It has been awhile since my last post, mostly because I have a serious and potentially long-term case of blogger's block. I seem to be unable to think of anything worthwhile to say and, for that reason, I have decided that it is better to say nothing than to ramble on meaninglessly.
But then I remembered that I forgot to mention that I decided to drop clinic. Of course, it's not exactly like everyone was waiting with baited breath to see what I was going to do, but the reason I started this blog initially was because I was so frustrated with it and wanted to have an outlet for it. It was a pretty difficult experience. Looking back, I know that some of it was my fault. Still, though, the supervisors were pretty difficult. The one that I liked was almost never in her office, didn't practice family law and could never give us any advice, other than to tell us to go to talk to the other supervisor, and never did the things she said she was going to do. The mean supervisors, the one I referred to as Professor Umbridge, was also unhelpful--she would give us fifteen directions to go look in, but all of them always turned out to be completely unhelpful. On the night before our first hearing, she mentioned several hours worth of stuff that she wanted us to look up--all of which I tried to explain was not what we needed to be looking at (it was a statute that said that if a kid had been in foster care for 15 out of the last 22 months, the department had to move for termination of parental rights--(1) these kids had not been in foster care that long, and (2) we were representing the mother, we didn't WANT to move for termination!!). Luckily, by then we knew better than to listen to her, and we didn't do it. Our hearing lasted like 10 minutes. Funny how no one could tell us something important like THAT. Like, don't spend weeks on developing good oral argument---because only one of you will get a chance to talk at all and you won't get to talk more than 3 minutes. That would have been helpful. But no. No one told us anything useful.
I enjoyed working on that case, though, and even though our supervisors were profoundly uninteresting and unhelpful, my partner and I made it through and reunited a family, at least partially. Our other client was another story entirely. She was the most difficult woman I had ever met. She emailed 6 or 8 times a day, with a bunch of different things she was telling us to do. Unfortunately for her, that's not really the way a lawyer-client relationship works. You don't say "File this complaint and this complaint and this complaint"---your lawyer strategizes with you on your behalf. Of course, a client's opinion and concerns definitely come into play, but it is not for the client to tell the lawyer what to do, especially when the rules governing these kinds of complaints specifically forbid us to do what she was asking. We tried to explain, but were unsuccessful. In the end, it was mostly my desire never to work with her again that made me decide to quit. You may think that's a bit drastic, but if you had met this bat shit crazy lady, you would understand. Besides, I know that our supervisors will dump more and more ridiculous assignments on us at the last minute, with no regard to our other school work, and I'm tired of all my other classes taking the backseat. Last semester, I had 7 credit hours of clinic, and 9 hours of everything else---and the 7 governed everything else. That can't happen again. I need to be able to focus on my other work and get good grades in everything. I need to do what needs to be done, without regard for what my supervisor will say if I tell her that tonight, I really do need to do my homework for a particular class. (BTW--she will say that's not even C level work.)
All in all, I feel like I've made the right decision and I am looking forward to a simpler time, a happier time, when there's no nasty client sending 100 emails a day that I can never answer fast enough, when there's not emails in my inbox from supervisors that make me feel panicked because there's not enough time in the day to do all the things I know they'll ask me to do, when I can do all my work for all my classes without anyone telling me what order to do them in or giving disproportionate weight to one class to the detriment of all the others, to a time where I can leave to go home for the weekend and not worry about what I might be missing, not worry about my clinic partner being mad at me, not feel like I can't possibly go to the gym because I might get a hateful email in the mean time.... It's my last semester in law school, and I'd like it to be a happier one than the fall semester. Here's hoping.
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