What was the best and worst day of your articling or summer position.

[Twenty]

14 minutes ago, cherrytree said:

A small part of me dies every time the Word file is unavailable and I have to convert a PDF to Word...because that always means 1-1.5 hours to be spent on fixing the stupid blanks and wonky margins that result from the conversion.

MOOD. I was once so fed up with trying to fix the post-conversion formatting that I decided to just recreate a document from scratch. Word is hell.

Also, I was once asked to redline an entirely German contract. Didn't know German so I just had to eyeball it LOL. 

Edited January 28, 2022 by Twenty

[cherrytree]

7 minutes ago, Twenty said:

Word is hell.

Gather 'round the campfire, little 1Ls...this is the one-sentence horror story of the day, lol. Luckily I've never had to re-type a Word doc from scratch, but I was going through an agreement the other day to update the section references, which should be as easy as a mouse click if the cross-references were set up properly, but whoever worked on that document last just ended up typing dummy text for the section numbers instead of inserting dynamic fields. So I ended up re-inserting all the cross-references, but thankfully it wasn't too time-consuming.

8 minutes ago, Twenty said:

Also, I was once asked to redline an entirely German contract. Didn't know German so I just had to eyeball it LOL. 

Google Translate is great. I like Deepl better as a second line of defence to double check, though, especially when I don't speak a lick of the source language.

[Twenty]

12 minutes ago, cherrytree said:

...but whoever worked on that document last just ended up typing dummy text for the section numbers instead of inserting dynamic fields.

That would be me. I would be the party on the other end typing dummy text. 👁️👄👁️

(This is probably why they pay you the private-firm bucks, and I was paid my in-house wage)

Edit: Okay, I'm only (half) joking. I'm not THAT bad with Word. 

Edited January 28, 2022 by Twenty

[CleanHands]

This was neither my best or worst day as a student, but @Vizslaw's amusing trial story made it pop into my head just as one of the funnier moments in my work. Thought I'd share since we're just shooting the shit and trading war stories now.

Anyways, as a summer student, I was a patient advocate at a civil mental health detention review panel hearing. My client was asked by the panel if they were taking any oral medications and they responded "you mean up the ass?" I instinctively burst out laughing. Nobody else (the client, the panel, the medical professional presenting the case) did.

This was pre-COVID and I like getting to wear masks in court now in order to conceal efforts to withhold laughter. In contrast to the above, a time that came in useful was the first time I was running a trial prosecuting a traffic ticket. Even though it was low stakes, due to my inexperience I was still nervous simply because I didn't want to look like an idiot. So I was really trying, treating a speeding ticket like the crime of the century (not in terms of punishing the accused but in terms of ensuring I covered everything off). Then the accused took the stand, convicted himself by acknowledging all elements of the offence, and said that "the officer's car was dirty." This was his defence. It led to an extremely awkward back and forth punctuated by lingering periods of silence while the JP tried to figure out what his point was (correctly, in my view, deducing that the accused was trying to imply that he was somehow entrapped, but the accused stood there saying nothing when this was directly asked of him). I was just standing there trying not to laugh, with a mask over my face, during this. I felt very silly for being so nervous. I did not know it yet, but given all the self reps this was basically a representative traffic court trial.

Edited January 28, 2022 by CleanHands

[epeeist]

At the time not being hired back felt like the worst day, but in hindsight was good, I articled at a full-service firm including litigation because I wanted a broad experience, but at the time was most interested in IP litigation and did that as an associate (now I only do litigation PT non-law FT). EDIT: Oh, and the day I wasn't hired back (notified by message) I was the only one not hired back who came into the office, because of a deadline that day. And the partner I was working for on it asked me how I felt not being hired back and coming in that day! I simply said I had a deadline and so needed to or something like that, and he was one of the lawyers who later gave me a glowing reference, so likewise in hindsight okay.

Best not really legal, I continued fencing while articling, and decided that since there was exactly one fencing World Cup circuit event in Montreal that was open to all North American fencers even with no international (or domestic) ranking, I would go if possible. Unfortunately the qualifying round was the last Friday of the month, and I would be the only student in the real estate rotation at that time, a very busy day. So several months ahead of the event I met with the head of the real estate department to ask if I could book that Thursday and Friday off a few months ahead. If anything he was more excited than I, in addition to emailing everyone he took me around in person to every lawyer in the department to tell them directly I would be off and unavailable in a few months for a fencing tournament.

