Of Labels and Orientation

Greetings, law fans!

When Perry and I started this blog, we agreed to do about one (substantial) post per week each. I believe he has indicated that he is working on something about classes to be put up soon, so keep a weather eye open for that. I, on the other hand, ran into a bit of a snag. I had originally intended to keep up with my string of "how-to" posts and write on briefing cases, since I learned how to do it in undergrad and my orientation this week showed me that it's a surprisingly rare skill for incoming 1Ls. However, I soon learned that there will be a workshop at my school next week on this very topic, and I felt that it would be remiss to not scope that out first and get a sense of their suggestions. Furthermore, I did not want to write a lengthy treatise on this only to generate a brief "oh yeah by the way" addendum next week or try to fit it into the existing post. So that's out for this week.

Which leaves me only to make a brief announcement that I will from here on out be including tags in my posts for easy reference to aid enterprising legal scholars. I feel like, if our intent is to convey our experiences for future students, it would be helpful if they could quickly access anything they desire to read about without skimming across the entire blog. I haven't discussed this with Perry yet, so I will only be instituting it for my posts for now to experiment a little. Please pardon our dust.

Orientation concluded yesterday. I don't care much for orientations by and large, and I won't get into the boring details about it, but even I couldn't help but glean a few useful tidbits from the process. The chancellor made quite a good introductory speech on Wednesday telling us that we were entering a service profession and that we must avoid feeling superior by virtue of becoming officers of the court. Our goal, in whatever field of law we pursue, is to serve. We are to be mouthpieces for our clients, to translate their desires, needs, fears, and wants into the complex legal language that our country's far-too-fragile rule of law demands. I think this is the message I'm taking into year one, and hopefully beyond.

The two other main themes, derived from this main one, were pro bono work and professionalism. In the first vein, we were informed that the ABA recommends attorneys to devote 50 hours per year to pro bono work - which translates into about a week's worth of work total. We were further told of the myriad of opportunities that we would have to do pro bono work of our own by volunteering to provide free legal services for the homeless, immigrants, and others who daily fall through the cracks (all under the supervision of a licensed attorney, of course). I feel sure that this will be in my future in some way, though perhaps I will wait until my second year to get deeply involved. It was nonetheless good to hear that there is force behind that "service profession" claim.

On the topic of professionalism, we were constantly reminded not only that we are building our reputation now but also that the colleagues we meet with in class will be our firm partners, the judges we appear before, the elected officials who make and enforce laws, and the adversaries we meet in the court room. A far cry better than a bitter reminder, as was the case in the past, that a full third of us will not be there next year (they actually made sure to reassure that virtually all of us will graduate).

I don't feel like I've adequately expounded on these themes or addressed them with requisite eloquence, but let them remain there as a guide as we embark on this journey through law school. The time to commence the journey has come at last.

I had better start on that civil procedure reading...

~PAX