue, what do I do?

A11: Try staying in the light or taking a light with you into dark places and the Gures will never bother you.

Q12: Grue? What are you on about?

A12: Before there were internets, there were electronic bulletin boards and usenet with FAQs like this for things like ZORK. No computer should be without one.

Q13: Hey shut up about the Grue, is there anything else I should know about volunteer hours?

A13: You bet, you can find it all in the Handbook http://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/download/?id=96

Interviewing skills, or "This one time I ..."

The hot trend in human relations for at least the last decade has been using behavioral questions in interviews. Those are questions that get at your skills and experiences by seeking information about a specific time you encountered difficulty or managed a heavy work load or showed whatever skill the employer is looking for. Reports are starting to arrive that law firms have begun to rely on behavioral questions more in order to confront a growing applicant to position ratio.

Many businesses adopted this practice years ago, and the trend applies to the public sector as well. I once participated as part of a panel interviewing candidates for a state investigatory position, and behavioral questions were among the bureaucratically generated questions we had to ask in an identical manner of each applicant.

So, what should the hopeful interviewee do? As always, prepare. Prepare to answer questions about planning and organizing skills, decision making and leadership, taking calculated risks and sometimes failing, and effective communication and working with people from disparate backgrounds.

While you are at it, pay attention to how your answer is formed. The more specific you can be the better; employers are looking for an example of an event that happened to you and not a broad overview of best practices. Focus your attention on the context, your actions, and the results, or if you like the word what: what was going on, what you did, and what came of it.

Keep in mind that some behavioral questions ask for situations where things did not go your way. It is important with these questions about negative situations to end with a positive; there is always a lesson to be learned, and if you find that lesson, even a story of a bad experience can be an example of building character and skill.

For more information, check out the ABAJournal story and follow the link in that article to a 2005 reprint from the NALP bulletin.

So you want to volunteer, are you missing the postings?

If you are looking for volunteer opportunities and you did not receive the latest pro bono listserve email, here is what you are missing:

Hello Pro Bono List People,

Two volunteer opportunities to publicize today:

1. The Washington County Circuit Court Family Law Facilitators Office
has its posting up for volunteers to help file family law cases. This
is a great opportunity to learn some of the basics of family law, to
see how civil practice works, and to gain experience with client
contact. Open to all levels from 1L through practicing lawyer.
Shifts are flexible and the commitment is minimal. Mandatory training
is this Friday the 9th 2:30 to 4:30 at the law school in Seminar
Smith. Email me at wcpenn AT lclark.edu by 4 pm Wednesday the 7th if you
are interested.

Full Posting:
The Washington County Circuit Court Family Law Facilitators Office
operates in the Washington County Courthouse in Hillsboro. This
office helps people who are filing family law cases pro se (meaning on
their own without an attorney). The court facilitators direct clients
to the correct paperwork and answer non-legal questions about the
process of filing a case. Students who volunteer with this project
assist the facilitators in assisting pro se clients following the
guidelines set in ORS 3.428.

Staff facilitators rely heavily on Lewis & Clark volunteers. If you
have any interest in family law, or on working on client interaction
skills, this is the project for you! The Courthouse is about a 40
minute drive from campus, but there is a MAX stop only a couple of
blocks from the courthouse. In the past students have coordinated
their shifts and carpooled.

2-4 hour shifts either weekly or bi-weekly for the Semester or the
year. Scheduling of shifts is VERY flexible (anytime that the
facilitation office is open). There is a mandatory two-hour training
scheduled on Friday, October 9th from 2:30 to 4:30 pm on campus in
Seminar Smith in Wood Hall.

Indicate interest by 4 pm Wednesday, October 7, 2009 to wcpenn AT lclark.edu



2. The Health Law Section of the Oregon Bar is looking for students
to write articles. Writing for bar section newsletters can be a great
way to meet people who work in a particular area of the law and can be
a great way to get your name in front of lawyers across the state.
Sections are always looking for people to write, and there are
sections in many areas, check out the list of sections at:
http://www.osbar.org/sections.

Full posting:
We are providing students the opportunity to publish short articles on
different areas of health law- whatever they are interested in or want
to write about. We ask for at least 2-3 paragraphs, but not a
multipage article. We will not edit the articles, or check cites, but
we could see if someone would be willing to mentor if that is an
issue. The articles will be published on the website with the
student’s name- and this could be a great opportunity for students to
get their name out there. If students are interested, need more
information, or want to submit something, they can contact Amy
Vandenbroucke: vandenbr AT ohsu.edu.

Best regards,

Bill

Signup for the listserve today. You can either send an email to majordomo@lclark.edu with "subscribe probono-list" in the body or email wcpenn AT lclark.edu and ask to be added. Volunteering, it is a great way to get experience, a great way to give back to the community, and a great way to remember the reasons why you came to law school.

