On the list of things people do not generally look forward to, the job interview ranks right up there with root canals, strip searches, and John Tesh boxed sets. But with the proper preparation, it doesn’t have to be that way. The central skill is to know how to answer the damn questions. This sounds simple. It is not. Don’t believe us? We have proof.

Recently, we asked a panel of top legal experts (see sidebar: The Panel) to share with us their favorite interview questions. Then we had real law students give their answers. When you see how perfection-challenged many of the replies were, you’ll realize that answering interview questions isn’t as easy as it seems (you may also understand why the participants asked not to be named).

Fortunately, our recruiting pros graciously evaluated the students’ answers and offered their expert advice on how they—and you—could do better. Here, everything you need to know to impress the best.

What got you interested in the law?

I’ve been exposed to the law my whole life. A lot of my family members are lawyers.
New York University 1L

The intellectual stimulation and wanting to help people. Also, the reputation.
Boston University 2L

My parents said I’d make a good lawyer because I like to argue and debate. But it wasn’t until I was a paralegal—I worked on real estate transactions and foreclosures—that I realized I truly liked the profession.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
Playing the family card (”A lot of family members are lawyers”) or the natural aptitudes card (”I like to argue and debate”) may be logical enough from a student’s point of view, but recruiters hate both tactics. They’re overused, and interviewers are sick of hearing them. Plus, family stories show “intellectual laziness,” says Gail Flesher, chair of the recruiting committee at New York’s Davis Polk & Wardwell. Talking about your parents marks you as juvenile, and “Also, the reputation” is flat-out off-putting. “Like it appeals to the girls or the boys in the bar? That wouldn’t fly with me,” says Michele Jawin, an executive with Mestel & Company, a recruiting firm based in New York and Washington, D.C. In general, the answers aren’t nearly specific enough about each student’s unique motivation. To succeed at a law firm, says Kim Koopersmith, a hiring partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld in New York, “you have to really want to do this. It’s not an easy way to make a living, so you had better have thought it through on your own.”

Good
The last piece of the Rutgers 1L’s answer establishes the kind of personal connection that recruiters are looking for, says Akin, Gump partner and hiring committee member Andrew Rossman. Saying “I was a paralegal [and] I realized I truly liked the profession” may not seem like a home-run answer, but it doesn’t have to be. The point is, the student took a firsthand experience and related it to her decision to become a lawyer. “That’s real,” says Rossman. “That I can accept.”

The Bottom Line
Be prepared to talk about a concrete personal experience that led you to the law. If you have something big, great—go with it. JeanMarie Campbell, Akin, Gump’s manager of legal recruitment and professional development, recalls one student, for instance, whose parents were killed in an accident; a lawyer helped the student with estate and finance issues, and that inspired her to go into the law. But you don’t have to have the slam-dunk reason. Recruiters realize that most law students have had neither much practical legal experience nor a life-altering episode that drew them to the field. Just be sure your reason paints you in a flattering light. Consider the BU 2L’s answer about “intellectual stimulation.” “If that’s true, that’s perfect,” says Flesher. “If you worked as a paralegal, great. You have to have a reason, though. There’s got to be a reason.”

Why do you want to work in a law firm?

Working in a firm will expose me to many practice areas and different partners and associates.
NYU 1L

I’ll grow and learn the most in a firm environment. I want to learn different areas of law because I feel I’m too young to commit myself to one specialty.
BU 2L

When I worked for a law firm in Florida, I liked the opportunity to help the client. I also liked when the attorneys brought in novel problems and issues. I realize that a corporate environment would offer the same type of problem-solving opportunities, but a law firm will offer more diversity as to the types of problems and the opportunities to help clients.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
Me, me, me. You’re definitely on the wrong track if your answer implies that a firm should cater to your desires (see “Working in a firm will expose me to different practice areas,” and “I feel that I’ll grow and learn the most in a firm environment”). To an interviewer, this says you’re less interested in helping the firm than you are in helping yourself. It may also imply that you’re there to get your basic training, then leave. Yes, you need to find out what the firm can do for you, but do it later, after you get an offer. For now, show the interviewer what you can do for the firm. Another problem: “None of these answers says anything about the business,” says Flesher. “There’s lots about the work that should be interesting to the applicants, and if it’s not, they shouldn’t be going to a firm.” Yet another mistake: the way the Rutgers 1L mentioned “a corporate environment” out of nowhere. The remark sends a signal that she may be as interested in business as she is in law.

