Externship at the United States Attorney’s Office: Christopher Hedges
Second-year student Christopher Hedges spent his spring semester working at the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the Middle District of Florida. Professor Beane’s Federal Litigation Externship class places students in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in order to gain real-world experience in federal litigation.
Hedges is a second-career law student with a background in business and a passion for courtroom litigation. He sees the focus on experiential learning at Stetson Law as a way to stand out from the crowd, as well as a way to gain valuable experience and knowledge that does not come from a classroom or textbook.
Hedges urges interested students to participate in some kind of experiential learning at Stetson, and if possible, to devote an entire summer to an externship or clinic. Students may need to carefully evaluate their course loads when taking an externship during a semester full of classes—Hedges spent 16-24 hours a week at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He emphasizes the importance of being able to come into work regularly and consistently in order to reap all the benefits of the externship experience.
At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, interns can be doing a different task each day. Some days Hedges was doing work preparing for a trial, such as redacting documents that will be used as evidence. Some days he spent researching and writing or drafting documents. Because of the nature of the office, interns can encounter cases of first impression where extensive research is required to examine a novel or unknown issue.
Students are not assigned to just one attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, so they have a chance to experience a variety of cases and procedures. For Hedges, this was an invaluable experience to see how a case proceeds from beginning to end. He shadowed one U.S. Attorney who built an entire case upon jury instructions, beginning by asking what needed to be proven to the jury to get a guilty conviction. Hedges emphasizes the holistic nature of the experience and says, “If you don’t see the case from beginning to end you don’t see how all the pieces fit together.”
Hedges encourages students interested in trial advocacy, either civil or criminal, to seek out this externship. You will have the opportunity to meet specialized legal personnel, including trial team specialists who create exhibits and support attorneys in preparing for trial. He describes this kind of experience as getting students out of the “bubble” of law school and providing the kind of real-world experience that is integral to being an effective attorney.
During his externship Hedges utilized information from multiple classes, including Criminal Procedure, Criminal Law, Research and Writing I and II, Evidence, and Trial Advocacy. Ultimately, working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office gave him the chance to blend the black letter law he learned in the classroom with experiential skills utilized by successful attorneys in order to prepare himself for a career in litigation.
Post date: May 21, 2019
Media contact: Kate Bradshaw
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