Blogger Went a-Courtin'

I finally got around to visiting a trial-in-progress this week.

It was the first time I had so much as set foot in the spanking new Richard Sheppard Arnold Federal Courthouse. It's a thing of beauty, inside and out (once you get past the airport-style security, complete with shoe removal). I have a professor who is fond of saying that courtrooms should be designed to invoke a sense of, "My God, something important is going to happen here." Mission accomplished.

Unfortunately, nothing particularly important seemed to be happening there when I visited. I sat in on about ninety minutes of testimony from a state department of education official about monitoring and compliance procedures. It was not exactly the stuff of Law and Order, but I was struck by how closely the real thing resembles the mock trials I've participated in at school. I'll have to go back when something with a little drama is being litigated.

Progress on the Moot Court Front

I did not meet my self-imposed deadline for sending my moot court brief to my partners. I sat down at the computer last night with the idea of emailing something out by the end of the night come hell or high water, but when I finally finished my draft I decided to sleep on it before I hit "send." Good thing. What feels like an epiphany in the wee hours often looks more like a hallucination after a good night's sleep. After a substantial rewrite, I sent my draft on its merry way (in the end, it was about twenty-five hundred words, not the three thousand I predicted).

Demon Procrastination

Well, my recent promise of moot court updates has gone unfulfilled. The due date for the brief is coming on fast, and I've barely started writing. On Tuesday I promised a teammate that I would get her a draft of my section of the brief before the weekend. At this point, that more or less means writing a three-thousand-word paper in a day. This is going to be a very rough draft.

Bombs Away

I just sent out my first few applications for real, honest-to-goodness, full-time lawyering jobs. The application process makes me sick to my stomach. The economy being what it is, there are scores of applicants for every job, so I know that every employer's first order of business will be to scan my application materials for a reason--any reason--to put them in the "reject" pile. No amount of proofreading feels like enough.

Schedule Conflicts

About half of my credits this semester are coming not from classes but from "co-curricular" activities: externship, moot court, law review. You would think that would make my schedule very flexible, but I am starting to see that it is going to cause some problems.
This week, for example, the judge I extern for wanted to take the office to lunch. I wasn't about to pass that up, so I missed Decedents' Estates. That would be fine if I weren't already scheduled to miss Decedents' Estates twice in October when I travel for my moot court competition. The DE professor will summarily drop anyone who misses more than four classes, so I only have one more absence to spare. My calendar is going to be pretty hairy before this semester is over.

It's Lonely at the Top

During my 1L year, everyone in the full-time program spent hours upon hours together. I think we all--even people like me, who didn't make a lot of close friends--felt bonded to the group. As 2Ls we began to scatter a bit as electives became available to us, but I still saw the same faces all the time.
Now I'm suddenly surrounded by strangers. The line between full-time and part-time students is completely blurred, my classes are full of 2Ls whom I've never met, and everyone in the 3L class seems to have more obligations off campus than on. In a sense, it feels like law school is already over. 1L and 2L were the war; 3L is just a mop-up operation.

The Externship Begins

Working at the state supreme court means passing through these doors to get to the office every morning. The resulting sense of self-importance is pretty intense. Here is what I learned in my first week:

1. Real attorneys spend a lot less time proofreading than students do. Every document I've looked at has more than its share of typos and grammatical errors.
2. Being asked to decide which side is right is much harder than merely being told to argue for one side or the other.

So far, I love the work. All indications are that it's going to be a great semester.