[Mike McKee]
Hey hungry job seekers! There will soon be an opening for a research attorney on the California Supreme Court. And those don’t pop up very often.
Penny Buckley, one of Justice Joyce Kennard’s chambers attorneys, is leaving at the end of July after a relatively short nine years and counting on the court. Some such attorneys have been on the court for 20 years or far more.
“I’m going to be an officially old person in early May and I’m going to retire,” Buckley, 64, said today. “I like this job, but there are other things I’d like to do.” Like travel! “There are a lot of places we haven’t been to for a while and other places we’ve never been to,” she said of herself and her husband Mike, a Reed Smith partner.
Kennard — who’s been on the Supreme Court bench since 1989 and maintained friendships with nearly everyone who’s ever worked for her — hates to see Buckley go.
“We all love her,” she said Wednesday, adding in her typical plainspoken style, “She’s just a classy gal.”
Kennard is seeking applicants, whom she said by phone must be “nice” and work “diplomatically” with others.
Kennard’s known as a lovable, but exacting, boss, and her ad makes clear that applicants must be tough-skinned. “The attorney must be able to work independently,” ads in the Recorder and on Craigslist state, “while also welcoming extensive revision and editing by Justice Kennard, as well as criticism of the work product by other attorneys on her staff and by other justices and their staffs.”
Responses must be in by May 15. And the winner could have a job for life.
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