Ian Millhiser

I mean, I think back to when I was a young lawyer and like you think very, very hard about what jobs you want to take because you're especially when your early career, you're establishing your reputation.

And if you get attached to a bad employer early in your career, that can have repercussions that carry you forever.

Think about what happened to Julie Lee.

Like every single potential employer who wants to hire now is probably going to Google her name.

And what's going to come up is going to be a bunch of news articles about the time when she told a federal judge that she wanted to be held in contempt of court.

And like the reason that happened is because she was put in this untenable position by her employer.

where she was given such an unmanageable workload that the employer set her up for judicial sanctions.

I'm not going to go work for that employer, and no sensible lawyer is going to want to go work for an employer who's going to do it for them, because that could be career cancer.

And if you look at what happened to Julie Lee, if you look at what's going on with these jump teams and all these lawyers having been surged to all these places because the workload is so intense.

If I'm a lawyer who has the option of going to a private law firm and making a whole lot more money than I would make at the Justice Department.

You know, I might be willing to take the Justice Department salary if I know, well, I'm going to have a more reliable workload.

I'm going to have job security.

I'm going to see my kids more often.

Like, there's a lot of attractive things about this federal job.

But the Justice Department can't promise that anymore.

And that means it's going to it's going to struggle to hire people or it's going to have to raise its salaries significantly if it wants to be able to compete for the very, very high caliber of talent that is historically been able to hire.

Ian Millhiser.

He covers the law for Vox.

Hadi Mawagdi produced today's show.

Amina El-Sadi edited.