How Ed Tomchin found his new job in a law firm

This week, Ed Tomchin, a paralegal in Golden Valley, AZ, tells LawCrossing how he got his job:

"For most of my legal career, I worked freelance for any number of attorneys. I'd prepare a small three-fold brochure, which I'd copy a few hundred times and mail to all the sole practitioners and small firms in whatever area I happened to be living at the time. I reasoned that the larger firms would want staff employees rather than a freelancer, and my experience bore this out. I'd also get a lot of assignments via word of mouth."

"I wanted to experience the law in a different jurisdiction in a different part of the country, so I moved to Phoenix, Arizona. I've always been partial to the Southwest. I'm a desert rat by nature. The Phoenix law community didn't know much about what a paralegal was, how to use one, or what they cost. It was difficult finding work—small jobs here and there but nothing to really bite my teeth into for a long while. [I] worked up some PI cases for a couple of attorneys, summarized surveillance notes for a private detective for a while; then I was hired by a big local firm to work on a large water case doing general gopher work like assisting yearlings [with] conduct[ing] document inspections and organizing the documents, but it was water law, which is really unique in Arizona and a very few other desert states. Most places have riparian rights, but in Arizona, water is distributed according to right of first appropriation."

"If you think that doesn't result in some bizarre issues, think again. This case was a big local developer suing the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant, which hadn't opened yet—this was still 1983-84—over its acquisition of a tri-city's conjoined affluent for cooling the plant. The developer was asserting that the right of the cities to sell their affluent to the power plant was in violation of a preexisting right of first appropriation. I have no idea what the outcome of that suit was."

"I moved back to California after spending one summer in Phoenix. I decided I wanted to live in another capitol and moved to Sacramento, where, after making a few phone calls, I picked up an assignment summarizing daily trial transcripts. It was the greatest pressure I'd ever worked under. I'd get the trial transcript about 8:00 p.m. and work through the night to prepare the summary for counsel the next day. I didn't have a computer at this point and worked by notes and a typewriter with 512 bytes of memory. I learned to edit on a one-line monitor before committing to print."

"This was the first major legal depression I'd ever experienced. The case settled after about 11 days, just prior to closing arguments, and it took every bit of the wind out of my sails. I felt like I'd lost everything, that all my work was for nothing. I made it through only to find it was but the first in a long history of such experiences—hazard of the profession."

"I didn't get much respite, either. Within a week, another local attorney heard of my work on the trial transcripts and called asking if I would come in and discuss computerizing a large piece of construction-defect litigation. How he'd made the connection between summarizing trial transcripts [and] computerizing evidence was a mystery, but I wasn't complaining. I'd be working for a consortium of six law firms, representing a slew of defendant builders to computerize all the deposition and discovery evidence so it would be available to each firm chronologically by subject, by keyword, by issue, and by a number of other factors that were determined in numerous conferences. The building was at issue since it collapsed—fortunately a week before opening."

"I said I could provide what they wanted, except I didn't have a computer. They took this in stride and advanced me $6k to purchase my first system: a Compaq Deskpro with 640k RAM, two 20mg HDs, eight megs of extended RAM, and a professional database-management system (Microrim's rBase). The depositions and discovery documents began pouring in, and for the next 11 months, it was 12 to 14 hours a day summarizing it all into the database I'd created. I chose rBase over the popular dBase because it was better at handling text, which was the majority of the data I needed to store and access."

"Eventually, I settled into working for two particular sole practitioners in Las Vegas that would give me the sort of work I enjoyed until I finally retired and moved to Arizona."