Vox Lucens

About two weeks ago, I was given the biggest single legal project of my “career” to date. I am the point man on a mortgage foreclosure proceeding. Not incredibly exciting stuff, and I obviously can’t sign pleadings or anything like that, but still, for being my first start-to-finish project it’s kind of cool.

And there is also something to be said for the feeling of competence that comes when you can research a project, write a pleading, and begin litigation. I call the feeling “assisted competence”–competence that comes when I ask lots of questions.

With the boss going on vacation for next week, and me being out of the office the week after that, it hit me at about 10 this morning that I needed to file the complaint today. So I pulled it up, added a cause of action, made some final changes. I added the final lis pendens, made sure the caption number was right, and took the docs to the attorney. When my boss signed the complaint, I felt like I had arrived. My job was done, the pleading was ready, and I could sit back and watch the client grin.

Such is what law school teaches. I did the research, knew the elements of the prima facie case, and rolled them all into a crisply worded, beautifully formatted 19-point complaint. In short, I had the theory down. And when the theory gave way to practicality, my feeling of competence came to an abrupt halt.

For I had to file it. And when you file it, I discovered, you have to add all sorts of stuff that could as well have been written in Greek, for all I understood them. A coversheet…a summons…a letter…a filing fee…a certificate of service…all things that I was familiar with in principle, but when asked to put them into a package that conformed to SC Rules of Civil Procedure, I felt like somebody had handed me a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle and given me an hour to do it.

And I would have failed, but for the truly competent people that were willing to give me their time to see that it was done right. At least, I hope it was done right! If I get a call from the Clerk of Courts next week I’m going to duck and cover.

At any rate, I was given a nice dose of the limits of law school training. There’s a lot more learning to go.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Law School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.