I thought I'd post a little bit more about my job now that I understand the scope of my confidentiality agreement better, and now that a number of you have asked. (Yes, zero is technically a number.) The background on my case, as it has been presented to me, is this: In the 1940s and '50s and well into the 1960s, any number of corporations were unwittingly polluting the environment in any number of ways. I'm not talking about Big Steel turning the noontime sky in Pittsburgh black or anything; rather, this is the type of pollution that comes primarily from seepage away from man-made bodies of liquid that were specifically created to contain waste runoff. In the '60s and '70s environmental regulation came into being and these companies were charged with cleaning up the messes they had created or contributed to. So there were sites on company properties that needed to be cleaned up, as well as dumpsites for which no one company was uniquely responsible, but many companies contributed to polluting. For the latter sites, so-called "Superfunds" were created with companies contributing to the cleanup effort in the proportion to which they used the site.

Now, I'm sure there's more to all this, and maybe some of what I've said so far isn't totally accurate, but basically that's my framework for understanding this whole thing.

Anyway, our client Company X polluted or contributed to the pollution of about five dozen sites. Now, since corporations are amorphous, changing things, this gets complicated. Some of the pollution was done by subsidiaries, some by companies Company X bought only after the polluting took place, some of it discovered only after the relevant subsidiary was sold off, etc. etc. But anyway, as far as I can tell all the sites in question for this case have been cleaned up or are on their way to being cleaned up.

Company X is not unique in this situation, as many companies have had to clean up various sites in this way as well. At some point in the '80s, one of these companies figured out that since it did not realize that it was polluting at the time (at least in some instances), they should file a property damage claim with their insurance companies to cover the cleanup effort. Many other companies, including Company X, thought this was a great idea, and that gets us up to today.

So what it boils down to is that I'm working for the law firm that is working to get Company X's insurers to pay for all or some of the cleanup around numerous sites in many states over the course of decades. Within the last two days I have seen relevant documents from 1999 and from 1913. My bailiwick is the 1,100 boxes of documents produced by various law firms, companies, subsidiaries, et al for the purposes of this case. Assume a box contains about 2800 pages, which is about average. Now, out of those boxes, we are particularly concerned with 47 culled from the other c. 1,053, because these boxes are being shared with opposing counsel in the near future to be examined by experts.

These 47x2800 pages have been imaged onto CDs, 12 CDs in all. Fortunately, my predecessor had the almost unthinkable task of indexing these documents page by page, document by document, site by site, box by box. Now, as part of the imaging process every page of every document is given a "Bates number"--a unique identifier starting at 00000001 and going up for purposes of this case. (Some of these documents are on their third or fourth set of Bates numbers, having been through a variety of lawsuits.) I now have the only slightly more thinkable task of identifying the Bates number range for each document, and in the process double-checking the index and making sure no documents protected by attorney-client privilege have slipped through the cracks. I will probably spend about 50 hours this week doing exactly that.

The paralegal I'm working for (I thus consider myself a paraparalegal) swears that at some point the work will get more stimulating. Good lord and butter I hope so. But for the time being I'm still cruising on the whole "being downtown" euphoria; that, Internet streaming radio, and the Flavia machine will hopefully see me through.