Good
The Rutgers 1L tried to connect her answer to a real-world experience that had inspired her to work for a firm. The panelists agree, however, that she should have gone deeper, citing specific cases or matters that she worked on.

The Bottom Line
As with the first question, be prepared to answer this one by citing a personal experience—in this case, one that made you want to work at a law firm (as opposed to, say, a DA’s office). Also key to acing this query: Show that you understand the complexity and challenges of practicing law at a firm. After all, why would anyone believe you when you say you’d be good at a job if you don’t know what the job entails? Vague answers about “many practice areas” and “different partners” only serve to show how little you know. Instead, talk about a case that the firm has worked on recently, say why you found that matter interesting, and spell out how you could see yourself enjoying—and contributing to—that sort of work. Try something like “The Stumpington case you handled is obviously going to have a major impact on IP law. That sort of matter is something I think I could contribute to, because . . .” No one expects you to be an expert, but don’t present yourself as utterly naïve either. Instead of “I’m too young to commit myself to one specialty,” at least try something like “I think my skills and interests could be a good match for your litigation department,” says Akin, Gump’s Rossman.

What drew you specifically to our firm?

I’m attracted to firms that have a bicoastal presence, because I’m from California. I’m also interested in a firm that does all kinds of work, because I’m unsure about what I want to do right now.
NYU 1L

I was attracted to your firm because of its great reputation. And it’s in the location I want to settle in.
BU 2L

I want the opportunity to work in New York City and to try different areas of the law before settling down and developing an expertise in one or two areas.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
A firm with a “bicoastal presence”? One with a “great reputation”? “In New York City”? The students are describing some 50-odd firms, the panelists point out. “One question I ask in our evaluations is “Interest in the firm?” says Rossman. “I have no basis to say that the BU 2L has a particular interest in my firm.”

Good
Sorry, thanks for playing.

The Bottom Line
There’s no excuse for not knowing what a given firm has to offer—or not being prepared to say what about the firm appeals to you. These days, firm Web sites detail everything from practice groups to starting salaries; stories about firms in legal publications are easily accessible on the Internet; and online forums like Greedy Associates offer all manner of inside scoop. Gathering even a few tidbits from these sources will show an interviewer that you’ve done some homework. Better yet, use your networking skills to make contact with a lawyer at the firm and ask her questions. Saying “I spoke to one of your associates the other day, and one of the things I learned was . . .” is an excellent way to show that you care enough about a firm to go the extra mile. Next, says Akin, Gump’s Koopersmith, “make a presentation that explains why this firm is what you’re looking for. Say, ‘I like that you have an international practice’ or ‘I like that you staff the litigation department in a particular way.’ With me, that scores points.” Another tip: Avoid expressing your interest in one firm by making negative comments about another. Plain and simple, it’s unprofessional.

What did you do last summer?

I just temped to make some extra money. It was pretty administrative, but I learned a lot about hedge funds, because my boss was meeting with investors, trying to get them to invest.
NYU 1L

I worked for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office in Boston, doing legal research. I used creative skills and also skills I learned as a law student. I approached every situation as a search-and-rescue mission and saw myself as a man my supervisors could depend on.
BU 2L