One lawyer asked, "Fencing, you mean with swords?" to which the head of the department sarcastically replied, "No, he builds fences competitively." Which I barely managed not to smile or laugh at...

Edited January 28, 2022 by epeeist

[Rusty Iron Ring]

The worst day is every single time I thought, for a split second, that I might have missed a limitation period. False alarms every time, knock on wood.

 

[MOL]

Summering was a blast; paid well, no real responsibility, firm paid for a lot of drunken revelry.

Articles not so much; best day would be days when the lawyer I was doing work for would actually involve me or explain wtf was going on, worst days - corporate rotation during a severe recession, i.e. trying to look busy when I wasn't. I pretty much knew hireback was a non-starter - they hired back 25% of the students.

Lawyer - Jesus, way too many going either way. One highlight was getting a heroin addicted client out on bail, walking her to treatment centre and having her come back weeks later, clean and in recovery to say thanks. The worst days are when everything goes to shit, but yeah thinking you missed a limitation period has a special way of freezing your guts.

[MOL]

21 hours ago, razraini said:

I was trying to be charitable. She was what I often refer to as a "turbo Crown".

There was a Crown back in the day at the East Mall Court in Etobicoke who fit that description to a tee. I was running a bail hearing and she proposed a release. I sidled up to the box to discuss with my client and less than 30 seconds she was foaming at the mouth; "Is he going to take it? Is he? It's a great deal for him? If he doesn't take it in the next 30 seconds I am going to revoke my offer". I told her to relax and let me talk to my client. She went berserk. The JP just laughed. God save us from the Crusaders for Justice.

[Jaggers]

1 hour ago, MOL said:

Lawyer - Jesus, way too many going either way. One highlight was getting a heroin addicted client out on bail, walking her to treatment centre and having her come back weeks later, clean and in recovery to say thanks. The worst days are when everything goes to shit, but yeah thinking you missed a limitation period has a special way of freezing your guts.

In my last two jobs (first in firm, then in house but doing my own litigation) I had a lot of stress over deadlines. Not really limitations periods (I only ever defend claims) but filing deadlines, etc. Thankfully I can now download that stress to external counsel 🙂 I hardly ever wake up in a cold sweat any more dreaming about a deadline, which was a semi-regular occurrence for my first 10 years of practice.

[Snax]

On 1/28/2022 at 10:28 AM, cherrytree said:

A couple months ago I had to manually retype the articles of a corporation for an amendment. There were about 9 share classes and about 10 - 15 pages in total. It took me half a day. 
 

Then I had to do it again … because I corrected errors in the original that were supposed to stay.  
 

Edit: I tried quoting the part where you said you haven’t had to retype a word doc from scratch, but failed and don’t know how to fix it now, so it is what it is lol 

Edited February 1, 2022 by Snax

[cherrytree]

9 hours ago, Snax said:

A couple months ago I had to manually retype the articles of a corporation for an amendment. There were about 9 share classes and about 10 - 15 pages in total. It took me half a day. 
 

Then I had to do it again … because I corrected errors in the original that were supposed to stay.  
 

Edit: I tried quoting the part where you said you haven’t had to retype a word doc from scratch, but failed and don’t know how to fix it now, so it is what it is lol 

That sucks. I hope you were able to leverage what you already typed up when you had to undo your corrections?

[Rusty Iron Ring]

On 1/28/2022 at 3:32 PM, Jaggers said:

In my last two jobs (first in firm, then in house but doing my own litigation) I had a lot of stress over deadlines. Not really limitations periods (I only ever defend claims) but filing deadlines, etc. Thankfully I can now download that stress to external counsel 🙂 I hardly ever wake up in a cold sweat any more dreaming about a deadline, which was a semi-regular occurrence for my first 10 years of practice.

I'm not sure if there is anyone other than other litigators who understands just how much of our mental space is devoted to deadline anxiety. 

[easttowest]

8 hours ago, Rusty Iron Ring said:

I'm not sure if there is anyone other than other litigators who understands just how much of our mental space is devoted to deadline anxiety. 

Nothing like setting up ticklers but then checking then from time to time to confirm you were right the first time.