One at a Time

11.13 am

Mid-semester evaluations for the Human Rights Clinic this week, which meant sitting down with my supervisor to talk about where we are in the project, where we want to be, and whether I'm getting what I thought I would from the whole thing. After establishing that the best time to have that meeting will be two weeks from now, when R and I are frantically writing draft after draft of the handbook, he asked how that whole social justice thing was going.

Social justice? What? I vaguely remembered mentioning something about having gone into law school with the idea of saving the world. Then came OCIP and callbacks and offers - and the truth of the matter is that when you're worrying about whether you're even going to have a job this summer, after you've been counting on said job to help pay for your semester in Europe, you start to forget that there was anything to school besides a mountain of debt and a BigLaw job at the end.

My supervisor said something that was oddly reminiscent of something I'd heard in one of those summer blockbuster disaster movies. "You can't change the world. Nothing that you or I do can change the world. But you can save one person. And for that person's family, it matters."

My East Coast Interview Tour

10.59 am

After spending a week interviewing in New York and DC, I can definitively say that there are differences between law firms, even in BigLaw. Some of it has to do with size - an office of forty lawyers feels different than an office of two hundred. Some of it has to do with work - one firm I interviewed with did only litigation, while another focused primarily on finance and international arbitrations. What interested me the most was the difference between the people at the firms.

I'd heard some recruiters talk about how firms hired based on "fit" - and I also heard that was a keyword for "we just didn't want to hire you". I'm more inclined to believe the former than the latter now. One of the firms that I was at this week is European based - and it shows. The attorneys I spoke to tended to have a more global view and to look beyond American law when discussing their work. Another firm, this one based in Texas, had more of a West Coast feel - pro bono work counts above the line there, and the attorneys were doing a "wear jeans/donate to breast cancer research" day.

And while I'm trying to sort out which firms are at the top of my list (extremely difficult, given that I only did callbacks at firms I really want to work at), I'm also sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring and reminding myself that it only takes one.

Post-OCIP Bliss

8.57 am

It's officially over. The two weeks of mind-numbing interviews, of sitting by the phone waiting for the firm to call (although I still haven't heard from 14 of the 25 firms I interviewed with), the 6 am alarm clock and the 2 am bedtime. And since I have gone through OCIP and survived, more or less, I provide a few words of wisdom for those contemplating going through the process in the spring or next fall.

1) Do the initial research, especially if there's a particular area of law you're interested in. The search by category field on b-line is helpful, but only to a point. Then, once you've found a firm practices in that area, check out the practice area by office location part of the website. Often, a firm that specializes in a smaller field, like international law or clean tech, will only do it in one or two offices.

2) Do more research before the interview. Find out something about your interviewers from the firm's website. Then talk to fellow Boalties who worked there last summer. If you go into the interview knowing something different and unique about the firm, it will demonstrate that you're genuinely interested, and not just applying because of the fear factor.

3) Remember to keep turning the interview questions around. If you're asked about your experience working with X, when you really want to be doing Y, explain how X led you to/will help you achieve Y. I had some great interviews where the interviewer and I talked about some of the really interesting parts of my resume - but it didn't have anything to do with the areas of law the firm practiced, and I didn't get callbacks.

Most importantly, relax and try to have a good time. You only have twenty minutes to make an impression, but that's plenty of time to connect with someone and convince them you're a good fit for the firm.

10.56 am

Interviews have been going well. It's a bit like speed dating - we sit across from each other at a table that's rather small, in uncomfortable chairs that don't quite pull up to the table, gaze into each other's eyes a moment or two, ask some questions, then go home and breathlessly await the ring of the telephone. Despite that, I've been rather impressed by how not-horrible the process has been so far. I'm enjoying the people I talk to - one interviewer and I talked about the horrible season the Red Sox have been having, and a second interviewer and I compared notes about my favorite professor (she had him when he had just started teaching). Two others asked me what I liked to do in my spare time, noting that they didn't want to hire only the brightest and the best - they wanted to hire smart kids who also know how to have fun. Plus, I got a squishy yellow duck. It doesn't get much better than that.

