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The Harris County District Attorney's office is continuing to face a major turnover problem. It's plagued the office since at least 2023, when former DA Kim Ogg first spoke out about it, and it looks like so far under her successor, Sean Teare, we haven't seen much improvement.
According to county records, about 86 different people have left the office since early January. Of those 86, about half of them were prosecutors, many of whom worked in the misdemeanor courts.
Jared Woodfill, a Houston attorney and founder of Conservative Republicans of Texas, says this is due to a couple of factors, including pay rates at the DA's office, which are far below those of private law firms. He says the result is, "A lot of folks will come out of law school, go to the DA's office to get some trial experience, then later go on and make a lot more money with a big civil firm."
Woodfill also says the "politicization" of the DA's office is a major factor in all of this. According to Woodfill, "In the Ogg administration, you had a lot of folks upset that she was abusing the office in an effort to promote a political agenda."
He says that now DA Teare has to try to win back some of those attorneys in order to reverse this trend. That's something Woodfill thinks could take a while because "he's going to have to rebrand the DA's office, he's going to have to bring public confidence back to the DA's office, and he's going to have to do a good job of getting his folks out there recruiting young lawyers."
We reached out to Teare's office about the issue, but as of publishing, they had not responded to a request for comment.