Showing my briefs

Law school, I am learning, is full of insecurities. I don’t know if they plan it that way, but if they do, damn — they’re good.

Take for example, the exercise we’ve just completed for legal writing. We had to write a 20-page brief that represented a fictitious client in a fictitious appeal. Over a three-week period we had to research and write this paper completely on our own, with no help from our instructor or others, save the occasional cryptic general guidance in class.

So we go through this whole exercise pretty lost on whether we’re doing it right, and we get the paper nicely printed and bound at Kinko’s, and then we turn it in to await our final grade. And then, we have to find a partner to present our case in oral arguments before a panel of fictitious judges. (Although some might be actual judges…the rest are learned actual attorneys.)

After our papers were turned in, we could share them with our partners to help us prepare for the presentation. So I emailed mine to Chris, a guy I’ve studied with since we started last fall, and he did likewise.

So an innocent little Word doc appears in my email, and questions seize my mind. Did I do it right? Did I find the right cases? Did I analyze everything correctly? What about my citation form? I was afraid to open Chris’s brief. I didn’t for a couple of days.

Then yesterday, I decided to bite the bullet and open it up. Crap, I thought. His was 22 pages, mine was barely 19. He used big words like “slake the public’s voyueristic interest.” I probably wrote like a third-grader. He cited a few cases I didn’t. I was certain I had failed. I was ready to drop out. I called my other law school friend Roger and Chelsea and had two good extended freak-out moments.

Yesterday evening, Chris stopped by the office to help us get ready for our practice argument last night.

“Yours was so much better organized than mine,” he said. He had a lot of the same little insecure thoughts that I did, just reversed.

I learned two important things yesterday: First, there’s more than one way to write a brief.

And second, in law school, everybody’s in the same Insecurity Boat. Nobody knows if they’re getting it right. Even after exams are graded and you’re assigned your A,B,C or otherwise, you still really don’t know what you did exactly to deserve what you earned.

I guess in some way, law school teaches about life — there ain’t always a right and a wrong answer, and you don’t always know what to expect. You just have to keep on keeping on, get over your insecurities, put it all out there, and expect good things in the end.