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Working at the firm is kind of like having a quirky, rich uncle. Sometimes it's amusing, sometimes it's annoying, and occasionally you get fun things. Yesterday we got a happy hour (and, as part of that, to leave at 5 - more exciting?!). This week I've had an interesting project. And today we had a painful training.
The happy hour gave the summers more time to hang out and get to know each other. Surprisingly, I beat Chris at pool 2 out of 3 games. And after a few drinks, we found out from the recruiting coordinator how many people interviewed at our office that were winnowed down to the eventual 5 summer associates we have. It's a shocking number and points me towards "luck" as the answer to how I got here.
Today's training was for about Professional Development and setting SMART Goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, ummmm Mandatory? Asinine? No, those are words that describe the training. Alright, I don't remember what the acronym is, but the woman leading it made us write down short-term goals and specific ways to accomplish them. She was physically in the room with us, so we had to play nice and look remotely interested. Then she went through the videoconference and made one or two people from each office say what they wrote. Everyone's goals were bland, legitimate work goals for the summer: "I want to attend a hearing on an issue I worked on, and I will accomplish this by speaking to the associate I am working with..." and "I want to get work from ten partners in my department." Except this one kid in the Boston office. He says, "I want to get married. Five year goal. And I will accomplish this by getting my girlfriend to move here, then..." before he got cut off. The woman in our office running the training was shocked. I want to buy him a beer when I meet him. If training lady hadn't been standing twelve feet from me, I would have burst out laughing. Way to give an answer as useless as the question!

I didn't really know what lawyers "do" all day, and I'm still not sure. I feel like that with a lot of professions. My major project this week has been reading a hyper-technical contract and essentially rewriting it in terms that the client signing the contract will understand. The contract was, of course, drafted by lawyers. Come to think of it, this is what happened: the client paid lawyers to do something, they did it obtusely, and now the client has to pay lawyers again to tell them what they did in the first place. When she first started, Rebecca described the job of a contractor as "You make problems, then you fix the problems you made." That sounds eerily similar. What a hilarious business model!
Granted, there really is a point to "legalese" and writing contracts in such technical language. If it weren't written that way, there would probably be a lot of loopholes and ambiguities. But I don't think I am doing too much that a regular person couldn't do. I think that law school just helps train us to focus more and not give up at pointlessly complex language.

Corporations is turning out to be an incredibly helpful class. Tax also.

Last Saturday night I was told that if I were a Star Wars character, I would be C-3P0. It was easily the worst part of my night. I was so dismayed. The next morning I was told I would be an Ewok. I don't know if that helps. I guess it does?

For once, I was polite on the escalator and it paid off. The down escalator was broken, so everyone had to climb down. The pace was pretty slow because there was a guy a few people ahead of me climbing fairly slowly. I contemplated cutting him and the other people by shooting down the left side, but decided against it. Then someone behind me did the left side route, and jostled the slow guy a little bit. Well, when we got to the end, it turned out the slow guy was slow because he walks with a freaking cane. I am so glad I (for once) was polite and wasn't some jerk making life harder for a guy with a cane.