It always amazes and amuses me how lawyers are portrayed — or rather, mis-portrayed — in the movies. It’s what makes the legal profession so exciting to laymen, but we lawyers know it’s not even a tenth as outrageous a job as the exaggerated cinematic depictions. (At least mine isn’t).
Case in point: as an alternative to our Nightly Ritual, Hubby and I watched The Social Network. The second year associate at the muckety-muck big law firm, played by Rashida Jones, confides in Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) after his deposition that in her twenty months of practice as a voir dire specialist at the firm, she can tell him how a jury will react to his side of the story. She then sagely advises, based on that twenty months of practice, that he should settle the case.
“Voir dire specialist?” Hubby and I questioned in unison.
” She must have meant document review specialist.” (We chuckled at our clever insider joke).
That’s when I realized that 1) we are law geeks and 2) it is sort of cool to be part of a profession. You’re in on something that you think the rest of the world knows about, but really only a small percentage of people understand.
Today’s verdict: Maybe I should keep practicing. At least I’ll have something to laugh about.
The Verdict 