Tag Archives: documents

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.

Resume!

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For all you potential employers out there, and for all you paralegals who might want to see what a good resume template looks like filled out, I present to you my own resume.

If any nibbles come of this post, professional and personal references and educational transcripts are also available upon request by email or snailmail.

Prenups can be fun!

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Or at least they can be when the assignment scenario is as humorous and ripped-from-the-tabloids as this one.

Personally, I believe that prenuptial agreements get a bad rap. The most common complaints are that being so concerned with how the money gets split up is mercenary and unromantic, and that making contingency plans for if the marriage fails undermines the idea that you’re supposed to work to make sure your marriage is for life. My response to this has always been that someone whose love for their spouse is strong enough that they want to make sure even a divorce is as amicable and fair as possible is more romantic than flowery declarations that one’s love is blind to matters of money. Marriage has historically been and continues to be more advantageous for men than for women. We need to protect ourselves, ladies, even as we follow our hearts.