Ka Leo O H.A.L.A., 19:2, Summer 1996

THE SCARINESS OF SAVING TIME AND TREES
Anonymous

     I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. Maybe I’m just never happy, no matter what. Or maybe I’ve been a paralegal too long.

    I refer to a particular incident.

    It was ten or eleven in the morning. We had two depositions tomorrow, so it was time to start thinking about deposition exhibits. Ideally, I like to think ahead, and have a copy set of the documents for a particular witness already prepared for the attorney, before he or she asks -- but who has time to do anything the ideal way? The attorney and I talked about the kinds of things he wanted, and I started to pull the appropriate documents and have the appropriate number of copies made (four: one for our attorney, one for the court reporter and witness, one for opposing counsel, and one extra).

    But it seemed wasteful to make all those copies, since the attorney hadn’t reviewed the documents yet, and I was fairly sure he wouldn’t want to use everything. So I decided to let him look at the documents first, and designate which ones he actually wanted to use. And rather than making him his own copy to look at, I decided to save time, which was at a premium, by letting him look at my topic binders, in which I had already tagged the appropriate documents, and at one batch of originals. (Normally I don’t like to let attorneys touch the originals, but I try not to be too dogmatic, and so far this attorney had proven trustworthy).

    At about three-thirty, when I hadn’t heard back from the attorney, I lined up someone to work late copying the exhibits, and then gave my attorney a call:

    "Let me know when you’re ready to talk about the depo exhibits," I said.

    "The depo exhibits?" he asked.

    "The exhibits for tomorrow," I reminded him.

    "You already gave them to me," he said.

    "But you need copies," I said.

    "Copies?" he asked.

    "You have only one copy of most of them. You need to tell me which ones you want to use tomorrow so I can have the four copies made," I explained.

    "Oh, that’s all right," he told me, "If I decide to make anything an exhibit I can just have it copied during the depo."

    I was flabbergasted, horrified, alarmed.

    Flabbergasted because this has never happened to me before in my 10-plus years of being a litigation paralegal: in my experience, attorneys like the comfort and security of having a nice neat stack of enough copies of everything they might want.

    Horrified because he had my binders, and a few original documents, and for all I knew, he might decide not to call someone to make copies, but just to give my copy to the court reporter, leaving me with the task of reconstructing my binders from the original documents or from the exhibits that would eventually come back with the transcript. (Not the end of the world, but I have enough to do without that sort of exercise.) Or, worse yet, he might give the original away (although this seemed highly unlikely).

    Alarmed because an attorney was saving us the trouble of making all those copies unless it was really necessary, and it made me uncomfortable.

    So I did a reality check. I talked to a few other litigation paralegals, all of whom reacted exactly the same way I did. And I talked to my husband, who said, "The guy’s making less work for you and you’re not happy about it? You’re sick." So, my reaction is normal for a litigation paralegal, but sick for a normal person.

    Well, that makes sense.