Week Two:
Christensen & Ehret, LLP

June 3, 2015

Two weeks down and I’m still breathing! This last week has been challenging, but I’ve learned some valuable lessons and I hope to continue learning.

Before Memorial Day weekend, I was approached by one of the attorneys here at Christensen/Ehret and asked to use my prior knowledge of the institutionalized issues within the Illinois prison system to help her develop her with one of her cases. At Cornell, especially as a Politics major, we are constantly given research topics that we conduct on our own and present. Although we are allowed to choose the topics, stringent guidelines are usually given by our professors to guide our research in a sense. Nonetheless, this attorney gave me all authority of the issue. I was able to find cases using different Illinois databases that possessed the potential to overlap our cases.

After finding roughly five different issues that she could potentially juxtapose with her current case, she gave me another task: sifting through nearly 200 pages of documents of plaintiff, witness, and defense testimony that she could use for her depositions. The only rule? – finish within one hour. Again, going to Cornell and being a Politics major, I have crammed for Professor Hassell or Dr. Thomas’ classes, so retaining and analyzing information from these documents within a confined window would be difficult, but a task that was familiar to me.

This task actually was the most interesting work that I have done since I’ve been here. Just seeing the holes and inconsistencies of each testimony makes it really difficult (but extremely interesting) to determine the “what actually happened here” question. Nonetheless, I pieced together the puzzle in the manner in which I thought the incident occurred and submitted it to the attorney for her review.

Currently, this attorney has me conducting research specific to this case. This includes looking into the background and histories of the parties involved, looking at different statutes and laws that could have been violated, in addition to contacting individuals that we could use as expert testimony. I find the last task to be the most difficult, as many potential experts often talk your ear off on the phone rattling off details much faster than you can write ending with the anticipated: “I can talk about this all day, but I charge $___ per hour.” Nonetheless, with a myriad of colleges within Chicago, there are tons of candidates to sift through and speak to over the phone.

In other news I finally moved into my loft! I am extremely excited; mostly because I don’t have to commute on the train and deal with anxious people anymore (did you know there was a lady that sat DIRECTLY beside me on a train that was nearly empty? Never mind, that’s another story). But my loft and roommates are incredible. I have three roommates, one graduate student from Indiana University, one graduate student from the University of Michigan, and one graduate student from the University of Wisconsin. Two of them are focusing on accounting while the other is focused on environmental law. On top of our own personal loft, everyone in our building is a student of some sort working in Chicago for a summer internship/job. It makes for pretty interesting conversations that often turn into résumé battles.

With only three days around each other we have had some pretty funny experiences. We try to always eat dinner together, so after planning on going to the Plymouth Rooftop Bar located right down the street from us (which I knew about from a Cornell College Career Tour), we set off on a thirty minute excursion to find something that was right next to us. The detour was a lot of fun as we got to walk past the Art Institute, got to see a street band perform live, and best of all got to see the shopping center that none of us knew was so close to us.

There are still some things I need to figure out, though. Firstly, I need to find a church that is not to far away from my place. I live in the middle of everything so I’m sure I will find one soon. Second, I need to find a gym with a basketball court. The Roosevelt University coach was kind enough to let me use his gym, but only when he gets back from his trip in about three weeks. And third, and arguably most important, I need to find a barber! I am very precise about my hair (remember when I had my hightop fade?) so this barber needs to be top notch. It is a little out of my way to travel back to Naperville every weekend to see my regular barber, but if that’s what I have to do to ensure that my hair looks presentable then I will do so. Even in this, I am excited to spend my summer in the city of Chicago!