First impressions

Work is awesome. Being at work at 8AM sucks. Say a mistrial on my first day. Was tons of fun. The prosecutor was pissed. Day 2 was just training, boring but required. My work last year doing appeals has helped me a lot in knowing the issues and some of the state law. Mock trial as an undergrad has helped me know a lot of the rules for running a trial. Voir Dire was new to me and a little confusing. The thought of doing it myself is a little scary. Tomorrow I get to go see the courtroom I will be working in and possibly see some of the cases I will be assigned. To start I will be given 15 or so cases. The goal is that one of them will go to trial. My provisional license hasn't shown up yet so I still can't do anything. Once I do one jury trial under supervision I can do trials on my own, without my supervisor even in the building. I didn't realize I would be trusted so much.

I've learned very quickly that life as a PD is kind of hectic. Every fifteen minutes or so my training is interrupted by another attorney stopping by with a question for my supervisor. Part of that is that she is the supervisor for all the misdemeanor attorneys and there are a lot of new misdemeanor attorneys.

Learned a lot about DUI cases and driving without a license cases. Learned about plea offers and what to expect from the prosecutors. Fortunately my office has a good working relationship with most of the prosecutors. A couple of them a real douche bags, but for the most part they seem nice. One of the attorneys is even dating a prosecutor.

I usually look for any excuse to wear a suit. Suiting up is awesome. I knew that this summer the requirement that I suit up fairly often would cause wearing a suit to lose its novelty. I didn't realize that it would only take one day for it to lose its novelty. My biggest problem is that my dress shoes are cheap pieces of crap and dig into the back of my heels. I put bandaids on the back of my heals to prevent this problem (and just bought some moleskin to see if that works better) but they can slip and fall off during the course of the day.

It has only been two days but I already know that I've chosen the correct career path. Enough pressure and excitement to keep my interested, but not the insane crazy cutthroat pressure you get at firms (or so I'm told). Everyone in the office smiles a lot and has been very friendly.