Way back when I was immediately out of law school (quite literally the summer / fall after taking the bar) I ended up working… somewhere similar to a clerkship — it wasn’t exactly a clerkship because I set it up myself and I was getting a stipend through my law school, and I was shared between a lot of appellate judges as opposed to just one. The short explanation was that when I graduated, the economy was such shit, law schools were gaming the system by paying a small stipend to any recent graduate unable to find work so that their stats could still say everyone was gainfully employed right out of law school. We just had to go find ‘something’ to do and your law school would pay you to go do it.
Anywho… I got assigned to work for this attorney and I was handed a stack of casefiles day 1 and told to write appellate judicial opinions for them. Not low level mind you. Just out of the block, go write substantial substantive decisions for these cases for the appellate judges.
I was given one exemplar of a very dissimilar nature and told go. So I start trying my damndest. I finish the first one and send it off to them and request comment, thinking I’d get back a redline, I could then better figure out what they want. But instead… nothing. I send some follow up messages throughout the week and waylay them in the hallway and I’m always brushed off and told sometime later. So I keep working. I keep talking to this attorney trying to get comment on my work, and never get anything. Nothing returned to me, no comment whatsoever. At various points this person who is my superior starts (rarely) making small talk about how the other weekend they went from never having any animals to adopting four cats in one day. Seems odd.
The job had some strange caveats to it too, I was supposed to show up late and leave early because I wasn’t given a key to the office. I couldn’t take any work home, I was specifically told I couldn’t use any work I did there even for writing samples. The office operated like it was some sort of high security area… but it definitely wasn’t. Even today looking back on it, I’m not sure if this was actual office policy or what would turn out to be my supervisor’s delusions.
Regardless, weird(er) things start to happen. When I ask one day if they had read through any of the stuff I had been sending them, they get a bit irate and tell me they heard I had asked other attorneys there if they could give some feedback on the work I am doing. She was pissed. I was told I should stop bothering the other attorneys and I was supposed to come into the office, close my office door and do my work and not talk to anyone.
I accepted the hostile work environment and did just that. Came in, closed the door and just researched, typed, and sat in my office. But the walls were literally paper thin… and I could hear her call the attorneys on either side of my office and ask if I was in my office working. (office on the right) **ring**… what.. yeah. They’re here. Uh huh. You want me to get them for you? Oh. ok. Bye” **Ring**… (same conversation from the left office). Rinse, repeat throughout the week.
And then it all fell apart. A bit over a month of working there, I get called to our conference room, which was also the legal library. She was visibly shaking she was so angry. She starts screaming that I was wasting her time. That nothing I had done was usable. She starts losing track of her argument… I read this opinion last week, no I came in early to read it, I stayed late… Her grasp of the timing on when she did one thing or another became fluid and lost. She yelled that I should know how to write appellate judicial opinions because I went to law school. And then she starts throwing books around the room and hurling piles of papers. The fun legal casebooks no one uses, just hurling them everywhere. She then yells that she thought I would be better than the last clerk because she had never used a single thing he had ever written at all. (I had replaced him… and he had been working — for her specifically — for the last year).
This tantrum continued for a good 10 minutes. Although I was a neophyte, I wasn’t an idiot. I quietly and rather detached watched this person lose the strands of their sanity in front of me. Once it reached a lull. I said, “Oh. Ok.” and got up and left. I went back to my office and sat there weighing my options, then picked up the phone and called my law school… although I had set this job up myself, it was a rather impressive position and I was smart enough to know I couldn’t just burn that bridge because it would reflect on my law school too… (politics!). I honestly got 3 sentences in to an explanation and didn’t even tell them yet about what had just happened, and to their credit, they told me almost verbatim “GTFO” and they didn’t give a crap about reputation in such situations. Probably one of the relatively few positive opinions I have of my law school was their immediate reaction to my problem.
I walked into the head attorneys office (whose name at the time was on a great many impressive pieces of paper in that state, and was in effect the name invisibly stamped behind every appellate decision for years in this state) and proceeded to tell him what had been going on and the culmination in the law library just then.
He listened quietly. Then basically said that they had noticed she was acting erratically recently. Didn’t realize this had been possibly building for at least the last year. He got up, left me sitting in his office for about 15 minutes… then came back and effectively admitted to me that they thought she may have had a mental breakdown, she was going to go on a break for awhile, and it would be taken care of. Interestingly, of everything he seemed most seriously concerned that they had been working the last clerk for a year without using a single thing he generated; apparently it seemed the managerial oversight in the office was a bit lacking. he made a big point of telling me that was not how the office was supposed to utilize their clerks and this had never happened before.
I was then told that unfortunately, for several reasons, including the fact that this attorney’s name was behind a LOT of case decisions in the state relating to some rather serious issues, they were obviously going to keep this quiet and deal with things internally as best as possible. At which point I was told I was no longer welcome at the office — pretty much for exactly that reason. I was unfortunately part of the “dealing with things”. They basically said they couldn’t force me to not tell anyone about what had gone on, but they would prefer if I didn’t.
I suppose the carrot to that request was that I was told that this rather impressive person would gladly write me a very glowing recommendation to where ever I wanted. I never did take him up on that offer. Partially because it had taken months to setup this position and I had nowhere to go now, but also because I am a paranoid fuck and just didn’t trust this guy considering I had just been tossed out as opposed to just being assigned to another (sane?) attorney.
But, that was how my clerkship ended.
I left it on my resume because it looked impressive, and it is sufficiently disguised as to how long I was there, but so very few people know the backstory.