PT-LawMom

Well apparently a magazine in the U.K. has featured my blog and the British legal secretaries are heading over to check it out. Although I am a legal secretary and could regale you with many a cautionary tale (couldn’t we all?), the best legal secretary blog I have found is ” Lawyer’s Right Hand“. I would recommend that all of you visiting my blog from the U.K. first read and comment on my Curmudgeonly Legal Secretary post (which is aimed more at new attorneys than at us) and then head on over to Half Eagle’s blog to check out her very creative and useful tips for your everday life as a secretary.

In 1997, I made my best-ever purchase (second to the aforementioned Dyson), an HP 6L LaserJet printer. This trusty printer got me through undergrad, several years in publishing and I was looking forward to using it for law school. Unfortunately, the cable was outdated and wouldn’t work with my shiny new Mac. After moping around for a few days and considering purchasing an expensive new printer, I realized some Internet detective work was in order. I found the most wonderful store, Luso PC. Luso PC sells on Amazon (where I went) and eBay and has the best customer service I’ve encountered in a long time. When I at first ordered the incorrect converter cable, Joe at Luso e-mailed me right back and told me exactly what cable I needed and helped me ship it back. They immediately sent me the proper cable and then, thanks to some awesome MacWorld posters, I found the drivers I needed. I have just successfully printed a set of beautiful pages. I’m so excited!!!

Thanks to Julie-Fleming Brown of “Life at the Bar” for her post on my tips for new associates on how to best work with a legal secretary. Ms. Fleming-Brown is a life coach for attorneys and covers some very useful topics on her blog, such as how to best achieve work/life balance, the role of money in career decisions and the role of per-partner-profit in a firm’s increased billable hour goals. She may not know I’ve been a loyal subscriber to her blog for about a year now. I would definitely recommend her blog to any future or current attorney.

MSNBC has an article today that states that the number of federal tax filing by undocumented immigrants continues to increase.

“They want to go forward, work, be a normal taxpayer,” said Erica Gonzalez, a staffer in ACORN’s Fresno office, where demand for the tax ID has shot up in recent years. “If they want to establish themselves here, this lets them do that.”

Wow, I'm getting some serious traffic lately from New York and the UK.  Hello.  :)  Hope you're enjoying my little blog. 

A little more than a month until orientation and I’m getting excited. I’ve read “One L”, “Getting to Maybe”, “Law School Confidential” and the wicked scary “Brush With the Law”. I keep picking up my CivPro Examples and Explanations book… and then putting it down again. I think it will make more sense once my casebook arrives. I know, I know. Half of you are telling me to drop the books and relax before four years of hell begin. The other half are saying, “What?!? You mean you don’t already have your E&E highlighted, tabbed and indexed? Time is running out!!”

The school had another admitted students event recently and I met a handful of my future classmates, several of whom live near me. They are all well-educated, mostly close to my age and working in interesting fields. I think we’ll have some great discussions. I just hope their work/school experience doesn’t help them kick my tush to the bottom of the class ranking scale. LOL! Seriously, though, I think this summer will bring a lot of challenges and a great chance to meet some new like-minded people. I was pleased to hear that most of them are working (there are at least two that are NOT and will be in our part-time program, which I think is patently unfair!) so we’ll mostly all be facing similar work/school balance challenges.

I’m still waiting to hear from the financial aid office about summer loans but they assure me I’ll get a loan and all will work out. I’m actually fairly zen about this. I trust them… for now. I’m going with the old schoolteacher saying - you have an A grade now and it’s yours to lose. This is very unlike the old me who would fret about every little thing. I think motherhood has stripped away a layer of neurotic tendencies. I just don’t have the time or energy to worry about things that haven’t technically gone wrong yet.

Speaking of things potentially going wrong, I had a strange conversation today. I was recently assigned an additional partner at work. We finally got the chance to sit down and have our “get to know each other” chat today. When I told him I was going to law school at night, he seemed a bit shocked. He told me that he went to school part-time for 1L and then switched to full-time (if I had a dime for everyone who has said that, well, you know…). Then I mentioned my schedule. Mind you, when I was hired I specifically chose a non-litigation desk so that I could leave at a reasonable hour (no 4:30 filing deadlines to meet). They assured me it was nooooo problem and said that the firm has plenty of other people to help if necessary. Well if you’d seen the look on this guy’s face, it was obvious no one shared that with him. Not much I can do. His last secretary worked until 5:30 or 6 and they moved him off her desk. I can’t do that, law school or not. Right now I have to be walking out the door at 5:20 at the latest if I want to be sure that I’ll make it through rush hour traffic to my son’s daycare by 6:30 (usually arrive earlier but one accident could — and has in the past — mess everything up!) That’s why this big firm has a night word processing department. Hey, I get it. Word processors are just not the same as your own, personal secretary. But it’s not my fault he gets in around 10 a.m. when I’ve already been there almost two hours and doesn’t ramp up until the late afternoon. I’m experienced and efficient. Get me a document before I leave and I’ll turn it around. We can make this work. But the undercurrent of the conversation concerned me a bit…. I need this job, the healthcare coverage and, most of all, the salary, at least for the next two years or so. Hopefully this issue won’t rock the boat.

I am burning mad reading this story, not so much about the USCIS raid but about the blantant racist, ignorant things these people’s neighbors have done to try to push them out of their NIMBY neighborhood. ARGH!

Georgetown University Law School has decided that now’s is a good time to remember that it’s a Catholic institution. Or perhaps it’s too scared of losing the support of rich, conservative alumni to support its current students. Jenny Woodson, a first-year GT law student, accepted an internship with Planned Parenthood and was told that the school would offer her funding under their program that supports students during unpaid public interest internships. Apparently since Planned Parenthood, in addition to providing desparately needed services to young women nationwide, just happens to offer abortion services, Ms. Woodson will not be eligible for funding this year.

Ms. Woodson had the following remarks on the school’s last-minute decision:

“If Georgetown wants to be a Catholic University it has the freedom to identify as such,” she said. “If the school wants to abide by Catholic doctrine it should do so consistently and prevent all activities the Church disagrees with. This includes prosecutors’ offices that impose the death penalty, gay rights organizations, political candidates and judges that hold positions that disagree with the Catholic church, military law organizations and human rights organizations (the majority of which support reproductive rights, as well).

“When we apply to Georgetown Law, the most you hear about the Jesuit tradition is that [the school] supports students doing work in the public interest,” she added. “If I ever knew that taking part in women’s rights issues would lead to a chilling effect, I don’t know if I would have ever considered coming here.”

The truth is that Georgetown does advertise itself as a Jesuit institution, if somewhat discreetly. They don’t make it blatant, but if you have contact with the hospital, especially during childbirth, you hear things that remind you of their stance on certain issues. On the other hand, Ms. Woodson has a good point. There are so many public interest organizations in DC that, as part of their good work, support segments of the population or issues that the Catholic church opposes. It seems awfully arbitrary for the school to decide now to take a stand.

The Washington Post has an article today about Hightstown, NJ, a small town outside Princeton that recognizes that it’s immigrants are helpful members of society who work hard in local businesses and help to strengthen their economy. Instead of harassing them, they chose to embrace them and have more immigrants calling the police than hiding from them. It’s a really heartwarming story about an alternative way of handling the issue of policing versus undocumented immigrants while the federal government figures things out.