I was on a study-abroad program in Beijing. Learning about the differences and similarities between our laws and theirs was fascinating. And developing relationships with the students and professors as well as local residents was thrilling.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
Oh, where to begin? Let’s start with, “I just temped”? “That’s just dumb,” says Flesher. “And lazy.” It’s not that there’s anything wrong with temping, but use the experience to focus on something substantive, she says. The NYU 1L was headed in a better direction, for example, when she mentioned learning about hedge funds. But her answer would have been far stronger if she had gone deeper into the specifics of what she learned and how that knowledge affected her interest in the law. Give a demerit to the BU student for the phrases “search-and-rescue mission” and “a man my supervisors could depend on.” Both remarks cross the line between self-confident and cocky, the panelists say. (In general, simply state the facts about anything you’ve accomplished and let the interviewer draw his or her own conclusions.) The Rutgers 1L, our hero to date, whiffed this question badly. Calling a cross-cultural learning experience “fascinating” comes off as glib and unsophisticated, the panelists say. Interviewers don’t care whether you liked your co-workers or bosses. Those answers relate to people skills. And as Flesher says, “We’re judging your people skills just by talking to you, so focus on substance.”

Good
The BU 2L was smart to bring up his Suffolk County job. You’ve certainly got a leg up if you spent your summer working in a DA’s office or, for that matter, any law-related job (note: do that). The trouble? You guessed it—lack of specifics. Rossman’s suggestion: “Say something like ‘There was a case that involved kidnapping. There was an interstate jurisdictional issue about whether you could prosecute someone you know who kidnapped a person in Massachusetts and took them to Rhode Island. I researched it and wrote a memo.’ ” That speaks volumes about a candidate, Rossman says—what she’s done, how she explains matters, how involved she got in the work. “Show me that you’re thinking.”

The Bottom Line
Koopersmith has a tip that applies to the “just temped” answer—and to all answers, in fact. Before you start talking, take a few seconds to organize your response. The “just temped” answer would have been much better, she says, “if the student had paused and started simply with ‘I had an opportunity to work in the hedge fund area, and it exposed me to an area of corporate practice I might be interested in.’ ”

How will law school help you as a lawyer?

I feel that my law school education will be invaluable regardless of what I do.
NYU 1L

My student government experience helped me with my people skills, and my clinic experience taught me how to interview and counsel clients. It also taught me that details should not be overlooked.
BU 2L

My law school education will open doors for me. With a law degree, the possibilities are virtually unlimited as to what avenues I can explore.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
The NYU student’s ship is sinking fast. If by now you don’t recognize the gross failings of that answer (vague, impersonal), your boat will likely go down, too. The BU 2L’s answer may appear to be good, but at least part of it is flawed, says Koopersmith. If you have to talk about student government, she says, “it shows you don’t have enough substance.” Once again, the Rutgers student has accidentally revealed that the law may not really be a main interest. Her comment about law school’s opening doors translates as a lack of commitment to legal work, says Mestel & Company’s Jawin. “That makes me nervous. I want to hear something definite about wanting to be a lawyer.”

Good
The clarity with which the BU student delivered his remarks about his student government and clinic work showed that he had come prepared (that said, be careful that your answers don’t sound canned, even if you’ve given them a dozen times already). And the law clinic work that the BU student refers to is a solid response. To a law firm, almost any hands-on real-world experience you get in law school is a big plus. That said—have we mentioned this before?—the student could have been more substantive and specific.

The Bottom Line
In a way, the “How will law school help you?” query is a trick question. If all you have to talk about is what classes and professors you liked or what you did on student government, you’re not going to impress anyone. If you don’t have practical experience (we repeat: get some), translate what you’ve learned in a class into something that shows why you’re interested in—or why you’ll be good at—working for a law firm. Try something like “I had a class in which we talked about telecom deals that involved big firms. The most interesting case was X. What I learned was Y. That’s exactly the kind of work I think I’d like to do.” Or talk about a professor in terms of how she got you interested in an area of the law. “For instance, ‘I had a contracts professor who wrote a book on gender-neutral contracts,’ ” says Campbell. A student could use something like that as a way of saying what she herself is interested in. Red flag: If you find that all you and the interviewer are talking about is law school, “start paddling for shore,” says Rossman.

What do you do in your spare time?

