Inside "L": Some Thoughts on the Office of the Legal Adviser

I have helped scour a foreign capital hours before a closing to assemble the twenty-one owners of a property we wanted to buy. I have litigated a million dollar case on my own. I have learned what "hak pakai" and "hak guna bangunan" are.1 I have seen China's Great Wall, Cambodia's Angkor Wat, and Cape Town's townships (and I am one of the least well-traveled people in the building). I have had an ambassador swing an armadillo at me. For all that, I am still in my first rotation in the Office of the Legal Adviser (or "L," as it is denominated in government-speak) at the State Department. Needless to say, this job has been full of surprises. I made a decision to work for the State Department, rather than for a law firm, by buying into a cliche: go to the government if you want significant responsibility as a young lawyer. What has been surprising from my (admittedly amateur) vantage point is not the amount of responsibility we are given-to which the aforementioned experiences attest-but rather the ever-expanding range of entities, agencies, individuals, and governments with which L regularly deals. I should not have been surprised, in a decade in which everything is interconnecting at an exponential rate, that the executive agency with the lead role in international affairs has had to deal with more numerous and complex issues every year. What I did not expect, though, was the diversity of those issues, and the concomitant interaction between the Office of the Legal Adviser and private attorneys, industry, non-governmental organizations, attorneys from other agencies, and private citizens-as clients, as constituents, as consultants, and as challengers.2 This essay briefly sets out the structure of the Office of the Legal Adviser, then turns to the work of specific offices to illustrate the above-mentioned interactions. The essay concludes with a look at the work I have done in my first rotation, in the section of L that advises on the acquisition and disposition of real property overseas. I. THE STRUCTURE OF THE OFFICE OF THE LEGAL ADVISER The Legal Adviser's Office is divided into twenty-three specialized offices and employs about 160 attorneys.3 Some of these offices advise regional bureaus, while other offices serve as advisers on functional issues. For example, the L office that handles European affairs ("L/EUW') as a regional office, advises State policy offices like the Bureau of European Affairs on issues relating to North Atlantic Treaty Organization ("NATO") and the EU, conflicts and institution-building in the Balkans, and democratization in the Newly Independent States, while the L office that handles political-military affairs ("L/PM"), as a functional office, offers advice on issues like the law of war, export controls, and foreign assistance programs. The interaction between the regional and functional offices can be conceived of as a kind of grid, whereby the work of the regional offices extends across several functional areas and the work of the functional offices extends across each of the regional areas. While the bread and butter of L's work is public international law, including work that generally would not be performed by a private law firm, a fair number of functional L offices do work that is similar to work law firms perform for their clients. Offices within L give advice in the areas of employment law, real estate, litigation, contracts, administrative law, and international arbitration. Before working for a government agency, I had never considered that an agency needs legal advice both to serve its own in-house management functions and to serve its needs as an executive agency with a policy mission. Because L has a rotation system, many attorneys there have passed through each kind of office and, in the process, have learned about the cogs that make a government agency-that great beast-rumble forward. Another unexpected (and tricky) aspect of practicing law in L is the occasional lack of a clearly defined client, and, in other instances, the presence of multiple clients, each with a different agenda. …