When you’ve been out of practice for a while, it takes a minute or two to get your bearings.  This is true for anything you do – foreign language, baking bread, legal research.  I’ve been out of the practice for a while so everything seems a bit new and sparkly to me.  It reminds me of the excitement of being a new law grad and getting to try a case for the first time, looking at the case from all sides, figuring out the issues and then deciding how to attack.  (NB:  I tried my first case as a 2L, so I’m imagining how OTHER new grads felt) There are some things I have no doubt about still.  I don’t need to look up basic evidentiary rules and I’ve got the hearsay exceptions down pat (unless they made up some new ones or took some away).  I feel fairly secure in my knowledge of appellate procedure and still have a firm grasp of our constitutional protections.  But the other day I went to a legal search engine and my fingers hovered over my keys – what words would I need to use to search?  I had to think for a minute.  Not a painfully long minute, but a minute nonetheless (a minute I clearly didn’t charge my client).  I used to be the master of the search terms, why has my brain shut down like this?

Alas, it hadn’t.  It just needed a little prodding, a little grease on the gears.  Once I started typing, it came back to me in one fell swoop. I was awash in legal search terms, switching between natural language and boolean like I was born to it. (No height over here, but some serious legal research skillz.  Yeah, with a ‘z’.)

While I was at it, I looked up some of the basics to make sure they hadn’t changed while I was in hibernate mode.  Yes, criminal defendants are still entitled to counsel, we still have some fourth and fifth amendment protections, there is a new chief judge at the Court of Appeals in New York, and the immigration laws have gotten crappier.  All in all, it seems that while the method by which we practice law has gotten much more technologically advanced with such things as “cloud computing” and “electronic signatures” and “the Fujistu Scan Snap s1500“, the practice of THE LAW is still the same.  Boolean searches and all.