Since starting law school, I’ve spent most of my spare time tutoring middle-school students, going to the gym, and reading for pleasure.
NYU 1L

I like meeting people outside of law school. It puts life in perspective. I like to read adventure books like The Perfect Storm. And I like to work out—jogging, tennis, soccer, basketball.
BU 2L

Reading, playing puzzle games like Myst or Riven, or watching TV, like Discovery Channel’s forensic show.
Rutgers-Camden 1L

Bad
Okay, so no one expects law students to live rock star social lives, but honestly, this is just ugly. Television? Never mention it, ever, no matter how “educational” the shows you claim to watch. Computer games? Never ever ever mention them. Leave aside issues of extreme geekdom. “It says that you’re a couch potato,” says Jawin. Meeting people outside of law school? God help you if you don’t.

Good
Tutoring is an honorable way to spend a few hours of your week. Law firms aren’t looking for Mother Teresas, but firms do respect people with an altruistic spirit (that said, don’t act like you’re “above” law firm work). An interest in an activity like tutoring also indicates that “you can focus on something other than yourself and that you use your time constructively,” says Koopersmith—and those are traits a law firm definitely values. Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that the NYU student could have turned her B answer into an A by using . . . yes, specifics. Says Rossman: “She could have tried something like ‘I’ve enjoyed tutoring middle-school students, and for the last year, I’ve tutored a third-grader, and it’s been terrific to watch her development in math.’ ”

The Bottom Line
You don’t have to be healing the sick, winning IQ competitions, or playing on the LPGA tour (though none of that would hurt). Interviewers simply want to see that you have something positive that you’re passionate about—something that makes you you. The NYU student’s answer was perfectly good; a picture of her personality emerges—someone who can focus outside herself. Fine. Finally, here’s something to ease your mind: Flesher says she asks this question in part just to see how articulate people are. “I just want to know that somebody can hold an intelligent conversation. It tells me they’re skilled in verbal interaction.” In other words, it’s a lob—sit back, relax, and show off your intelligent, verbal self.

Except for his name, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started out in the law like a lot of people. As a young man, he decided to go to law school, and after earning his JD from the University of Virginia in 1982, he became a prosecutor. All well and good. But then he decided to veer off into a budding form of environmental law. He began suing on behalf of … a river. Specifically, the Hudson River. He helped popularize the strategy of appointing a guardian, or “Riverkeeper,” for a given body of water—a practice now used from the Hudson to the San Francisco Bay—then suing those who foul the waters.

Today, the 47-year-old Kennedy is the chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, co-director of the Pace University Environmental Litigation Clinic, and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. With the current president viewed by environmentalists as aggressively antigreen, Kennedy argues that now is a critical time for young attorneys to enter environmental law. His call to action and his passion for his own work (at press time, he had just begun serving a 30-day jail sentence for protesting the American bombing range at Vieques in Puerto Rico) have brought new energy to an old Kennedy ideal: the value of putting social service before self-interest.

JD Grade the Bush record on the environment.

RFK It’s worse than that of any president in a century. His visit to the Everglades last summer is a perfect example. He announced more than $200 million in aid, but that number represents a substantial cut from what the Everglades was supposed to get under the Clinton plan. Because we have a very docile press, they cover these things as if they were something good. But Bush’s announcement was a cut. It was an attack on the Everglades. In Texas, Bush had the worst environmental record of any governor in the country. Under his leadership, Texas had some of the highest levels of air pollution, toxic releases, and water pollution in the 50 states. His environmental commissioners came from the regulated industries. One of the heads of the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (the state environmental protection agency) was a 30-year executive of the Monsanto [chemical] Company. And Bush has brought the same philosophy to Capitol Hill. Look at his appointment of Christie Todd Whitman to the EPA. As governor of New Jersey, she cut the budget for the state’s Department of Environmental Protection by almost a third. The person she brought in to run DEP was a political hack from south Jersey. He essentially ended environmental enforcement in the state, and Whitman’s motto was “New Jersey is open for business.”

