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You cannot apply. The fact of your nomination is secret until you’re invited to join. Hopefully, everyone here - hopefully the fellows involved in your nomination - followed that guide and you were not informed that you were even being considered until you got a letter from the College inviting you to fellowship. The reason that your nomination was so secretive and so confidential is because there are a lot of pitfalls along the way and many candidates don’t make it so we don’t want to embarrass anyone by having them know that they are being considered and then don’t make it.
So the nomination; how were you nominated? Just to be nominated took a lot of work from someone. You were nominated and seconded by fellows from your state or province. Those fellows had seen you in a trial or a judicial fellow had seen you in a trial or a judge, who was not a fellow but knew of the College, told a fellow that you might be a good candidate. Once you were identified as a talented trial lawyer, then the process of gathering in- formation for the nomination form began and that’s not an easy process. In addition to gathering the background material on your law school career, all the firms where you’ve ever worked, and making a guess as to what Fel- lows you may know so they will know who to contact about you, the most difficult part is obtaining a trial list. And that’s difficult because the process is secret, they can’t ask you for a trial list. So there are a number of inge- nious ways that the nominator has gone about trying to get your trial list.
If they knew and trusted your secretary or your legal assistant to keep a secret, they would approach them and ask them for a list of your trials. If they knew a Fellow in your firm, they would contact that person and try to get a case list. If you were a mem- ber of another professional organization that required a case list to become a mem- ber, they might contact a member of that organization and try to obtain your case list from that prior application.
So once the nomination package is com- plete, the nominator sends it to the Nation- al Office and to your state or province chair. The state or province chair then appoints a fellow to conduct a confidential investiga- tion. The investigator is given a copy of your entire package, and most importantly, he’s given your trial list. The investigation con- sists of calling all the judges that they can identify that you’ve ever appeared before.
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