OK, the lay of the land of the job is this. My basic schedule has been 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., which means that I start with the presumption of a 50-hour week. I also work a sixth day probably two weekends out of three. This past weekend I worked both days due to a nasty special project, and so I ended up putting in a 65-hour week, which was a personal record for me for paid employment. I may have worked some longer weeks in grad school, but that's a different animal.

So the set-up here is that I am a litigation assistant (I still think of myself as a para-paralegal) charged with overseeing the workroom, which is where we keep the 1100 boxes and all the other temps. Two other temps, Maria and Seson, are also litigation assistants. The other 8-to-11, currently 8, temps are lawyers whose job is to systematically review boxes for relevant and/or privileged information. Mari and Se's job is to process boxes that have been completed--photocopying key documents, Bates labeling (i.e. the horrible page numbering exercise I outlined here), removing and tracking privileged documents, etc. I deal with the logistics of all of this, plus my main side project has been to create an index with Bates numbers for the 133,336 pages we have already shared with the opposition.

We started with 11 lawyers on a Friday about three and a half weeks ago. One quit after the first day and was replaced. A second one was fired in the middle of the first full week because he spent most of the day on his cell phone and laptop, and he took a day off to deal with his other clients. He was also replaced. Then the fun really began.

One of the attorneys, let's call him "Bill" (his actual name is Bill, without the quotation marks), worked here for almost two weeks without ever putting in a full day. How, pray tell, did this happen? Well, on that first Friday he had to leave at 3 due to day care issues, which was understandable. On Monday he called in sick with a sunburn. On Tuesday he called off because his son was being held out of school due to a concussion. Ditto on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday he came in, spent about an hour on the phone, talked to our boss about his mistakes, said he'd go home and not bill us for that day, and asked if we could just start fresh on Monday. We had been debating all week whether to cut him loose, but he convinced her it would be OK. Also, since she had asked for 10 people but got 11, she figured she wasn't losing anything since he wasn't getting paid for calling off, and anything he produced was gravy. Also, his wife is the family breadwinner, but she is having some stark psychological problems apparently, and so she had some sympathy.

That Monday, he called off. He couldn't get a babysitter, but he assured us that he had someone lined up for the rest of the week, and it was a service and not just a flighty individual. On Tuesday he came in rarin' to go. That day saw some fairly substantial shifts in the project, and we had two big meetings that day with the attorneys who actuallly work here. During the first meeting, "Bill" took a cell phone call, walked out of the room, and didn't come back for 30 minutes. Crazy wife issues, apparently. But he got the key meeting info from someone else. Then he told us he was going to have to leave at three. The second big meeting was at 2, and he didn't show up. Apparently, he had left at 1:30 and had only informed one of the other litigation assistants. At this point our boss finally decided to pull the plug....but wait, there's more.

"Bill"'s agency was unable to contact him Tuesday evening, so he showed up to work on Wednesday morning, and everyone was walking on eggshells around him because we knew it was his last day, but he didn't. On Wednesday our boss was taking all of us litigation assistants to lunch, and she was meeting us at the restaurant because she was coming from court. Getting off the subway, she saw him getting on. It turns out that he left at 1, basically without telling anyone that he was going or why. He got the call from his agency that night, and he actually had the balls to bitch them out on the phone, after "working" for nine days and a grand total of about 14 hours.

After "Bill" we were down to ten lawyers and things settled down, except for the one I'll call Wacky Lady. Wacky Lady was a type my boss had warned us all about before we brought in the attorneys. She said some people will come in and instead of doing their job, they'll get the idea in their head that even though they are one person doing document review in one little corner, they can be the one who somehow solves the whole case, in the process getting noticed and maybe hired. This is an utter pipe dream--both the idea that someone in that position could solve even an element of the case, but also the idea that big law firms hire that way. Still, Wacky Lady apparently had that notion. She was consistently asking to photocopy documents for herself, get different colored paper so she could start charting things out, etc. What was her job? To determine whether documents might be relevant or might be privileged, so that an attorney upstairs who's actually familiar with all the trappings of this labyrithine case could make the final determination. That's it, that's the list. Charting, connecting, etc. were not on her agenda. In the meantime, she seemed bound and determined to overturn the "there are no stupid questions" hypothesis, she was scatter-brained as all get out, her actual document reviewing sucked, and she was working unauthorized overtime. This was like the Dilbert character who worked a lot of extra hours in order to make up for not being smart, only to have it explained that him working a lot of hours only made everyone else work even more still.

OTOH, we didn't want the bizarre drama that comes with an individual firing, so we decided that rather than get rid of one person, we would downsize to 7-to-8 people, with part of the rationale also being to extend the duration of the project for the people we actually like. We (being my boss and the litigation assistants) couldn't agree on an obvious third person to can, but we did determine that The Old Guy was second on everyone's hit list. The Old Guy said in our first-day introductory meeting that he had been internal counsel for his whole career, had taken a retirement, but now he was bored and wanted to go back to work. Riiiiight. Document review as a cure for boredom is like prescribing Wild Turkey to cure alcoholism. Speculation was rampant about whether "early retirement" was a euphemism for forced out, or whether investments had gone sour, or what. But he was here, he was weird, he spent a lot of time on the phone, he asked dumb questions, he was sexist, and his work was mediocre at best. So he is now gone.

The Wacky Lady and The Old Guy were fired on Monday by two different agencies. Old Guy's did it right--they called him after work, said not to go back, and they came and got his stuff yesterday. Wacky Lady's was supposed to do the same thing, but instead they called here asking for her, supposedly only wanting to say that they needed her to go and see them, but even she could see the writing on the wall, and when she asked if she needed to take her things, they said yes. Basically, this guy was as subtle as the Turk at training camp: "Coach wants to see you in his office, and bring your playbook." Since my boss was not around, I had to not-so-subtly hover in the area (though not too too close) and make sure there was no drama, which to her credit there was not. But that was the absolute low spot of my otherwise very happy time so far at this job.

So while that's certainly not all of my saved up work stories by any means (some other time I'll explain why I worked 65 hours last week), that should give you some sense of how The Beallsvonian is occupying his days.