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Personal Narrative: My Interview With An Attorney

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Interview: For the interview portion of the career paper, I contacted three different attorneys that I know. As I am not quite familiar with any of the three, I sent them formal email requests to interview over the phone or by email. The first of my three prospective interviewees is Garret Murai, the husband of my Girl Scout Troop leader and an experienced construction attorney at Wendel Rosen Black & Dean LLP. The second attorney I chose to contact was my friend’s older sister, Hannah Yang, an attorney at the national law firm Polsinelli. Ms.Yang, who passed her bar exam in 2016, just began working at the firm in November 2016 in the Science and Technology Area. She ultimately declined to participate, but I thanked her for her time anyway. …show more content…

As a lawyer, I do a lot of reading and writing. I do go to court, but it’s a very small portion of the time I spend working. Most of the time I spend at the office is reading and writing. Reading is generally researching cases, like what the law says, or what the court has said about similar cases in the past. Otherwise, I am looking through documents to find documents that could either benefit or hurt our case. It’s important for a litigator to know not only what’s good for your case, but also what evidence the other side might try to use against your evidence. Then I try to find a way to either explain and negate the impact of that evidence. In terms of writing, I often write motions with the court. Often times, in the course of litigation, disputes will arise before trial happens, and you file a motion to the court to resolve it. This weekend I’m working on a summary judgement motion which asks the court to render a decision in my client’s favor without having to go to trial. Litigation and trial is extremely expensive, so one way to try to avoid those costs is to file a motion for summary judgement. We go, okay, here’s the facts of the case, here’s the evidence, here’s the law, and this is why we think we’re right and we don’t need to go to trial for the court to make that determination. So that’s one type of motion I’m working on right …show more content…

At our law firm, we have an hourly rate, and we charge by the tenth of an hour. Every six minutes of our time, we charge for. Because that’s the way many lawyers bill, we have to keep track of every minute of our day what we do. From 10:00 to 10:05 I wrote an email. From 10:05 to 10:30, I wrote a letter. That’s what shows up on the client's bill, so you need to be specific about what you do, so the client knows exactly what he’s paying for. At the same time, having to keep track of every minute of your time is very time consuming. Having the chance to interview real lawyers really benefitted me and impacted my view of law. Though my interview with Ms. Wang was brief, her response to my final question led me to briefly reconsider whether I truly wanted to go into law. However, this only ended up reaffirming my former interest. This is because after considering the various aspects of her job that she shared with me, I realized that I was truly interested in law itself, including all of the writing, reading, and research that comes with

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