A Day in the Life of a San Diego Criminal Defense Lawyer

People who ask what a criminal defense lawyer does all day usually picture a courtroom. The courtroom is real, and it matters more than any other room in the building. It is also a small fraction of the hours. Most of the work happens in hallways, in jail interview booths, in a car on Interstate 15, and at a desk with headphones on.

What follows is a general description of how criminal defense practice works in San Diego County, written for students, people weighing law school, and anyone who is curious. No two days match, and the calendar decides most of it. But the shape of the work repeats, and it is worth describing plainly rather than dramatically.

The Early Call: How Most Days Start

Arrests happen at night. Calls come in the morning. The person on the line is usually not the one who was arrested. It is a parent, a spouse, or a coworker who has been awake since two in the morning and is calling from a parking lot before work.

Those calls start in the middle of the story. The first job is to slow it down and establish a short list of facts, because most of what happens next depends on them.

• Who was arrested, their full name and date of birth, and which facility is holding them.
• What the arrest was for, as far as anyone knows, and which agency made it.
• Whether the person has been booked, whether bail has been set, and whether a court date exists yet.
• Whether anyone has spoken to police, and whether any statement was recorded.
• Whether there was a search, and whether anyone gave consent to it.

What the Lawyer Tells a Family in the First Five Minutes

The second half of that call is instruction, and it is close to identical every time. Do not discuss the case on a jail phone, because those lines are recorded and calls get played back later. Do not post about it. Do not contact anyone named as a victim or witness. Preserve what already exists: messages, photographs, receipts, and the names of people who were there.

The honest part is that the lawyer usually cannot promise anything yet. Nobody has seen a police report at eight in the morning. What the lawyer can do is lay out what happens next in order, separate the reasonable fears from the unlikely ones, and give the family one useful task so the day has a shape.

The Morning Calendar: Court at 8:30

Criminal matters are commonly set for 8:30 a.m., and one courtroom may have arraignments, readiness conferences, motion hearings and sentencings all set for that same time. The clerk and the judge decide the order, and custody cases usually go first.

The result is the part students never picture: waiting. A defense lawyer can stand in a hallway for two hours to make an appearance that lasts ninety seconds and consists of confirming a date. The case moved forward and the client did not face it alone, so the morning was not wasted, but it is nothing like television.

Geography adds to it. Felony matters and much of the downtown workload are heard at the Central Courthouse at 1100 Union Street, and the county also runs branch courts in Vista, El Cajon and Chula Vista. A calendar touching two of those buildings can mean an hour of driving before lunch. Lawyers manage it by asking the clerk to hold a matter, arranging for another attorney to appear, or moving a date when the court allows it.

The Hallway: Where a Large Share of Cases Actually Move

Between calendar calls, the hallway outside the courtroom is a working space. The District Attorney prosecutes felonies county-wide and misdemeanors filed outside the City of San Diego, and the San Diego City Attorney prosecutes misdemeanors inside city limits. Either way, the prosecutor in that hallway is carrying a stack of files and has a few minutes for each.

The useful conversations involve something concrete: a treatment record, a repair invoice, a pay stub, a video timestamp that does not match the report, a witness the officer never asked about. General appeals to sympathy rarely change anything. A document sometimes does.

Credibility is the working capital, and it accumulates over years. A lawyer who overstates a fact once gets discounted by that office for a long time. A lawyer whose representations hold up gets listened to on the next case. This is one reason defense lawyers tend to stay in the county where they started.

Jail Visits and the Conversation Nobody Enjoys

Custody clients are visited where they are held, which in this county usually means San Diego Central Jail downtown, the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility in Santee for women, or the Vista Detention Facility in north county. A visit is rarely quick. There is sign-in, a wait, and then a booth or interview room, often with a glass partition and a phone handset.

Meetings out of custody are calmer but no easier, because the hardest discipline in this job is telling a client something they do not want to hear. Sometimes the video is bad. Sometimes the offer on the table is better than what a jury is likely to do. Sometimes the account the client wants to give will not survive twenty minutes of cross-examination.

That conversation should happen early, once, in plain language. It is also where the limits of the role matter. The lawyer supplies the assessment and the options, but certain decisions belong to the client alone: whether to accept an offer, whether to go to trial, and whether to testify. A lawyer who takes those away has stopped doing the job correctly.

The Afternoon Nobody Imagines: Discovery, Video, and Jail Calls

Afternoons are usually a desk. The prosecution has discovery obligations under Penal Code section 1054.1 and the defense has reciprocal obligations under section 1054.3, so material arrives in batches: police reports, dispatch logs, photographs, lab results, phone extractions, and video.

Body-worn camera footage has changed the work more than any other development of the last fifteen years. It cannot be skimmed. A forty minute contact involving four officers produces hours of video, and the detail that matters is often a five second exchange nobody wrote down. Recorded jail calls are similar: hours of audio behind the ninety seconds the prosecution intends to play.

