From The Office of the District Attorney:

Recent law graduates who will be taking the July Bar Exam reached out to the District Attorney’s Office
inquiring as to potential attorney vacancies. These ambitious future attorneys were attempting to
secure a job, a pre-commitment, while awaiting their bar results. This is a practice many young law
school graduates do with civil firms, private firms or any place of business where they may have done an
internship during their time as a law student. Many law schools offer second and third year law
students work in “clinics” under a licensed attorney in order to gain real work experience. They are
allowed to “practice as an attorney” under the State Bar’s Rules Governing Supervised Practice of law by
Qualified Students and Qualified Unlicensed Law School Graduates.

The District Attorney reached out to the Human Resources Department for the County and inquired as
to the process and procedure of hiring these individuals who had inquired about possible employment
with a Supervised Practice Card. HR directed the DA to seek an opinion from the legal department of
the County Attorney’s Office, who gave a three sentence opinion stating that the law graduates could
not be hired. The DA’s office disagreed with the County Attorney’s 3 sentence interpretation of the
Texas Government Code and Supervised Practice Card rules. The disagreement of the County Attorney’s
opinion was further strengthened by the fact that in prior years the Public Defender’s Office and the
County Attorney’s Office had hired law graduates pending bar results under the same terms and
conditions that the DA was seeking. For these reasons a request was submitted to the Attorney General
for an interpretation of whether the DA’s office could in fact hire recent graduates who would be under
the direct supervision of a licensed attorney. The graduates would be learning and training under
licensed attorneys, much in same capacity as a law student is a “student attorney” working at a
specialized clinic under the supervision of licensed attorney/law professor.