Jan 18: Challenges So Far

Surprising absolutely nobody, the largest difficulty I have had at internship so far is my age and general lack of experience. I want to be of use to the firm, but I don’t always know how to do the things they want me to do. Luckily for me, though, that’s an issue the rest of the firm is also aware of, and I don’t have to worry about being judged for asking questions a more educated person would know the answer to, because there’s no way that I would know the answers to begin with.

From this comes another issue, which is also a problem the rest of the people working here face, but is made a lot worse because of my lack of experience. Basically, the amount of cases dealt with by the firm is astronomical. On a single day, I could be working on four different things, and that number's a lot higher for the more seasoned attorneys. The other people working here deal with this problem by writing everything down, and asking other people for help in researching or grabbing various documents from the printer. Personally, this jumping around has been very hard for me. I’m not so good with technical terminology (something I learned through the League Of Amazing Programmers) and it’s hard for me to adapt to all of the legal phrases being thrown around. Because of this, I often don’t know what my coworkers or talking about, or worse, what they need from me. However, independent research has helped a lot with this, and I’m finding that I remember what something means much better if I can attach a case to it. Plus, it’s a pretty cool feeling when I hear an acronym I didn’t know a week ago and I remember the exact laws behind it. It may be happening slowly, but I’m definitely getting better.

Also, I got locked out of the office this week, which didn’t really tie into the prompt but I thought I’d bring it up anyway. That was… a fun time. That’s all for this week!