Post #2: First Week

Well, for the first week of my internship, I've basically done the same thing--read transcripts and summarized. This gets me caught up on how the case has progressed from the beginning to this point in time and gives my supervisor something she can glance over that summarizes these huge binders worth of information into one o two pages of facts relevant to our case. I have already noticed that some of the allegations against our client are backed up by nothing concrete, and one charge in particular we actually have evidence directly against. In the process of writing all of this I'm also getting acquainted with the office again, which is nice. This form of professional writing I'm hoping to become familiar with as I intern, but what I know from my history in the office is this: your assertions should be directly stated, yet the jargon you use may make it seem the opposite, which makes reading difficult without a legal education background. So naturally I have to ask my supervisor a lot of questions to get a feel for what kind of assertions we are trying to make.

This internship has taught me a lot about how I need to change my way of thinking and reading with legal documents and cases. Over this week, my reading has greatly improved--I know what I am looking for as well as how it is relevant, and when my supervisor asks me how I feel about a certain point or argument, I not only can formulate an opinion, I can back it up with a reference in my summary, which of course is much more persuasive than stating how I feel so far.