Saturday, July 27, 2013

1st week of attachment @ law firm.

Here i am, gratefully survived the 1st week of my attachment student at a law firm.
(I already did my attachment at high court last year, now it's time to do it at law firm.)
In which i think is a good plan because i get to experience both worlds; on the bench and in front of the bench.


In short, i could only summarize my 1st week of attachment as ruthless.
It is so because i have to compete with 11 other attachment students from other unis.
True to what i had in mind, doing attachment in a bigger firm means more work, and variety of cases from many fields.
(My firm particularly focused on doing criminal cases, civil cases, and conveyancing. We have 4 criminal lawyers, 2 civil lawyers, and 1 conveyancing lawyer. Also, 1 paralegal which is surprise, surprise, my senior from uni.)
However, due to the huge number of workforce, at the end of the day i would only be able to do 2 or 3 kinds of work.
Which is kind of disappointing because if i had known this would happen, i would have chosen a smaller firm.
I just could not stand sitting in my cubicle even for 10 minutes doing nothing.
I never knew that i had this kind of traits in me, but i do now.


Granted, a chambering student kindly advised me to study my final year subjects instead of doing nothing, and i did so.
Still, it doesn't chase that lingering feeling of dissatisfaction away :/
It's the feeling of imagining something great will come your way, but you could only taste a bit of that greatness because you couldn't reach it far enough.
Nevertheless, i am almost proud to say that i could now open a photocopy business due to managing perfecting the skill.
Almost.


I think another factor as to why i did not receive as much work as other practical mates is because of my position.
The cubicles in the firm are aligned in a double straight line, and divided into departments.
I was placed at the conveyancing department, and when i asked the lawyer to give me some work, she said that they do not allow students to handle their documents because conveyancing deals with a lot of original documents.
So, they could not risk the chance of misplaced original documents due to delegated works to many people.
So, i am left with basically nothing to do.
The students at criminal department had to do hujahan balas, and stuffs. The students at civil departments had the most work with drafting letters and being delivery boy.
Syukur Alhamdulillah, the staff in front of me took pity on me when i begged her for work, and i finally got to do a bit of conveyancing thingies yesterday. 


Am i too naive to think that i would be the only person to be a student in a big firm?
Yes.
But i sure as hell did not expect to be a part of 12 students in that firm.
So, i am taking every chance that i have to grab myself some work there.
Thankfully, my fellow practical mates who are already doing their practical for two months kindly tutored me about some things that i do not know.
I went around each department and asked them to teach me what they had done that day :p
Even by not having any transportation has given me some disadvantage for not being able to do field work, i am still thankful because my fellow practical mates who have cars would offer us for carpool to go to court.
I think this is a blessing in disguise because i managed to gain more new friends.