On Saturday, I flew to South Carolina for a business trip. A custody case I've been working on since May is finally going to trial. (It was scheduled for trial in October, but postponed when the adverse attorney came down with H1N1 right before the trial.) It was a complicated, intense case where we represent a mother who was both defending outrageous abuse allegations made by the father and seeking custody of their small child. I was heavily vested in the case from probably hundreds of hours worked over eight months. But it was more than that. I believed in our client and I really felt that the current situation was not in the best interest of the young girl.
Thomas, Erin (the other attorney in his practice), and I spent about 14 hours on Sunday preparing for the three-day trial that started on Monday morning. All of us camped out in Thomas's office, each with our laptop, scanning through reports, depositions, affidavits, emails and other documents - it was like being in the War Room. While the work that we were doing was very different, it was not unlike my days at HITT Contracting, the night before a big budget was due, poring over excel spreadsheets, double-checking formulas and reviewing drawings. I LOVED IT.
Court on Monday was fascinating to me. I really enjoy court-room dramas on TV, so it was exciting to actually be in court, sitting at the attorney's table with Thomas, Erin and our client. It was also really exciting to me to see questions I had posed, details I had unearthed in the documents and tactics I suggested be used in court. I'm finding it really difficult to find the words to describe what it was like for me. On a different level, court was intense because some of the most mundane, slow-pitch questions Thomas asked of the adverse party's witnesses produced shocking answers and opened doors we didn't know existed. This also gave us LOTS of work to do Monday night in preparation for Tuesday...
Tuesday morning, the court called the attorney's in to the courtroom (I got to sit in on this - exciting to be part of "the attorneys" group!) to announce that his mother in law was dying of cancer and he expected a call at any time to notify him of her passing. When that call came, he would recess court and reconvene some time in the future. We got about 2 hours of testimony in before the call came. The judge literally interrupted the father's testimony, mid-syllable. He notified us that he would reconvene court in early February to continue the case.
While we all understood his situation, it was hard to process that we were being put on hold for another month. I likened it to spending weeks studying for a final exam only to be told half way through to come back in a month to finish it. The up side was that we now had another month to investigate some of the (shocking) new information that had come out in testimony. But it also meant another trip back to SC for the final stage of the trial, and it meant yet another postponement for our client, and for her daughter.
Another upside to the postponement was that I got ELEVEN hours of uninterrupted sleep Tuesday night. It was amazing. Amazing. I spent Wednesday in the office working on other cases before heading back to Dallas Wednesday night.
Just before heading to South Carolina for this trip, I signed up to take the LSAT's in February. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet. But taking them seems to be the right thing to do.
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