I've been working at a new job for the last month or so and for the most part I like it. After graduating law school my intention was to enter into private practice at a small to medium sized firm. I worked at a very small office for a while but, unfortunately the workload was really feast or famine with much more famine than feast. The office worked primarily in civil litigation and I enjoyed working on the cases but I needed more certainty and stability. I took a new job for a large legal publishing company and I now work supporting their electronic legal database. Basically lawyers call in and I help them with their research. In many ways it is a glorified, well slightly glorified, call center job. But on the other hand, it is akin to a research exercise I was assigned in law school. In the guerrilla research project we were given a research question and had a limited amount of time to come up with an answer. I do enjoy that aspect of it. A lawyer will call in with a legal question that is confounding them and in ten to thirty minutes I will work with them to find the answer.
I wonder sometimes about how this work will position me for any future work in private practice, but if nothing else, the ability to quickly find answers to befuddling legal questions is a good skill to have.