The rest of the afternoon is writing and phone calls. Motions to suppress evidence under Penal Code section 1538.5, motions to compel discovery, and motions for peace officer personnel records under Evidence Code sections 1043 and 1045 take research time no client ever sees. Between drafts, the lawyer or the investigator calls witnesses who do not call back, calls again, then drives out to knock on a door. Persistence does more here than talent.

Trial Weeks Are a Different Job

Trial weeks do not resemble the rest of the year. Preparation happens at night, because the courtroom takes the day. Exhibits get reordered, cross-examination outlines get rebuilt around what each witness has to admit, and jury instructions get argued over word by word, which sounds tedious and decides cases.

Jury selection is mostly listening. The useful questions are open ones that get people talking about how they see police, addiction, memory, or the duty to sit in judgment at all. A lawyer who spends that time arguing the case learns nothing about the twelve people who will decide it.

Cross-examination looks little like the movie version. The reliable form is short leading questions carrying one fact each, built so the witness can only agree. A collapse on the stand is rare. What usually works is a series of small admissions that add up during closing argument.

Then the waiting, with nothing left to do and no way to know how long it will take. Marc S. Kohnen has taken cases to jury verdict in San Diego, including first degree murder and misdemeanor DUI. Every case is different and prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

The Emotional Side, Told Plainly

Clients arrive at the worst moment of their lives. Some of them did the thing. Some did not. Many are somewhere in between, charged with more than what happened. Nearly all are frightened, and many are also ashamed, which shows up as anger in the first meeting and settles later.

Families carry their own version. Parents want to know whether their child will be in custody at Christmas. Spouses want to know whether the job survives. Those are fair questions, and the answer often depends on things nobody in the room controls, which is hard to say out loud and worse to dress up.

A not guilty verdict does not feel the way people expect. The room goes quiet, the client shakes, and relief arrives in pieces over the next several hours. The losses land differently and stay longer. Most defense lawyers can describe the cases they lost in more detail than the ones they won. The steady ground is knowing the job was to make the government prove its case, and that the job was done properly.

What the Job Requires, and What It Does Not

The traits that make someone good at this are less cinematic than people assume.

• Judgment about which fights are worth having, since raising everything raises nothing.
• Preparation, which is the one advantage nobody can take away from a defense lawyer.
• An even temper, in a room where the judge, the prosecutor and sometimes the client are all frustrated.
• Tolerance for uncertainty, because the outcome is decided by twelve strangers or by one judge.
• Plain speech, so a person under real stress understands the choice in front of them.
• Stamina for detail: the case often turns on page 214 of the discovery.

How the Work Differs From Television

The surprise witness does not exist, because California requires reciprocal disclosure of witnesses before trial. Objections are short and usually dull, since a speech in front of the jury draws a rebuke. Trials run days or weeks rather than forty-two minutes, and the lawyer is not out at midnight solving the case personally, because a licensed investigator does that work well before the jury is picked.

The larger difference is proportion. Most criminal cases resolve without a trial, through dismissal, diversion, a reduction, or a negotiated plea. Trial skill still matters, because a prosecutor's read on a case changes when the lawyer across the hallway actually tries cases. But the daily currency is reading, calling, waiting, and explaining.

If You Are Thinking About This Career

The path in California is simple to describe and slow to walk.

• Finish an undergraduate degree in any subject, take the LSAT, and attend law school. Grades matter most for the first job.
• Pass the California Bar Examination, pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, and complete the moral character determination through the State Bar of California.
• Get into a courtroom early. Time as a deputy district attorney, a deputy public defender, or an alternate public defender puts a new lawyer in front of a judge in the first year instead of the fifth.
• Treat trial experience as the currency, because it is. How many cases a lawyer has tried to verdict shapes how prosecutors, judges and clients read them.
• Go watch. Criminal calendars are open to the public, and a morning in a courtroom in Vista or El Cajon answers more than any article can.

A Realistic Note on the Trade-Offs

The early years pay less than corporate practice, the hours during trial are long, and a fair share of any week goes to scheduling, driving and waiting. Anyone choosing this because of a courtroom scene they admired will find the ordinary Tuesday disappointing. What keeps people in it is narrower and more durable: the problems are interesting, the stakes are obvious, the feedback is direct, and the client is a person rather than an entity.

If You Are Facing Charges Rather Than Researching the Career

The Law Office of Marc S. Kohnen has defended clients in San Diego since 2008 (State Bar of California number 255303), is licensed in state and federal court, and answers the phone 24 hours a day at (619) 398-2500, from an office at 425 Tenth Avenue in downtown San Diego near the Central Courthouse. Before that call, do not discuss the facts with police or on a recorded jail line, and preserve the messages, photographs and receipts you already have.

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