JD Has George W. Bush done anything at all that’s good for the environment?

RFK I wish there were something good to say, but there isn’t. Gale Norton, his Secretary of the Interior, is a joke. She has argued in front of the Supreme Court that the Endangered Species Act and the Surface Mining Act are unconstitutional. She doesn’t appear to believe in public lands. She seems to think they should all be privatized. Now she’s the principal enforcer of the Endangered Species Act and the Surface Mining Act and the principal trustee of more than 400 million acres of our nation’s public lands. Spencer Abraham, who is in charge of the Department of Energy, co-authored a bill when he was in Congress to dismantle the same department. And the lower-level officials being brought into the Cabinet departments are conservative ideologues in line with the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, while the scientists are being pushed aside. The agencies are being systematically turned over to large corporations whose executives see antipollution laws as interfering with their profit-taking. Listen, the EPA’s budget was more than $7 billion under the Clinton administration—0.4 percent of the federal budget. Bush has proposed to cut that by half a billion, and he’s got at least another quarter of a billion in cuts in mind for the Interior Department.

JD One of Al Gore’s weaknesses as a presidential candidate was the perception that he was too green. How should a presidential nominee in 2004 describe his environmental platform?

RFK I disagree. Gore’s primary problem was that he was seen as someone who was not passionate about anything. If he’d spoken out more about the environment, he would have done a lot better. Polling I’ve seen has shown that Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, were worried about Bush’s environmental record in Texas, and I think if Gore had done a better job of getting that out before the public, he would have won the election. The environment is intertwined with every other important social issue. It’s the most important social issue.

JD How so?

RFK Poverty and race issues are inseparable from environmental issues. Look at where the toxic dumps go in this country. They always go into a black or Hispanic neighborhood. Blacks and Hispanics are far more likely to live in an environmentally contaminated community than whites. One of the largest toxic waste dumps in the country is in Emelle, Alabama, 93 percent black. One of the largest concentrations of toxic-waste dumps is in the South Side of Chicago. One of the most contaminated zip codes in California is East L.A.’s. The poor always bear the heaviest burden for environmental injury, whether it’s access to public lands or exposure to toxic chemicals, so this is a fundamental issue. It’s not just about protecting fish and birds for their own sake.

JD Grade Bill Clinton’s environmental record.

RFK His was a rearguard action that he fought against the Gingrich congresses—the 104th and 105th—which were two of the most anti-environmental congresses in American history. They tried to dismantle 30 years of environmental action. Clinton stood up to them, and ultimately they shut down the government. The government shutdown was because of environmental riders that the Republicans had attached to the Omnibus Budget Bill. Clinton said no to them, and they shut down the government. He stood up for us.

JD Say I’m a second-year law student. My best friend is at Skadden, Arps, making the big bucks while I’m working at a low-paying environmental law job. he says to me, “you’re a sucker.” How do I answer him?

RFK People have felt that way for ages. But there is a choice in life. You can make a big pile of money for yourself, or you can spend your life being of service to others. My own experience and my observation of others have taught me that being of service is a more worthwhile way to spend your life. If what you seek is peace of mind and happiness, then that’s the path. People have different philosophies, and I don’t begrudge them that. I make choices in order to look at myself in the mirror and have some peace of mind.

JD If I were a law student interested in getting into environmental law, what’s the most effective kind of work I could do next summer?

RFK You could come and work for us at the Pace University Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York. We give each student four polluters to sue, then they have the summer to litigate against polluters on the Hudson or some other waterway. We also have volunteer jobs every summer.

JD Where did the Riverkeeper idea come from?

