Second summer starts...
To paraphrase Alanis Morrissette, it is all a bit ironic. When I was a software engineer, I never had any desire to talk about what I did for a living. Now, three weeks into the third coop of my legal career, while I would love to go into what it is that I "do for a living" -- I can't.
While at the US Attorney's office, and even while working for the Judge, there always seemed to be a way to discuss the cases, pending or otherwise, by changing enough details to make them unrecognizable, but leaving enough of "the meat" of the legal issue to make the discussion interesting. Oftentimes, my commute home would be spent coming up with ways to obfuscate the parties and alter the issues just enough to be able to discuss the problem. The same cannot be said about my current gig. Without making myself to be more important than I am -- a competitor armed only with the knowledge of who I work for and what the legal question I am trying to answer is would have a pretty good idea of what the company is trying to accomplish.
One thing I can talk about, however, is the experience. From the first day, the interns (yes, there are two of us, and yes, we are both from NUSL -- a first, for me, on both counts) have been intertwined into the legal department. We went through training, and have been getting a steady stream of work from all corners of the legal department.
The training has been invaluable. There are many things that law school attempts to teach you, but one thing it certainly does not get to is the confluence of business with law. Legal decisions inside corporations are never driven by precedent alone. Valid business reasons exist that make the most solid legal position untenable -- such as a company suing some of its biggest clients (regardless of who is right -- the customers won't be customers for long). The job of the in-house lawyer, is then to anticipate the legal challenges, and to evaluate them in light of the business reasons, producing a risk/benefit assessment. In other words -- in-house lawyers live in the real world, which is a place I long to get back to, armed with legal knowledge acquired in school.