Published: June 20, 2008 11:00 pm            

Prosecutor joins county DA’s office

Learning on the run and in a hurry is nothing new to Abby Rogers as she gets started as the newest assistant district attorney in the Garvin County office.

Stepping into the role just days ago as the replacement for Dee Graves, Rogers has moved from law school to preparations for a final exam for her attorney’s license to joining George Burnett and Kristin Jarman in the office in Pauls Valley.

“I’ve have a little bit of experience but have a lot to learn,” Rogers said.

“Right now I’m just trying to soak everything in, soak up as much knowledge as I can from these people that have a lot more experience than I do.”

Rogers, originally from Wichita Falls, Texas, got her bachelor’s degree in business from Oklahoma State University before going further south to the University of Oklahoma to attend law school, where she graduated this last month.

One more very big hurdle still remains —”the Bar” in July, which stands for the Oklahoma Bar Association and is the series of comprehensive and strenuous two-day exams allowing her to be licensed to practice law in this state.

“Right now I work all day long and then I go to a Bar review class at night,” she said.

“So I graduated, had a week off and then I started class again. That’s kind of how it works.”

The test, once it arrives, consists of eight hours worth of essays on one day and that same amount of time for multiple choice questions the second day.

Her interest in becoming a prosecutor in a district attorney’s office comes from the practical experience she gained as a student from her work as an intern at two different places.

“With law there’s so many opportunities that you can go into when you go to law school.”

The one opportunity Rogers initially took was working at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in Oklahoma City.

“One of my first contacts really was criminal law. I really liked that part of the law,” she said.

In that internship she worked for a judge researching the cases being appealed to that state court. She read the briefs, or documents outlining arguments on both sides of an appeal, then researched the issue at the center of the appeal before writing a memo to the judge describing what the law says and what she personally thought about the case.

“It was a good experience in that you can learn a lot that way, and you can learn a lot from other people’s mistakes that you read about in their appeals. You learn what is effective and what’s not effective,” Rogers said.

“It also sparked an interest in criminal law.”

From a bulletin board at school she later learned about an opening for an intern at the Cleveland County District Attorney’s office.

She worked in that position during her last semester in law school, which allowed her to do much of what a full-fledged prosecutor does — with and sometimes without a supervisor.

“There it’s a high volume of cases and everyone is busy all the time, so you get thrown in there to do everything you can.”

It was when her rotation as an intern took her to the D.A.’s office in Purcell when she applied for and got the job here in PV.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.