A legal secretary's life makes for some interesting experiences. Foremost on my list at the moment is skirting the antiquated practices of the Indiana filing system.
See, nearly all basic Indiana forms -- minute sheets (required for all filings; since the clerks don't like actually flipping through documents to determine what they are, every filing requires a minute sheet detailing what the filing is), summonses, subpoenas, attorney's appearances -- are given to the attorney's office in advance and the secretary, or attorney, has to fill them out manually. This means with a typewriter. So, each time one of these forms needs filing, I have to type, over and over, the case name, the case number, the Court number, and then the body of the text.
This wastes a considerable amount of my time. Michigan rallied itself to twenty-first century technology and put all of its basic forms in computer format. If my boss only practiced law in one state, I probably wouldn't notice or mind; but the juxtaposition of 2007 and 1955 wriggles under my skin.
I've done a few things with office forms already; my boss is an old-fashioned guy, and many of the internal office forms that we use had to be done manually as well. Late this summer I grew tired of using the typewriter for every little thing, and so I took the forms that we had and designed them in the computer. Now the clerical work goes MUCH faster.
So my challenge lately has been designing all of the Indiana forms in the computer as well. I actually enjoy doing it -- there's something about the organization required, and the perfection of getting every detail just right, that satisfies my little Virgo soul. I've had a lot of fun creating all of these forms from a single table, splitting or joining table cells as necessary, and locking the permanent ones in so that all I have to do is tab from one typing cell to another.
They actually look pretty great. My boss prefers to use the typewriter himself, so he wasn't that impressed, but I'm excited for my sake. Now I can save a bunch of minute sheets as master forms for each case and save myself the typing of every caption every time I have to use one.
One of the things I love about our computer-oriented generation is that it doesn't require much training to figure stuff out; all I did when I first started playing with WordPerfect (I know, most computer people hate WordPerfect, but I have found it to be rather easy to work with, if a little outmoded and unreliable in some respects) was go to the Michigan forms and hit a lot of buttons to see how they'd done their work, and then I was able to reproduce it in my own documents.
Brain surgery? No, of course not. But these are little things I like to do to ease my own tasks. I find them tremendously fulfilling. And I laugh at myself when I find that I'm procrastinating on work by doing other work. One of the signs of loving your job, I guess.
3 comments:
Yet another reason why Indiana is inferior to Michigan (other than the fact that Sufjan hasn't decided to put it into an album yet).
You know, it's funny. When you're driving from Edwardsburg (the town wherein I now reside) to Elkhart (one of the cities nearby in Indiana), there's a point on the road where the landscape totally flattens out, an oppressive nature instantly oozes from the atmosphere, and you start to wonder, Why am I so depressed?
And then you cross the state line.
I hope Sufjan has Indiana last on his list. What would he write about, besides the stupid highways and the backward government and the slow drivers?
Nice post. My Google Alert for "legal secretary" has just brought me to you. I know exactly what you mean about doing different work to avoid the "real" work. Work that you can control, work that will benefit you far into the future, feels so much more rewarding than just reacting to the mail and the phone. Kudos to you on converting those pesky forms to electronic!
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