Typical Day

Typical Day

Perry Legal wakes at 7:30AM and gets halfway through his shower before realizing he's still wearing his boxers. (Cut him some slack—he had a late night last night.) After the water does its thing, he gets dressed, breakfasts, and pulls into the parking structure of his office building at 8:15AM.

He takes the elevator up to the third floor, goes down the hall to the Workers' Compensation firm at which he is employed as a paralegal, and makes his way to his cubicle. (His boss has been promising that he'll get his own office soon, but Perry is beginning to doubt it, especially since they attached his nameplate to the cubicle wall with industrial-strength glue.)

Perry starts his day by going through and responding to his emails and voice mails. He then meets in the small conference room with the two lawyers he works with most closely to help them prepare for a big case that's being brought to trial. During the meeting, Perry takes notes and assists his superiors in finding whatever documents they request.

After the meeting, Perry goes back to his desk and does an hour of dictation (one of the lawyers he works for has an Irish accent, and it takes Perry ten minutes to realize he's saying, "Send this guy thirty bucks" instead of, "Send this guy dirty books").

Perry takes lunch in the downstairs deli at noon and is back in the office at 1:00PM. Once again, he meets with the lawyers who are going to trial the following day and helps them prepare their legal arguments.

The case involves an elderly woman who has been working as the receptionist for a major corporation for twenty-three years (the company is so massive and she's gotten so many raises over the years that she actually makes more than some of the lawyers in Perry's firm); she has recently been taking a self-prescribed leave of absence from her job to deal with a suddenly painful case of tinnitus that she claims has been brought on by all of the clients who scream into her ear over the phone every day.

Her employer is denying this claim (as anyone in their right mind might). It's up to the lawyers in Perry's firm to make a convincing case, and it's up to Perry to help them do that. He spends much of the afternoon going through similar, prior cases to see if he can find any precedent. So far he's come up empty.

At 4:00PM, he leaves the lawyers to dig through records on their own, as has to run out to file a couple of motions at the District Court before it closes for the day. He makes it back to the office around 5:00PM to find that the lawyers are still digging furiously for something substantial they can use in the tinnitus case. It's looking grim, and they may just have to rely on their charm and some crafty manipulation of the English language to sway the jury.

Perry wraps up his day with another hour of research in the law library and some more answering of emails, and then he's out of there at 6:30PM. This time, once he gets home, he writes himself a note and puts it on the shower door. He's not making that mistake again. And he exhales—he knows that the lawyers on the various cases in which he is assisting will be working until midnight. Thank goodness he was never quite able to pass that bar exam.