What The Hell Was That?

TGIF!

Well, it’s been one of those weeks. I kid you not! Take a look at Sergeant Saunders down there -- that’s pretty much my week. Except the boss frowns on submachine guns in the office. Between the drug prosecutor, the intern, and me, from Tuesday to today we finished four briefs on appeal, and one application for cert to our state Supreme Court. Not to mention the usual run of little things - like helping a trial prosecutor figure out how to approach a fairly serious witness problem, and installing the updated model jury instructions on our server.

UPDATE!

Forgot to come back and actually post this. Sigh. That was written on January 21, coming up on three weeks ago.  Not much changed up to yesterday. Through yesterday, four more brief for me (two of them abuse and neglect appeals, so not so much work as a criminal appeal) one more for the drug prosecutor, and one for the intern. She gets to slack off a bit, having just passed the state bar and getting sworn in and all that. You may well wonder how the heck long it takes my state to grade bar results, assuming the usual summer and winter examination dates if she’s just being admitted. The usual time. Results showed up in November and she missed the cut by one point. So, rather than take it lying down, she wrote her own appeal to the bar examiners and contested nine of the points they marked off. She won five of them! So, a belated admission ceremony and congratulations all around. Now, if we can just find her a job.

I see law school applications are down for the second or third year in a row. Good thing, because the legal job market is pretty grim. This is the first time in my memory that our graduating interns don’t have jobs waiting for them upon graduation or bar admission. It doesn’t help that most of them want jobs in prosecution. While the economy, in a national sense, seems to be doing fine, government, as a rule, is not. I think I wrote about the county budget process a while back, in terms of how the county raids the departments at the end of the fiscal year. Expect to see some screedy rants on the subject of the whole budget process in the near future.

A BREAK IS IN SIGHT!

My in shelves are now empty save for one habeas petition the trial court wants us to answer. Which I’m going to foist off on the intern so she’ll be able to add that weird sub-set of appeals skills to her resume. Me? I may take a day off for something other than doctor’s appointments for a change. Spending today cleaning off my desk of the accumulated filing and library updates. And the usual junk from the trial attorneys.