One thing they don’t teach you in paralegal school is that there are a few occasions when your lawyer will just turn into a completely unreasonable monster. One of these is when he is preparing for a hearing. You will do all that you can to “anticipate his needs,” and leave all relevant materials for him on the conference room table. You will assemble notebooks, the perfectly updated and organized file will be placed in front of him, yet he will still not be able to help himself.
He will call out to you, despite the fact that everything he needs is right in front of his face if he could just manage to read. “Get me X! Right now! I simply must have X!” You will slog into the room, and point out that “X” is the very first file in Box 1. He will grunt, and that means you are dismissed from his line of vision for this particular second in time.
Then, he will start rearranging the order of the notebooks. Yes, Virginia. All fifteen of them will get reorganized. After you do that and make a copy of each one of them, he will inform you that actually, on second thought, he needs two more copies of each. Gee, thanks for telling me when I was disassembling and copying earlier. Sure is efficient to do it your way, though! If you are lucky that will be the end of it, but most likely it won’t. Why would he let it be when he could arrange all of the tabs once more? This means you are now updating the order of fifteen notebooks. You need to go off by yourself to do this because it is harder than it sounds, and if some jackass comes around bending your ear off and breaking your concentration, you will mess this up for sure.
After that, he will decide that he needs a piece of evidence that no one in the office ever thought to obtain. Instead of working together and figuring out a plan to obtain the evidence (or hell, even letting you go out of the room so you can figure out how to get it yourself), he will interrogate you for twenty minutes on why you don’t have the evidence (usually the reason is because his former paralegal was a dumbass and so were his associates, and this was before you got involved with the file, but whatever).
My point is, once they get on an interrogation rant, that is when the monster comes out. They get focused on points that are just completely irrelevant to actually accomplishing the goal. Namely, to just find the CUSSING evidence instead of fixating on pondering about why it is missing. That type of crap used to drive me absolutely bat cuss cussing nuts. And it will you too, I guarantee it.
Ah, the things no class on being a paralegal can teach you. I wish someone would have warned me about this, because it truly is insane, and when the day is over you will feel like someone has been beating the hell out of your body. Fun!
Recovering Paralegal 