Articles Tagged with courtroom experience

Finding a job as a new lawyer can be humbling, particularly after three years of law school, passing the bar, and hearing for years how much promise you have.

An August 17, 2026 article in US News and World Report discusses staying mentally strong during a long job search. Fair enough. Rejection is difficult. Silence is frustrating. Watching classmates announce new positions on social media while you are still sending résumés can make you question every decision that brought you to law school.

Mental resilience helps, but newly licensed lawyers might also benefit from a friendly, well-intentioned dose of reality from a lawyer who has been practicing for a while.  You are entering a demanding profession. A law degree gives you an opportunity to begin proving yourself. It does not establish that you can manage a client, prepare a witness, try a case, bring business into a firm, or exercise sound judgment when the answer is not printed in a casebook.

The Client Behind a Guilty Plea That I’ll  Never Forget

Some cases stay with you long after the courtroom clears. This is the story of a mentally ill client who entered a guilty plea in a murder case, and the extraordinary Guilty-Pleas-in-North-Carolina Artistic Representation moments that followed. What he carried and what he chose to say changed the way I view my work as a criminal defense lawyer.

He wasn’t the first client I’d represented facing a murder charge. He wasn’t the youngest, the oldest, or even the most complicated. But something about this case, the years it took to resolve, the patience it demanded, the things I learned sitting beside him, will stay. I will carry the memory of that hearing with me, and what happened in that courtroom, for the rest of my legal career.

Defense lawyers don’t talk about it much. Not in CLEs. Not in chambers. Not even in the back halls of the courthouse, where truth slips out in whispered voices. We talk What-Defense-Lawyers-Carry-in-Court about strategies. We dissect rulings. We joke, sometimes darkly, because it keeps the walls from closing in. The emotional cost of criminal defense, the weight we carry, the doubt we swallow, the sorrow we sit beside, is something most of us keep to ourselves.

After more than thirty years as a criminal defense lawyer, I have learned that strength and sorrow are with me when I enter the well of the bar in a North Carolina Superior Court for sentencing.

You might think that I’d be used to it.

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