Putting in the Work

In order to become an attorney with their own practice, a person has to go through three years of law school, pass the bar, gain some years of experience working in a larger firm, and then they can start out on their own. Roger, my supervisor, has done all of this, plus he has worked his own firm since 2012. All of this experience doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows all the ins and outs of the law. This week, we had to deal with a particular case where a judge, someone who had over thirty years of experience, was even wrong about one area of the law. Every attorney has to perform legal research in order to better argue a case and understand the written law. Most research has to do with finding precedents, which are other cases similar to the one you are arguing and that result in the outcome that you would want for your case. These precedents prove to a lower court the way a higher court interpreted a certain law. My job this week was to do this legal research for Roger. I was able to use the resources provided to him by the BAR to search for precedents in a case where a court inappropriately used a pendente lite order, which is not legally permissible to be considered a final decree and is only used in between a hearing and a trial, as a presumption of a spouses ability to indefinitely pay child support. Finding precedents in this type of case was difficult due to the specificity of the situation and code, but I was able to find one. Roger then had me write up a case brief, which is basically a summary and analysis of the details and interpretations in the case to be filed internally and referenced accordingly. Delegating the legal research in this case to me, gave Roger the freedom to work on other aspects of the case and better prepare him for court. The details of the case that I found through the research gave us grounds to challenge the judges former ruling and rule in favor of our party.