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LawSchoolandInternships 17 - 04 Jul 2008 - Main.BarbPitman
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I'm curious about how others are feeling about their internships and clerkships so far this summer. I know there was substantial concern among students this past year about how law school was training us and will continue to train us to do the work of a lawyer. For what it's worth, so far, I've been pleasantly surprised. I've worked on various types of projects in various areas within a large Indy law firm, and I'm finding that there is nothing that I can't think my way through and bottom out on, by using the "tools" that we were exposed to in law school, which I don't think I would have been able to do nearly as effectively before I started law school. But I also know that it takes me substantially longer to complete a project than would be the case with someone who has more experience under her belt. I'm certainly relying on my low billing rate to offset this discrepancy. Granted, I know it's a long way from here to thinking about partnership, but at least I feel like I've got some basics down. | | | I guess legal reasoning is premised on more tenuous similes than first imagined. Everything is like something else, but equally unlike it just as well, which ultimately reminds me of Felix Cohen and the "Rule of Law."
-- JesseCreed - 04 Jul 2008 | |
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Jesse,
aren’t you working in a big firm in LA? Do most of your research assignments entail one aspect of a case or dispute? I don’t know if what I’m about to say is relevant to your assignments, but at my firm, it seems clear that when we “summers” get research assignments, they are almost always narrow questions that the assigning attorney needs an answer to, and he or she has done just enough research or general review that he or she knows that an answer, especially an on-point one, isn’t going to be easy to find. Heck, why do they need us (with our low billing rates) for the easy answers? Plus, the student I share an office with and I can now almost predict, based on the type of question posed, if a given question is one that the assigning attorneys know will probably not have an answer that they want, but the last thing they want to do is to go back to the client and say, “sorry, but . . .”. I’ve had several assignments where “on-point” was a nice thought, but only that – so I had to think around the question and keep widening my net until I bumped into law that could be used, just not authoritatively (kind of like setting out to catch that hefty lobster, and all that you get when you keep scooping around with your net are two or three scrawny crayfish).
One thing that is interesting to me is that, whenever I do something for the litigation department, the assigning attorney has, without exception, said that he is thinking about sanctioning the other side. I find litigation assignments interesting, but I can’t imagine getting into the sandbox with other litigators who don’t want to play by the rules. Maybe some attorneys get into this type of game, but I would find it exasperating dealing with others who want to flick sand in your face or engage in other more covert activities just to get an edge. I also better realize that managing a given case, let alone several cases simultaneously, plus a practice in general, is the real challenge here, and it’s obviously not something we will have our arms around (I’m accepting the fact that I will be clueless on this one) by the time we graduate.
-- BarbPitman - 04 Jul 2008 | | | |
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