I told a woman to get a gun today. Man, I can’t believe it. But she has a psycho ex, and nothing but faith in god between her and him, and before I knew it, it came out, “Maybe you should get a gun.”

Ah, legal services!

Even funnier: she said she knew how to shoot, and that she liked 45s, whereupon Supervisor started going on about he liked them too, but they “tend to jam after you fire about a hundred times.” Um, okay.

A little less funny was the talk Supe and I had, finally, about that wackjob of a memo I wrote up last week that totally missed some cases and, in his words, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going into court with that. I still don’t know what the law is.” Ouch. It was a nice way to say it, but bottom line? Your memo sucked the big one, hk.

The talk was actually less of a bloodbath than I thought it would be, mostly because Supe had found another way to make the point he wanted to make in the case. So it was mostly an exploration of why I felt I was so bad at legal research (getting bogged down in details and missing the big picture), and what we could do to fix that (more practice, don’t think of it as research, think of it as writing the brief).

I should say, in my defense, that it wasn’t entirely my fault, this memo’s crappiness. For one, Supe didn’t give me enough details to do good legal research (he neglected to tell me the exact entitlement program in the case, so I was searching for vague terms like “entitlement” and “welfare” and “benefits”). And for another, on our second talk about the research, I actually had brought up the solution that he’d finally settled on, but he dismissed it then. Argh.

Well, all in a day’s crappy work. You try, and you fail, and you try again. All in all, Supe was pretty nice about it. This place is such a revolving door of interns that he’ll not remember me a few years out anyway.