As you may (or may not) know, I work from home as a legal word processor.

My background is going on over 40 years of experience as a legal secretary/paralegal; and I can type fast – but word processing lets me work from home.

So I have an attorney send me a document for State Appellate Court for formatting.

This is not a baby-attorney (i.e., fresh out of law school).

Nor is this an oldster attorney (i.e., not comfortable with modern technology).

This is an experienced reasonably young attorney.

The document is a mess.

I haven’t done a State Appellate Brief in awhile.

But being the efficient (lazy) person I am, I have a cheat sheet I created on how to properly format documents for filing with the State Appellate Court (I also have one for Federal Court – but that’s another blog for another day – like the day, this guy sends me an Appellate Brief for Federal Court, no doubt).

And since it has been awhile, I figure I better check to make sure the rules for formatting haven’t changed.

So I go online and search for California Rules of Court-Appellate.

And you know what?

The internet takes me right to a site for California Rules of Court, and the rules on Appellate Court – including step-by-step instructions on formatting.

I clean up the mess of the document.

It is now beautiful (as is most of my work, if you give me the time).

And I send it back to sparky the attorney, along with a copy of my cheat sheet for future reference.

And he sends back an e-mail of thanks, and says, “I didn’t know where to begin on formatting this.”

Well, person who charges a whole lot more per hour than I do, you start by looking up the fucking rules on the internet – just like I did.

It’s not rocket science folks.

It’s not brain surgery.

It’s common sense.

Something, apparently, they do not teach in law school.

Leading back to my question – WTF are they going to do when I retire my tired fat OLD lady ass?

Until then, I guess I just look at it as job security.