How four 2L students navigated the LSO criminal law recruit
On top of a pandemic and an already-hectic second semester, March marked the end of yet another summer job recruit season. While some students were preparing to dazzle firms on Bay Street with their charming personalities and impressive extracurriculars, the preparation for interviews with Crown offices and criminal defence firms looked a bit different.
The CLSA spoke with four students at U of T Law about their experiences navigating the criminal law recruit.
Why criminal law?
All four students we spoke with had a passion for criminal law that stemmed from a genuine interest in the subject matter. This spurred their desire to work on compelling human-interest cases in the criminal bar.
Shannon Blaine (2L), who will be summering with the Downtown Toronto Crown Attorney’s Office, became interested in criminal law work after taking Criminal Law in 1L and spending her 1L summer as a research assistant for criminal law professors like Vincent Chiao and Martha Shaffer. Jean-Pierre D’Angelo (2L), who will be at the Crown Law Office – Criminal, expressed similar sentiments, and was especially drawn to Crown work given its public interest mandate.
“I like having discretion based on a mandate, instead of complying to a client’s instructions,” Jean-Pierre said. “Crowns have a lot of discretion in helping accused people rehabilitate into society, and that’s very interesting to me.”
Sophie Zhao’s (2L) interest in public service came from a prior job in a different government branch, where many of her colleagues had long and satisfying careers in the public sector. She also developed a particular interest in criminal law through her experience working at Innocence Canada and Downtown Legal Services during law school. Sophie will be pursuing both these interests this summer at the Durham Crown Attorney’s Office, which does criminal trials exclusively.
Anna Zhang’s (2L) work with the Elizabeth Fry Society prior to law school inspired a passion for criminal defence work. Although she had a very rewarding experience working at a national firm during her 1L summer, working in a corporate setting also reminded her that criminal law was what she wanted to do long-term.
The LSO recruit can be challenging for students who are not drawn to corporate law. Compared to the many Bay Street firms that participate in the formal OCI and in-firm process, there are relatively few opportunities for students to obtain criminal law jobs. Some of the students we spoke with interviewed at other government branches, Bay Street firms, and litigation boutiques as well, to keep their options open.
However, Anna chose to focus exclusively on criminal law because that was where her heart laid, and landed a job at Hicks Adams LLP. Although she is grateful to have had the strong support of both her former firm and the U of T Career Development Office (CDO), Anna still found it challenging to be the only one of her friends who didn’t apply to Bay Street.
“It definitely felt like I was on my own,” Anna says.
Interviews and preparation
For the students we interviewed, OCI and in-firm interviews at criminal defence firms tended to be relatively similar to interviews in other areas of private practice. The style of interviews were conversational, and applicants were not asked many substantive questions or quizzed on their knowledge of criminal law.
In Anna’s experience, defence firms seem to be most interested in assessing whether their applicants had a true passion for criminal law. “One of the questions they always ask is, why criminal law?”
Anna thinks it’s incredibly important to have a good answer to that question. Especially as there are so many other opportunities in full-service firms and more generalized practices, criminal defence firms will be able to tell if students don’t have a genuine interest in the field.
Crown OCIs also tend to be conversational, and interviewers are also interested in discerning whether an applicant has a genuine passion for criminal law. That said, unlike defence in-firms, the in-firms at Crown offices are largely substantive. Interviews typically last between 30 and 45 minutes (though some GTA office interviews can range up to 2 hours), and are designed to test students’ knowledge, interpretation, and application of criminal law principles and procedure. A distinctive feature of government interviews is that all students are asked the same questions, given the same amount of time to respond, and graded on a standardized marking scheme.
Most Crown interviews required students to analyze hypothetical situations within an allotted amount of time. These scenarios focused on topics like bail, sentencing, and Charter issues dealing with search and seizure and arrest. Some Crown offices sent out a case or a fact pattern that students were expected to be familiar with before the interview.
Certain Crown interviews also included a written portion. After being asked substantive questions orally, one student was asked to draft a brief legal memo on a sentencing issue, while another student was given 15 minutes to respond to an essay question sent over email.
There are a number of things students can do to prepare for these interviews. The students we spoke with networked with upper-year and articling students who had gone through the process, reviewed summaries from criminal law courses they had taken, and became generally familiar with key sections of the Criminal Code or recent developments in the field.