RFK The first Riverkeeper was founded on the Hudson in 1966 by a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen. Most were veterans of World War II and Korea who had worked on the Hudson as commercial fishermen. Their livelihoods were being destroyed by large polluters, mainly Penn Central Railroad, which was vomiting oil from a four-and-a-half-foot pipe. The shad tasted of diesel, so it couldn’t be sold at the Fulton Fish Market, in New York City. All these people, about 300 of them, got together in an American Legion hall, and someone suggested that they light a match to the oil slick to blow up the pipe. Someone else said that they should jam a mattress up the pipe and flood the rail yard with its own waste. Somebody else suggested they float a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point power plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day on its intake screen, taking food off their families’ tables.

Then a former marine named Bob Boyle stood up. He was a writer for Sports Illustrated. He was a great fly fisherman, and two years before, he had written an article about angling on the Hudson. In researching the story, he’d come across an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act, which made it illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States. There was also a bounty provision that said that anyone who turned in the polluter got to keep half of the fine. Boyle persuaded these people that instead of breaking the law, they should be enforcing it. The bounty provision had never been enforced—not a single time. These guys were the first ones to do it. They shut down the Penn Central pipeline 18 months later. They got $2,000, and they used that money to finance investigations into Ciba-Geigy, Anaconda Wire & Cable, and Exxon—some of the biggest corporations in America. They got a $200,000 bounty in one case, and they spent the money on a boat. In 1983, they hired a full-time riverkeeper—John Cronin, a former commercial fisherman. Later they hired me as the prosecutor, again using bounty money. Altogether, we’ve now fought more than 100 successful lawsuits against Hudson River polluters.

JD You’re a Kennedy; you could have practiced any kind of law in the world. What attracted you to the environment?

RFK I didn’t study it when I was in law school, but I was always interested in the environment. I became a prosecutor afterward, and around 1984 I decided I wanted to do something that was consistent with my values. I have spent a lot of time on the Hudson, catching fish and now investigating polluters and getting to know the river and the fishermen who are my clients. I love it. I love what I do.

JD What makes the environment so important to you?

RFK The environment is the best measure of how our democracy is working. It’s how we distribute the goods of the land. In the past, whenever we hit a depression in New York State and people were unemployed, they could always go down to the river and fish. It was the social safety net. You could always find fish in the river, and they belonged to the people. But now they are too dangerous to eat. The barge traffic on the upper river has been shut down because the shipping channels are too toxic. Women all along the upper Hudson are likely to have elevated levels of PCBs in their breast milk. Acres of beautiful shorefront property are off the tax rolls, robbed from the communities as a source of revenue or recreation. Virtually all of the commercial fishermen on the Hudson are out of work because, although the Hudson is loaded with fish, almost all of the fish are still loaded with General Electric’s PCBs and are too toxic to sell. Countless people living in the Hudson Valley have General Electric’s PCBs in their flesh and in their organs. That’s a theft. That’s an active theft. The fish and the waterways are owned by the people. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish their use or enjoyment by others. It’s a kind of right that dates back to the Magna Carta. And General Electric has come in and stolen the fish from everybody in the state. We don’t own them now. We can’t use them. General Electric liquidated them for cash. They turned them into profit, and they left behind a giant mess. That’s a profound injustice.

JD is cleaning up a river a moral fight or an economic fight?

RFK Good environmental policy is always, 100 percent of the time, good economic policy. If we want to measure our economy, then it should be based on how it produces jobs and the dignity of those jobs over the generations. What the Bush administration is urging us to do is to treat the planet like a business in liquidation—to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity. But our children will pay for our joyride with denuded landscapes, poor health, and cleanup costs they won’t be able to afford. Environmental injury is a form of deficit spending.

JD How does one articulate the Kennedy tradition of public service to a generation that seems pleased with itself and with the prosperity that comes from pursuing self-interest?

