Things didn’t slow down in my second week at Rumberger. In fact, they only got busier, which is good because I definitely prefer to be busy over the alternative. Idle hands and whatnot. One thing that struck me this week is since RK is primarily a defense firm; we don’t really have the luxury of choosing our cases. If a client gets sued we have to defend them whether there’s any actual merit to the suit or not. Case in point, an assignment I worked on this week is facially the textbook definition of a frivolous lawsuit. As I was researching and writing up my findings, it was hard to not get frustrated at the baselessness of the plaintiff’s claims. But ultimately I checked myself, because while the lawsuit may appear frivolous and meritless to me, who knows how the client views it. They’re not lawyers after all. So it was a nice reminder that every case deserves the appropriate level of attention, even those we think should be tossed out.

Week 2 also meant we started the Seminars and Workshops for the Summer Associate Program. This week the topic was Motion Practice. I’ve been lucky enough to compete in a few mock trial competitions during law school, so I’ve had a chance to practice motions in limine before. But I didn’t have any real practice in non-evidentiary hearings. Learning how to recap the facts of a case quickly and then analogizing that case to a legal precedent was new for me. I’m still more comfortable arguing the Federal Rules of Evidence, but overall I enjoyed and am thankful for the practice, especially because it dealt with arbitration. Given that arbitration is becoming more widely used, any practice with it is helpful. The only regret I have is that because Dan Gerber made the exercise a closed universe, we weren’t allowed to bring in any outside case law. And while normally I wouldn’t have minded this, just the week prior SCOTUS handed down its decision in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, which will almost certainly cause some shifts in the current jurisprudence on arbitration. So I would’ve enjoyed having an excuse to take an in-depth look at that opinion and see whether it was applicable here or not.

The other assignments I handled this week were rather varied. I did research for Leonard Dietzen on some school-related matters, I helped David Marsey with probable cause standards, I assisted Linda Bond Edwards with a public records request, and I also had to learn the doctrine on some rather obscure anti-discrimination provisions for Nicole Smith. I really like that the assignments generally come from different areas of the law. It keeps thing fresh and fun. And I am firmly of the belief that work should at least be a little fun. Plus, it exposes me to parts of the law I wouldn’t otherwise know, and likely wouldn’t explore on my own.