Week 7 was pretty hectic for me. It felt as if every day I had a new project to work on, but we all know what they say, “Welcome to the life!”

On Monday, I attended the Direct and Cross-Examination Seminar presented by Miami partner Scott Sarason. We learned about effective ways to portray a story in your cross and direct examination of a witness. We also watched a couple of famous cross-examinations from movies. These two skills are critical in a trial because this is where you introduce evidence to the jury. After the seminar, I focused on a personal jurisdiction issue for partner and my mentor Brett Carey. I initially thought the answer would be easy to find, but I found the issue to be much more problematic.

On Tuesday, I worked on researching a few different issues I was assigned. We also received our case file for the Mock Trial on August 3rd. The Mock Trial is about a plane crash victim’s estate suing the airplane manufacturer and aircraft mechanic. I am representing the aircraft mechanic, who clearly did nothing wrong. I am extremely excited for the mock trial. It was actually one of the first things I learned about the Summer Associate Program and one of the things that persuaded me to choose RumbergerKirk!

Wednesday was much of the same. I mainly continued research on the issues I had received. We also had a firm-wide COVID-19 update, but given the current circumstances, nothing has really changed. Most of the firm is still working remotely and comes to the office only when they need to. As the summer has gone on, I have become more comfortable with virtual practice. I definitely could see this changing the landscape of how law firms practice moving forward.

On Thursday, I attended the Direct Examination Workshop. I had to perform the direct examination of a witness to a car accident. He was a vital witness to the case because he knew the color of the light at the time of the accident. The workshop went well, but one thing that I found difficult to do virtually was to present evidence to the witness and to have the witness utilize the evidence. I will probably get better the more times I do it.

If you remember my blog post from 2 weeks ago, I made a timeline of events that occurred in a crime for one of the firm’s cases. On Friday, I was able to go to the location with partners Dan Gerber and Samantha Duke. We retraced the timeline to get a better understanding of what happened. This was the first time I had gone to a location to investigate. It was very hot during the investigation, so I ended up sweating through my shirt! After the investigation, I finished the rest of my work from home.

Week 7 was one of my busiest weeks yet, but now it is time to prepare for trial. The next couple weeks are going to be a lot of work and very rewarding.