11.01 am

In non-OCIP news, the boy's sister got married this weekend. The wedding was up in Sonoma, and despite a hellish drive that involved sitting in traffic for almost two hours and a flat tire, we had a wonderful weekend. I think the highlight was watching the best man, the groom, and the bride's father all start dabbing at their eyes during the ceremony. I'm still in shock that I have friends and family who are old enough to get married - two cousins and a college roommate last summer, classmates and the boy's sister this summer, and I'm sure a bunch of weddings after 3L year. As Mr. Woodhouse would remark, it is entirely unreasonable that people should grow up and get married.

Feeders

2.44 pm

The fish tank, which has been sitting in a corner of the room with miscellaneous junk in it for as long as I've been dating the boy, is now set up and going. Last week we went to the hardware store, where he bought some 2 x 4's to make a frame for the tank to rest on. Then we went to the pet store, and spent an insane amount of money on filters and pumps and a heater and so on. Insert gravel, driftwood, some live plants, and the ceramic trees that I made back in college, mix with eco-start and chlorine neutralizer, let sit for a week, then add fish.

I didn't realize setting up a fish tank was so much work. The fish we have in it now are "testers," which means that in a week or so they die and we bring the water into the pet store to see what went wrong. I am resisting the urge to give them names, but they're so cute it's hard. In another week or so, if they're all still alive, we'll pick up some cichlids. The only downside about the fish tank is that it's on top of the dresser right next to my side of the bed. Which mean that a) I don't have a nightstand now and b) if there's a you-know-what in the middle of the night, I'm going to get woken up with thirty gallons of water and some very unhappy fish in bed with me.

2.49

OCIP is coming. It's like that scene in the movie, where you hear the scary music starting up in the background, and you say to the heroine, "don't go down that dark alley all by yourself," and she does and then the monster comes out. Well, maybe not that bad. But the scary theme music is definitely starting to play. I'm narrowing down my list, especially since boy might end up with a job that would require us to be in the Bay another five years or so. Now I'm trying to figure out how much detail to go into in a cover letter, and whether (and how much) to tailor them for the firms I'm really interested in.

And it would be awfully nice to know what my schedule's going to be...

Hills are Fun! (the 5 stages of bicycling)

11.09 am

Denial: No way am I getting back on that bike.

Anger: %@#! this bike!

Bargaining: Just let me make it up this hill.

Depression: I ride so poorly, what's the poing?

Acceptance: Hills are fun! I wonder if this is like runner's high...


11.24 am

I went for a ride yesterday, after sitting at the desk copy editing for eight hours. The plan was to take a spin around town and start to learn where everything is, so that I don't end up so hopelessly lost every time I leave the house. Instead, I ended up biking along Seven Hill Road and then to Lake Chabot. I discovered that hills are kinda fun, especially if there's a bunch of them in a row. Getting up the first one took work, but after that I could coast downhill and use that speed to get almost all the way to the top of the next hill. It reminded me of that golf-ball room in the Children's Museum in Boston - the one where you climb up the stairs, start your ball on the top of the wooden track, and try to drop it so that it makes it over all the hills into the milk crate at the bottom of the run.

6.05 pm.

I woke up this morning to an explosion of cilantro. We had started seeds in one of those little greenhouses, then transplanted the basil, thyme, and watercress to a window box and the tomato to a pot of its own. Then we put down more seeds (especially watercress and coriander, since those hadn't done well at all in the greenhouse). The watercress has been shyly poking its head up for the past two days, but the coriander/cilantro was nowhere to be seen until this morning. Overnight, six or seven shoots came up, and more have come up today, growing so fast I could almost hear them. I wasn't sure any were going to survive, as I had placed the window box on the front porch, where a squirrel found it and happily dug up all the seeds.

It has been an interesting summer. I use interesting in the same sense I would use it if you told me you were going to open a "muffin bottom" shop and wanted to know what I thought. Interesting. We leave the Berkeley house on Thursday. I have mixed feelings about that. One the one hand, I'll miss being so close to school, and the house is gorgeous. On the other, I won't miss waking up at 5am every morning to feed the dogs.