RFK Our nation’s history is really a battle between two visions of this country. One of those visions is that America is a city on a hill, a model to the rest of the world for what human beings can accomplish if they work together and maintain their focus on a spiritual mission—trying to build communities. That idea really distinguished the European settlement of North America from the European conquest of Latin America, where the Europeans came as conquistadors driven by greed—to extract the minerals, to level the landscape, to subjugate the people, to enrich themselves, and then to move on. That very notion became prevalent in our country during the gold rush of 1849. That philosophy became the driving force behind the idea of Manifest Destiny and the driving force behind the robber barons of the 1880s and 1890s. Those two warring philosophies have provided the tension behind every major conflict in American history, from the Civil War to recent congressional elections. It can be felt in our own communities, at the planning board meetings when we have to decide whether to sell out to Wal-Mart for the easy money or to build a community that has dignity and maintain what our parents gave to us. And we have to fight that battle in our personal lives, as well. We each have to wake up in the morning and ask ourselves: Is this all about making my pile bigger? Am I going to be a gold digger? Or am I going to be somebody who has taken what God has given me and return it to my community? Is today going to be about me? Or is it going to be about giving back?

JD Will you ever run for political office?

RFK I considered running in the last Senate campaign in New York.

JD And in the future?

RFK We’ll see.

Kato? Of course. Who else could be the subject of JD Jungle’s inaugural “Where Are They Now?” column. The guy’s the very apotheosis of an odd late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century phenomenon—the bit player in a megahyped legal action who gets his fifteen minutes of fame (hell, maybe the whole phenomenon should be called “a Kato”). We caught up with the too-blond, too-tanned, bump-in-the-night-hearing 42-year-old Los Angeleno to see what he’s up to now, to hear his thoughts on the you-know-who case and to solicit his opinions about American jurisprudence. We know: You think he’s a complete—how do we put this?—idiot. Well, listen up.

Q: Okay, what have you been doing since the O.J. trial?
A: I had a morning radio show in L.A. and I’ve had a bunch of acting gigs, on shows like Roseanne and in the movie BASEketball. I just completed two years on Showtime’s Beggars and Choosers and I just wrapped up work on the new Pauly Shore film You’ll Never Wiez in This Town Again. I play the bald owner of a Motel 6. It’s a pretty funny part.

The O.J. case wasn’t your last brush with the legal system.
No. I sued a tabloid for things it wrote about me during the Simpson case. We settled last year. I can’t say anything else, but I did just buy a condo.

What have you learned about the law?
A lot. I’ve been in court so many times over the past six years that when I go to the supermarket now, I buy everything in trial sizes. But seriously, I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to law school classes about the law and the media. I tell students all the time that they should be witnesses at a high-profile trial—it changes your view of the system.

Does the system work?
I think it does, but it didn’t in the Simpson case because of the way it was handled in the media. The lawyers were smart and showboated for the cameras. It proved that even when a jury is sequestered, the media will influence them.

Was Judge Ito fair?
I thought he was. But again, his biggest mistake was that he loved the attention too much and saw the trial as a Hollywood event. Bringing in tapes of the Dancing Itos from The Tonight Show to show the lawyers—that wasn’t right.

In what other ways did the Simpson case affect you?
It sounds crazy, but to this day, all the focus on “time line” makes me obsess about knowing at precisely what time I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing. Because who knows if I’m going to be asked somewhere down the line to retrace my steps? Time became a nightmare for me. I’d drop my girlfriend off at her house and we’d have to synchronize our watches and agree that it was eight o’clock.

Which lawyer in the O.J. case impressed you most?
I think Barry Scheck came across the best. He was highly intelligent, a great communicator and he didn’t showboat. He came off as very solid, very matter-of-fact.

What were you doing in the audience of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire last year?
I was there in the companion seat to support my close friend Norm Macdonald [a contestant in a celebrity episode]. It’s amazing how many people saw that show. I just got back from a weekend in Vegas with Norm and people were coming up to us and saying, “I saw you on Millionaire.” And Norm was like, “Wait a minute—I do have a weekly sitcom, you know!”

Which famous trial since O.J.’s have you followed most closely?
I watched a lot of the Rae Carruth trial on Court TV. The lesson feels pretty familiar—how high-paid athletes can’t handle the instant fame and cash and begin to think they’re invincible. If it doesn’t already, the NFL really should have an anger-management program.

On May 16, Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be executed for the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.