Three months into my legal career, I was already working for the managing partner.
Not because I had any business being there.
Because the only person in that office who knew what she was doing decided to quit, and someone needed to fill that chair.
That someone was me.
Ninety days in, zero experience, no idea what I was doing.
Congratulations to us both.
Let me back up.
I was originally hired to work with a baby lawyer on the BP Oil Spill. No prior experience required, apparently. Nothing says sink or swim like handing a brand new paralegal the largest environmental disaster in American history and wishing her well.
The kind of boring that makes you google "is this it" at 9am on a Tuesday.
But I had a job. And I was keeping it.
Then the managing partner's long-tenured, knows-everyone-and-everything, holds-this-whole-place-together paralegal decided to quit.
I hit the voluntold lottery. Nobody asked. Nobody offered. One day I was buried in BP discovery, and the next I was the managing partner's problem.
Cue the disappointment. I mean, paralegal. His paralegal. Starting immediately.
New desk. New job. A whole new universe of things I didn't know.
This was the prehistoric era before e-filing, before everything went digital and documents lived in the cloud. Court orders came in the mail. Physical paper. Stamped originals, signed and couriered back to the firm like artifacts from the law itself.
Sacred. Untouchable. Apparently gold.
Nobody told me that. And apparently, common sense also took the day off.
One landed in the mail pile I was opening to prep for our meeting. I pulled it out, looked at it for approximately half a second, put it in my stack, and moved on.
I forgot my notepad that day. I had my pen. I had my enthusiasm. The notepad did not make the cut.
Like the amateur paralegal I absolutely, completely was.
The meeting started. He was talking. I was nodding. I needed to write something down, so I grabbed the nearest paper from my stack and started writing.
My full to-do list. In ink. Confident. Professional. Completely unbothered.
For twenty minutes. Twenty full, productive, I've-got-this minutes of a very real professional meeting, I sat across from the managing partner and wrote my entire task list directly on an original court order.
And if I'm being honest, there may have been some personal errands on there too.
The dry cleaning pickup is not relevant to these proceedings.
Nailed it.
He caught a glimpse of it as I was shuffling through my pile.
The room temperature changed.
Dead stop. Full eye contact. The specific, terrible silence of someone who has just seen something they cannot unsee.
"Is that an original court order?"
Reader, it was.
"...ummm, yes." Barely a sound.
What followed lasted approximately one emotional calendar year. I caught key phrases: original, court order, what were you thinking, this is a legal document, delivered at a volume and frequency I had not previously experienced in a professional setting anywhere, ever.
The rest I've filed under: formative.
The number of times I contemplated quitting and never coming back during that speech was absurd. I ran every exit in my head. The graceful exit. The apologetic exit. The stand-up-walk-out-change-your-name-move-to-another-state exit.
I considered them all. In under ten seconds.
I gathered my things.
And bolted through the door.
I came back the next day. With my notepad.
I still don't write on court orders.
The Unredacted Paralegal™