Work is going wonderfully, although since I'm not sure exactly what parts of it I can talk about, I won't talk about any of it at all. Suffice it to say that I am working on a wonderfully challenging memo interspersed with more academic types of things like syllabus writing and article editing. I also got a chance to go to a conference in Dallas, where I met a young lawyer from Argentina who knows several languages and runs a small printing press, a few grads from Boalt who lead eerily parallel lives, and a professor who decided to get into teaching because she realized halfway through a litigation that the case, although intellectually fascinating, was going to lead to the bankruptcy of a developing country. Which proves that not all lawyers are sellouts for the big money (something I was beginning to wonder about).

11.11 am

The assignment has finally arrived. That one. The memo which will consume most of my working hours for the next month, at least. The big one. The one that helps us figure out if we go ahead with the case or not. And I have absolutely no idea how to do it.

This, I think, is the prime example of why force feeding us the information we needed to write the memos/briefs in LRW/WOA is problematic. Sure, I know what the structure should look like. I can CRuPAC with the best of them. Which means I've got a great skeleton outline, set up all pretty with headers that will feed right into a table of contents. (It only took three hours of frustration on the brief assignment to figure that one out.) The problem, I fear, is that I'm not entirely sure what to put in between those headers.

It doesn't help that there really isn't any applicable law. So I've got to write a memo gunning for the law that's most favorable to our client. Not an interpretation of the law. But the actual law itself. Which, theoretically, would make this a breeze - just go through the books and pick the law I want. Not so easy. Because although the law we don't want to use (municipal law) is written down, the law we do want (international law) is not. There isn't even stare decisis in international law, so whatever cases I do find that are favorable to my client are persuasive at best.

It's going to be a wickedly exciting memo to write.

2.05 pm

The dogwalker arrived an hour an a half ago to take the puppies out, just as I was feeding them. Which meant, of course, that one ate too fast, threw up his lunch, and then resumed eating it. Ah, the life of a dog. I have that same feeling of relief parents must get when they send their children off to playdates. The house is quiet and I can actually get some work done. I sat outside to eat my lunch, and I could actually put my plate on the ground instead of trying to balance both it and the computer in my lap.

I've been busy working on a table showing the differences between the current UNCITRAL Rules and the proposed revisions for a conferences that's coming up in early June. The prof says that he'll put both our names on it when it circulates - my first quasi-published piece of international law work. I'm really hoping to at least get a writing sample out of this summer, if not a piece that could actually be published. Even if it's just my name as a co-author. Despite that fact that I thought LRW/WOA was about as exciting as having teeth pulled, this research fascinates me. I'm not sure if it's because this actually matters (there's a huge difference between having a paper due for school and being told that the prof needs something back asap so he can send it off to the other lawyers on the case) or it it's because this is the area that I want to work in (it's not that I'm not for blind people's rights, but it's not what I want to spend my life researching). It may also be because I'm the one in charge of doing the research, and the stakes are real if I mess it up. There's nothing quite like the rush I get after putting the attachment on the email and hitting send.

7.09 pm

A quiet day of work and dogs. I packed nine or ten more boxes in the old apartment this morning, and I'll go back and finish the rest either tomorrow evening or Wednesday. Then there's moving everything out, which needs to be done on Thursday (if I want help from the boy) and must be done by Saturday. The amount of junk I've thrown out astounds me. All this trying to be green and carbon neutral and Berkeley-hippie-esque rendered completely redundant with one move.

Then I get to do it all again (maybe) at the end of June, when I leave this house and go live in the Castro Valley apartment. Still undecided whether or not to look for a place closer to school. The idea of spending over an hour a day to get to school makes me less than happy. Neither does the idea of spending more than a grand for rent.

7.18 pm

The boy and I got seeds, and they're starting to grow. The basil is poking up little tendrils of leaves. They unfurl by the hour - every time I look there are more. The watercress and the thyme have put up little shoots too. The coriander and the tomato seeds haven't done anything yet, but boy says the big ones take longer. What I like most of all is the smell that comes off them when I lift the cover up - heavy and earthy, like fresh turned soil.

Time to light the mosquito coils and watch the sun get tangled in the trees on its way down.