It's the middle of my third week now at Quinn Emanuel (almost half done, if you can believe that!!) Things are settling in, and I'm feeling less stressed and tired.

I have, however, been working on one project this entire time. On my first day here, Dobbs*, the head of the appellate practice at my firm, asked me to research a very open ended common law issue for an appeal of a case he's working on. (The facts are pretty cool, but I won't talk about them here. Let's just say they involve alcohol and intellectual property, two of my favorite subjects.) Unfortunately, no matter how much time I poured into it, he wasn't satisfied with the cases I found. I should have known something was wrong when he brought me in to talk about my memo and he told me it was "um, a good start."

Turns out, the issue was so open-ended that Dobbs didn't really know what kind of cases he wanted until he read through the secondary legal sources which I had pulled up (and I did identify the right ones.) So now I'm doing follow up research for him, on a more well-defined issue. That's better, but gee, I'm almost half done with my six weeks here. I want to do something else, too.

To his credit, Dobbs has been pretty understanding about the whole thing. He realizes that the assignment he gave me was unusually fuzzy: "it's like poking a marshmellow," he said. The analogy is that the issue is so obvious, yet so hard to put your finger on.

* "Dobbs" is not the guy's name. It's actually the name of a treatise on restitution that I pulled up for him as part of my research.

It wasn't until yesterday that I got a new, unrelated assignment, this one on patent law. It's short, sweet, well-defined, and I was able to do the research in a very short period of time; I just need to finish writing it up today. It's a refreshing change..

Otherwise, things are going well. I am going on Quinn's monster firmwide hike starting 4 a.m. tomorrow: we're flying out to Billings, Montana and then driving down to near the Montana-Wyoming border. I've been packing for this thing in a pretty hectic fashion for the past week.. wish me luck!