Weekly Law School Roundup #19

This Week: Stories from the Summer Trenches According to The Anonymous Lawyer, it's the part of the summer when the events at the law firms "get ratcheted up a bit in terms of expense," so that the firms can make "the final sales pitch" and get "a good conversion rate" on the offers they hand out. But what are the summer clerks saying about their jobs? To find out, keep reading . . .

• Lawyers as Paper-Wasters Beanie of Screaming Bean complains that lawyers print far too many cases (which, I should add, they probably don't read). About a request from a lawyer to print all her research, Beanie says, "I'll spend about an hour with the trusty printers and produce utter tripe. Yup, I love my job." (By the way, Half-Cocked has a technological solution to the problem, which I'm going to explore in more depth the next time I'm on Westlaw.)
• A View from Just Below the Bench Dubitante is clerking for a judge, and hasn't been impressed by the lawyering. About a week-long criminal trial, Dubitante comments, "Fairly miserable lawyering all around.” About a plaintiff's memorandum in opposition to a motion for summary judgment, Dubitante says, "The plaintiff may have a legal argument worthy of examination somewhere, but her attorneys certainly didn't shed any light on it.” Ouch!
• Don't Ask Pork Rind About Her Summer Pork Rind of Notes from the (1L) Underground complains: "I don't want to be your resource, and tell you how to look for firm jobs, or what the 'atmosphere' is like. Sniff some white-out, stay up till 3 AM and self-administer a few papercuts, that'll give you a good idea of the fucking atmosphere around here." (Important note: Make sure to read the entire post. It's a classic, in my humble opinion.)

[In the continuation: More from Ichiblog, Ditzy Genius, ambulance chaser, Law v. Life, Jeremy's Weblog, ambivalent imbroglio, and transmogriflaw, plus a free bonus and a reminder.]

• A Fascination with the Criminal Law Matto at Ichiblog has a prosecutor's personality, but after working this summer at a "prosecutorial agency," Matto has been thinking about working as a defense lawyer: “[D]efense has an allure all its own as well--trial strategy is different, the kinds of skills that can be honed are different (like cross-examination), and the all-out argument that representing the People does not allow are all plusses." Many others are also thinking about working as criminal lawyers. For example, see these posts from Ditzy Genius, ambulance chaser, and Law v. Life (7/10).
• Don't Miss Jeremy's Mega-Post Jeremy of Jeremy's Weblog admits that he "had very little conception of the day-to-day of a summer associate's life before getting to the firm" where he's working now. Therefore, as a service to his readers, Jeremy's taken what he's learned and put it all into "The Day-In-The-Life-Of-A-Summer-Associate MegaPost." It's so informative, I learned some things about my stint as a summer associate that I didn't know!



• A Crime Lab and a Trip to NYC In other news, ambivalent imbroglio visited a crime lab ("CSI it ain't"); and transmogriflaw, who’s working in her firm’s “IP litigation group,” flew to the firm’s NYC headquarters for a litigation seminar, even though she's seven months pregnant.

Finally, in a bonus off-topic post, Ditzy Genius congratulates eight bloggers who made it onto law review.

Reminder: Want to be a Saturday guest-poster? I'd welcome your contributions. The topic, tone, and length are completely up to you. Details here.

Comments

[Federalist No. 84]

The Screaming Bean is dead on. For my boss I only hand in executive summaries. I post the legal statement in bold that he wants to make. Then I copy & paste relevant language from the article or case (obtained from Westlaw) that supports that statement. It is a helluva lot cleaner and sure beats the hell out of applying sticky tabs to note relevant pages in the opinion.

[Beldar]

My firm no longer maintains a subscription to the regional or federal reporters. We do all our research on Westlaw.

My standard practice is to download (via email) and save, in .html format, any cases I think I may use. Cutting and pasting in quotes is fine, but requires cleanup to remove the bracketed paginations, headnote cross-references, and other stuff that doesn't appear in the printed books.

Westlaw now has the ability to download cases in .pdf format, which looks just like you've photocopied the pages from the books, and I use this whenever I want to attach copies of cases to my written briefs. (There's an additional fee for these downloads, though, and the resulting product can't be cut-and-pasted or text-searched.)

On some occasions, however — typically on bigger cases that can bear the expense, and only when we have a high-tech judge — my firm is now submitting a "meta-brief" on CD-ROM that duplicates our written filing. We convert the text of the brief into .html, and we include a shareware program that autostarts the computer's web browser upon insertion of the disk into the CD drive. The meta-brief version includes hyperlinks to separate files (also stored on the CD) that may consist of —

• .pdf scans of key documentary exhibits,

• .jpg scans of photographs,

• .txt files with deposition or hearing transcript excerpts, and

• .html files with the Westlaw case downloads (although the hyperlinks need to be edited if they're to remain functional).

The resulting product is not only convenient, but drips credibility, because the proof for every factual or legal assertion that we've made is only a mouseclick away. My working assumption is that the judge is going to be more inclined to click that hyperlink than to dig down into written exhibits or walk over to his bookshelf.

The biggest problem, oddly enough, has been getting the clerks' offices to accept the meta-briefs. Generally we've had the best luck by putting the CD into a small envelope that we then staple to the middle of a page with the case's style and number, with a prominent (typically marked with a yellow flourescent highlighter) request that it be submitted by the clerk to the judge simultaneously with the print version of the brief.