[btw, I didn't mean to delete this previously, just amend the one truly embarrassing thing and omit the one single last name which might have given away any details. There are after all a million law firms around.]

So the screw up at work turned out to not be a big deal, really. To be slightly clearer than I was in the last post, we've been transcribing incriminating phone calls from this mutual fund, and entering them into a database. The only source of dating the individual wav files was a printout of the wav file names with their dates, and the to / from on them. We the paralegals didn't actually have access to the original database from which this printout came - it was sourced at another firm - we just had the hard copy. Many of the dates which I had listed as 1-xx-xx should have been 11-xx-xx, i.e. november not January. However the printout I was given had listed them as 1, not 11. The deal was that somebody had not adjusted the column widths appropriately, so that it could only handle 5 digits. so November 3, 2001 was listed correctly as 1-3-01, but Noveber 23 2001 was listed as 1-23-01. The attorney had accused me of making "all these dates wrong" (about 20 or 30) when after double checking, I had only made two typos in the whole thing.

She rather yelled at me, actually, and then stormed out, leaving me to double check my work, which was just as well. Because with time to think, I drafted a brief, to the point email that explained what had happened, pointedly apologized for the two typos I had made (pointedly not apologizing for the rest of incorrect dates because they were incorrect on the sheet I'd been given.) And this attorneys, who have the habit of getting quite frosty and grade-schoolish when they're dissatisfied with your work, have been perfectly normal to me ever since. I actually think they kind of respect me more for standing up to them. (This is the second time I've had to defend paralegal work to accusatory attorneys; the first time was on behalf of all three of us though rather than just me personally.)

The catch is that I sort of noticed the problem when I was originally going through the transcriptions because October 23 2001 showed up as 0-23-01 which told me that some of the numbers were being cut off. I meant to check up and verify the January dates to make sure they weren't November, but it wasn't actually my case, I was just helping out one of the other paras, and so I didn't pursue it as relentlessly as I would have otherwise. That was the mistake that I actually made, but I simply didn't mention that in the email - I would have owned up to it immediately had any of the attorneys pressed the issue with me, but they didn't bother. So I kind of got out of that. And now Scott is tasked with reverifying the dates anyway so even that's being taken care of. Lesson in carefullness learned for me w/o losing too much face with the attorneys or causing major case hiccups - best that can be asked for I guess.

Interestingly enough, the only times I've felt the wrath come down upon me have been when I'm working on one of the other paras cases to help them out. It's kind of galling, because I hate getting in trouble and I hate messing up, and when it's not your own case you have a lot less control over, well, everything.

However, for me the tension at work disappeared when John, one of the associates, screamed down the hall that our senior partner, Mr. Elsen, was a "fucking cocksucker".

Ah yes, see, if you got this far, you actually have something interesting to read. ;-)

John is my favorite attorney because he's very calm, willing to explain things to the paras w/o coming across as the slightest bit condescending or annoyed like we should already know everything w/o any training, takes the time to really fill you in on what's happening, and generally treats the paras like equals . . . well not quite like equals, but peers if you will . . . treats us with respect. I've heard virtually every other attorney in the office lose their temper before then, but John has never raised his voice in anger or excitment except for that day last week when he yelled "On top of all this I have to take this abuse? Mr. Elsen is a fucking cocksucker! There, now the whole firm heard it!" and slammed his door, knocking plaques off the wall, and stormed out for the rest of the day.

And we had a brief that we had to get fed-exed to Chicago that day so local counsel could file it. Guess who the attorney on the case was? John. Guess who the para was? Cecelia.

I thought John was fired for sure. Strangely enough the partner on the case actually seemed in a good mood that day. And he and John talked it out the next morning - didn't even take very long, honestly - and everything worked out fine.

I mean how many jobs can you get away with behaviour like that?????

On the upside, it put me in a position to make a good impression with Mr. Elsen, because with the associate gone, he turned to the para to do one or two things that normally he'd ask John to do. (Honestly they're more appropriate for paras anyway, but Mr. Elsen has been known to call paras into his office and dictate an email to us, which we then type, print, he edits, we retype, reprint, he edits, we retype, reprint, he edits . . . )

So basically, with half the attorneys I feel pretty good about my work and my position with them. With the other half, I'm on tentherhooks every time they ask me for something because I'm afraid I'm going to screw up!