Fellowship Season

It is fellowship season. Checkout the convenient fellowship calendar at pslawnet.org to find our where and when to apply. Some fellowships are simply jobs with a set term (1 year or 2 year), but others require you to develop a project and find a host organization in addition to finding a source of money.

Two of the largest funders of the latter type of fellowship are Equal Justice Works and Skaden Arps. Sometimes host organizations go out looking for people who want to apply for fellowships. These searching hosts can usually make a fast fellowship application possible (without a searching organization it takes months to develop a project find an organization and put together an application).

PSLawNet.org has many nationwide searching organizations in their database (signup for a free account to search), and there are some right her in the Pacific Northwest. One of these is the Northwest Workers' Justice Project (NWJP):

NWJP SEEKS FELLOWSHIP APPLICANTS

The Northwest Workers' Justice Project (NWJP) is seeking to sponsor fellowship candidates for Equal Justice Works and/or Skadden Arps fellowship programs. See www.equaljusticeworks.org/ or www.skaddenfellowships.org/. NWJP staff will help the successful applicant design a project for the proposal and act as the sponsor. Please submit resume and letter of interest to D. Michael Dale,michael@nwjp.org as soon as possible (final applications for the fellowships are due September 17 and October 5).

At NWJP we believe that all workers share the fundamental human right to live and labor with dignity, safety, and hope. Whether harvesting the food on our tables, cleaning our offices, houses, and hotel rooms, or constructing and landscaping the buildings in our communities, all workers deserve freedom from fear in the workplace, the assurance of payment for their labor, a wage that is enough to meet their basic needs, and the right to bargain collectively a wage and working conditions – in short, fair and lawful working conditions. People who work hard ought to have enough time to spend with their families and be able to participate in civic life, to contribute to making their community a better place to live.

Founded in 2003, NWJP uses advocacy, education, organizing, and direct legal services to protect workers’ right to organize, defend and strengthen the rights of contingent¹ and immigrant workers, and challenge the negative effects of international trade on low wage workers. Over 95% of the workers that NWJP supports are people of color and immigrants from Mexico and Central America who speak little or no English. They work in diverse industries, including agriculture, construction, manufacturing, child care, janitorial, automotive services, food service, landscaping, and food processing. At work, they face employers’ wage and hour violations, retaliatory acts for organizing, illegal and unsafe working conditions, and race and sex discrimination (including severe sexual harassment). While our primary focus is on improving the wages, working conditions, and legal protections for low wage workers in the Pacific Northwest, we engage in national and even international strategies where necessary and appropriate. A key part of our strategy for social change begins with the understanding that the problems facing low wage workers today are global.

Everybody does it, even the judges, so why don't you?

Last week in an article on the Law.com Legal Blog Watch Blog, they reported on a number of judges with LinkedIn profiles, including five US Circuit Court Judges. Like it or not, between Facebook and LinkedIn more and more social and professional interaction is taking place online, so why not just dive in, talk to people, and share your life online?

Well, as an earlier article on the Legal Blog Watch Blog shows, even the best of us, judges included, can get carried away with the social networking. There are, of course, the issues of sharing too many of your youthful indiscretions too freely. (I am personally thankful that, even though photos of me--both strangely messianic and less flattering--are freely available online, I came of age in the era before ubiquitous camera phones and Facebook; otherwise I might regret some of my wilder days, or that toga party when I was in law school...) But beyond unseemly photos of your last kegger, there are more complex social networking considerations for lawyers and law students.

The judge who got reprimanded for using Facebook fell into the trap of commenting without enough thought. You see the Judge's Facebook Friend was an attorney who had an active case in front of the judge, and Facebook comments can be ex parte communications; hence, a trial no-no and a reprimand. The judge did some other mis-deeds like Google a litigant and read the litigant's online poetry into the record, but this story is about caution in social networking...

So you might do well to network in the electronic world possibly even finding a judge to be your friend, but you should not leave your reason and ethical considerations at the keyboard.

Helping clear up some of the fuzzy details of OSCAR

OSCAR the online application for federal clerkships can be a bit of a bear to deal with, and there are many aspects are not well documented. To help you out on your journey through OSCAR, I prepared a step by step (with pictures and little red circles with shadows) Guide to Starting Applications and Adding Recommenders in OSCAR.

The Guide tries to clear up the process and, along the way, answer a couple common questions from this year:

1. When are recommenders notified? Notification happens only after you have BOTH added recommenders to the My Recommendations tab and created a draft application with the recommender attached.
2. I think I am done, is there anything else I have to do? Possibly, make sure to Finalize your applications. If your application is in all other respects complete but you have not Finalized it, it will NOT be released to judges.

Adding recommenders, attaching them to applications, and finalizing applications are all covered in the guide.

As an added bonus, here is a template excel file that you should use to supply lists of your judges to your faculty recommenders and/or their faculty assistants.

Sometimes someone else sums up your feelings completely

Feeling bad about not blogging.

Hopefully very few of you have been feeling this way during the first week of classes.

Welcome back returning students and hello new students!