Crown interviews in particular often require a substantial degree of preparation and studying. Every student we spoke to emphasized the importance of reading the Crown Policy Manual for these interviews, which gave students a clear sense of the Crown’s role and how a “minister of justice” might approach hypothetical situations. Many students also found it helpful to review the CDO’s “government guides,” which assemble sample questions from past years.
That being said, it is impossible to prepare for every single question — and students said the most difficult ones required them to think on their feet.
“Preparing in advance will help,” Sophie says, reflecting on a half-hour portion of one interview that was specifically allotted to oral advocacy. “But in the end, you only have 30 minutes and there’s a lot of information to synthesize.” Her experience in the Gale Cup moot, which often required her to answer hypothetical questions from judges and respond to policy concerns, helped her prepare for the oral portions of the interviews.
Thankfully, interviewers were not always looking for a “right” answer. Many questions were designed to assess the student’s reasoning process and how they would approach the problem instead. For example, when one student was asked to make a sentencing recommendation for a hypothetical accused, the actual sentence they suggested mattered less than their ability to demonstrate “what a responsible Crown would do.”
While substantive interviews can often seem daunting, Shannon, who also interviewed with litigation boutiques in Toronto, felt more grounded preparing for her Crown interviews. The behavioural-type questions she got from litigation firms, for example, were not the kinds of questions you could really study for in advance.
“In that sense, the substantive part of Crown interviews gave me more direction on how to prepare,” Shannon says.
Advice for future applicants
All four of the students we interviewed successfully obtained jobs through the LSO criminal law recruit. We asked them to share advice for students who may want to apply to Crown or defence summer positions in the future.
Though factors like relationships and “fit” don’t hold much water in government settings, many of the students nevertheless found it helpful to network during the job application process. Sophie reached out to a number of Crowns in order to determine what it was like to work at each of the offices she applied to, and also to affirm her beliefs that the job was right for her.
“Networking is mostly important for getting a clear picture of the job, whether this is what you want to do, and to what extent you are willing and ready to commit to it,” Sophie explains. Given that the government assesses candidates substantively, however, networking is not required to land a job, nor will it help you succeed in the interview itself.
In Anna’s experience interviewing with defence firms, networking was helpful in figuring out whether she was a good “fit” at the places she applied to, as well as whether she could see herself working there. Speaking with lawyers of the firm other than your interviewers may be especially helpful for defence firms given that they tend to be very small and close-knit workplaces.
One challenge that law students often experience when job-hunting is assessing signals about how you performed in an interview and what your chances are like. This can be especially difficult for criminal law jobs, given that most criminal law employers do not do follow-up interviews, coffee chats, or networking events (all of which are common on Bay Street).
“It’s tough,” Jean-Pierre says. “In a Crown interview, you walk out and you have no idea how you did. It would be inappropriate for an applicant to try and suss out [sic] their chances.”
Jean-Pierre encouraged students to find ways to cope internally with that uncertainty. Once he finished a Crown interview, instead of overthinking it, he channeled his energy into the social aspects of his Bay Street interviews.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the opportunities for 2L criminal law jobs are very limited within the formal LSO process. Students interested in criminal law often secure a job outside of the process by monitoring job postings or reaching out to employers and expressing interest. Although Shannon was ultimately successful in the formal 2L recruit, she had also planned on job-searching outside the process and had cold emailed a number of defence lawyers who were all very supportive in providing advice.
Many students also do both the formal Toronto LSO process concurrently with non-OCI interviews to maximize their options. Sophie found herself in the unique position of getting a job offer well in advance of the LSO Call Day from an employer outside the formal recruit, and ended up cancelling her Toronto in-firm interviews as a result.
Sophie’s advice to students thinking about criminal law is to be sure that the area is right for you. She found that much of the work throughout the job hunting process amounted to concerted self-reflection and research, which better informed her about what criminal law practice entailed and confirmed her belief that she wanted to work in this field.
She also encourages students who do have that genuine interest to wholeheartedly pursue it.
“If you know that criminal law is what you absolutely want to do, it would be good to resist the temptation to apply to full-service firms,” Sophie says. This can feel like a risky move when many other students are aiming for corporate jobs, and students may wish to keep their options open. However, if you are sure criminal law is what you are passionate about, Sophie feels it is a risk worth taking.
