Blog Entry 33

February 1st, 2010
Happy (?) Monday! 

Last night’s reaction for most of the people in my ALTA section? “I can’t wait for the weekend!” Never a good sign on a Sunday night… 

After finishing my brief yesterday, I was so tired that I had to really push myself to finish my reading for today. Needless to say, the laundry I planned to do, the work I wanted to get ahead on, the bookcase I wanted to build…it’s still sitting there, waiting. 

With last week being such a long week, and after a weekend filled with work, I think a lot of us are pretty physically and mentally drained at the moment. 

A bunch of us just finished our first second semester computer research training. There are two different online databases that are commonly used by lawyers: LexisNexis and Westlaw. The databases are included with our tuition, so for all intents and purposes, they are “free” for us until we graduate. After you graduate, you (or your firm) pay an arm and a leg to use it…so it is important to learn how to use it efficiently. Plus, there’s the fact that it can make researching for a paper exponentially easier… 

Use of the online databases is pretty excellent; we are so spoiled to have access to such a wealth of information. In addition to making our lives easier by providing us with printers to which we can print cases from home (and either schedule them to print when you want, or just pick them up when you get to school in the morning) and a variety of interesting training sessions…plus, you get reward points with the different databases based on the research and training you do, and those points can be redeemed for a lot of cool stuff. (I just redeemed my Lexis points for season 1 of Army Wives.) If you decide to go to law school, you will most certainly be afforded countless opportunities to get acquainted with these systems. 

I hope everyone is surviving their first day of the school/work week...