New Job
Great changes have been afoot in my working life over the past several weeks. After finishing up at the Tax Center, and taking a week to travel with my wife through London and Scotland, I returned to find that I had been transferred to the military justice section and was to be a military prosecutor (officially titled Trial Counsel).
This exciting move had been much rumored in the weeks before, but there were so many moving parts in our office, between deployments and the upcoming PCS season, it was not entirely clear who was going to end up where.
For the last month and a half, I have been slowly learning the job of military prosecution. I was fortunate to have a few weeks of overlap with my predecessor, so he was able to make introductions to my commanders and brief me on the few pending cases he was unable to close out before his move. I also have had the good fortune to have as a good friend the Senior Trial Counsel, whose office became a second home to me during the months when I needed temporary reprieve from the stresses of legal assistance.
Most of what I do, like most attorneys, takes place outside of the courtroom. My primary responsibility, as a prosecutor, is to build cases, advise investigators, bring charges, and prosecute those cases. Most of our cases are resolved through guilty pleas, which I'll discuss more in a later post, but even these require a good bit of work.
As a Trial Counsel, however, I have to do more than simply prosecute cases. Just as the Staff Judge Advocate is the primary legal advisor to the Commanding General, I am the primary legal advisor to the subordinate commanders in the units I am responsible for. That means I have two brigade commanders, six battalion commanders, and a couple dozen company commanders whose need for legal advice comes straight through me. While they primarily rely on me for military justice and discipline advice, they will often have administrative law, fiscal law, and ethics questions as well. While I often don't know the answers to these questions myself, it is my job to track them down. It has, thus far, made for a very interesting practice.
