Category Archives: Portfolio Notes

New semester and new job on the horizon!

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As my first semester at PPCC draws to a close, I am taking stock of all I’ve learned but also looking forward to the new challenges January will bring. My courses for the new semester are Contracts, Property Law, Civil Litigation, and Estates and Probate. January is, of course, also the start of tax season (Feel free to ask me for tips! I AM authorized to practice taxes!) and thus a new phase of employment. This year I’ve been asked to be an office manager, so I am very much looking forward to whatever additional light my coursework can shed on the workings of tax law. Any knowledge I gain from it is knowledge I can also pass on to everyone else at my office, after all!

To all who read this, I wish you a happy holiday season and a bountiful new year!

The Dream of the Paperless Office

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With my background in information science (I worked in libraries for several years before shifting to focus more on administration and legal writing), this assignment for Introduction to Law was a blast from the past.

The dream of the paperless office has been around since at least the late 1970s and, like Chinese democracy, always seems to be ten years away. The rise of broadband modems, wireless internet, and affordable electronic storage may mean that soon we really will hit a record low in office paper consumption…although as an archivist and thus a professional musty paper enthusiast I seriously doubt that our society will ever go truly paperless. “Different technologies have different affordances”, as my iSchool professors used to say. The physicality and scribblability of paper are just better for a certain subset of tasks, just as the accessibility and duplicability of electronic documents are just better for others.

I’m still very glad my parents paid for those touch-typing lessons back in grade school, though.

Family Law assignment scenario

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My Family Law course focuses pretty heavily on composing separation, custody, and divorce documents, so the professor handed out a sheet with a hypothetical couple, their children, their assets, and their tribulations and foibles. These formed the basis for several assignments that went from the initial filing and restraining order all the way through to the final divorce decree. I reproduce the scenario document here so that my future assignments based on it will be comprehensible.

And these were my first three documents produced from those assumptions:

The El Paso County Combined Courts have a, shall we say, quirk of using Wingdings characters for checkboxes on their downloadable forms, which makes them very difficult to fill out on the computer. I can’t imagine this encourages people to efile, but maybe they were concerned that creating real checkboxes in MS Word would make people with older versions of the software unable to open the documents.