I had to deal with one of our baby attorneys today.

This fella is trying his hand at using the dictating equipment.

I salute his bravery at trying to master this skill.

Most of our baby attorneys don’t bother.

And I am sure (okay, I am hoping) he’ll get better at it.

At least this time, it didn’t take three tries and a secretary for him to get the dictation into the proper file so I could access it.

In the meantime, I’m struggling to not explode.

He asked me to cut and paste from an existing document.  Okay.

He gives me a synopsis of the title (rather than the exact thing), no date, describes some of the content – which is of no help to me because again, not exact text – and most importantly – NO FUCKING DOCUMENT NUMBER!

We have a document management system for a reason.

Document numbers are integral to our document management system.

We put document numbers on our documents for a reason.

It makes it easier to find the document.

It makes it more likely that I am looking at the correct document.

I found two documents that appear to have titles that match what he says I should be looking for – and in both, where the text is supposed to be for me to copy and paste – it says “copy and paste”.

I shit you not.

The fact that I found two documents is problematic – because there would be no way for me to know which was the correct version – but of course, that is moot, because neither has the content that is promised.

So the document he is talking about doesn’t exist (he could have not saved it properly – or saved something over it), is saved in the wrong place (happens alarmingly often), or not named properly (see previous notation).

Also, his legal cites are a fucking nightmare.

He doesn’t know how to do cites properly – or even accurately.

Just love when you are typing along and have to stop and look up the cite that the attorney just mangled.

I would not be (quite) so aggravated, except, when he first started working at my law firm, I offered to come in and give him my handy-dandy lesson on our system and doing things “our” way.

But, no, he didn’t feel the need for that training.

Which is why I don’t feel the need to be especially nice now.

He should be very happy that I no longer work in the office.

Otherwise, he could be having a near death experience.

Or at least a time out.