I am 75% of the way through my first year of law school. That blows my mind. I still feel like that confused, timid guy who walked in here in August hoping that I had made the right choice about what I want to do with the rest of my life. I guess I still am confused and timid guy sometimes, but I think I'm less so. Mostly right now I'm tired, but I'm definitely not worried about this being the right choice.
You see, the supervisor of the skills course I'm in has said three or four times this semster, that this is the semester that 1Ls at Mitchell start to feel like attorneys. And she said she was happy to be a part of that. This is the skills course that's had me negotiating contracts, and for which I'll be giving an oral argument at the end of the semester. So, when she made the statement, she was referring to that. And, I don't know, maybe that will make me feel like a lawyer. I'm gonna try to leave that door open.
But what I do know is that I have already been getting what I want out of law school--I'm already feeling helpful. I'm helping people right now, every week. I get to come in every Saturday and talk with people about their problems and help them with paperwork that can be overwhelmint. I get to help them fram their questions for attorneys and make sure they understand what's the attorney's saying. Some weeks (including this one), it's hard to remember what I'm doing here. I can get inundated with trying to remember every detail of Contracts and Civil Procedure, both of which are important beyond the grade I'm trying to get. But in that quest for detail, I sometimes lose sight of why the detail is important. Why do I need to know about personal jurisdiction? It's not because Professor Janus is going to test me on it--I mean, he did test me on it Thursday. But that's the immediate, and frankly, small concern. I need to know about personal jurisdiction because one day I may want to help a client with a problem, and the help could hinge on the court's lack of personal jurisdiction. Who knows?
That's what I need to keep in mind.
And I need to keep it foremost in my mind, because I am really tired right now. Just emotionally exhausted. And the secret of Spring Break is there's not really that much time off. It's a week in name, but I haven't been outlining all the way along (like I said I would), so I've got to get that caught up. And because of midterms, I haven't been able to start next week's reading like I normally would. So, I'm off my reading schedule. This all means, I'm working half of the upcoming week to get everything back together, so that the next half of the semester, I can march through this with a little more organization and happiness. I wasn't ready for this semester to be so much busier than last semester. I worked really hard, but I never felt I got myself into a good rhythem the way I did by the end of last semester. So, now is my time to get it together.
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My mother keeps saying, "I don't know what I'm going to do when you become a lawyer." I can sort of understand why she says this. The only times she's had to deal with a lawyer were times of extreme stress--divorce, failure of a business. And while one attorney was on her side, there were at least one who opposed her. So, I get it. But when she got in trouble, she didn't hesitate to go to a lawyer for help. And that says something.
And more than that, there are so many attorneys who are doing good things. Helping out people facing foreclosure, fighting for civil rights, defending people who are accused of a crime, and doing billions of other things their clients need them to do.
It just seems funny to me that people only see attorneys as schills for big business, or as oily snake-charmers. I'm becoming an attorney because I want to help people, and in that respect, I'm in the vast majority of my class.
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