Sunday, October 04, 2009

Trial by Fire

Now that I am over one month into my clerkship, I can officially say that the job is great. Crazy at times, but great.

My judge told me that if I have felt incredibly busy over the past month, it is not just because I am new. We have had four trials in the past four weeks, which is extremely unusual on a civil docket. Most civil cases settle for a myriad of reasons (costs, unpredictable juries, etc), but not on my watch. To give a little context, my predecessor had about the same number of trials in eight months that I have had in four weeks.

I am not complaining in the least though. While trials require a lot of tedious work for law clerks, I have learned so much. I realized that I had never even sat through a full trial before this job. Now I know the whole process and learned about good and sadly, much more about bad lawyering. No Jack McCoys over at my courthouse. Actually most are not even close and it makes me a bit sad about the legal profession (but more about that another time).

The returning law clerks told me that starting off with a crazy schedule like this will make the rest of my tenure seem like a piece of cake. We'll see.

No comments: