It is still a little surreal every time I look out the tall windows of my spacious office on the 24th floor.  Light blue ocean?  Palm trees?  As a Pennsylvania native and a current Boston resident, the view still makes every day at the office feel a little like vacation.  I can’t think of a better place to spend long work days (except maybe Scott Baena‘s corner office down the hall :-) ). I was even secretly delighted when I was almost struck by a falling coconut while walking down the sidewalk the other day (#Miamiproblems…). 

To be working in such a beautiful and vibrant city is truly a privilege—which brings me to my next topic: privilege.  Well, privilege logs, that is.  This week, I finally completed my first selected assignment, an objective memo on proper privilege logging format for email chains being withheld under the work product doctrine. 

The assignment selection process works like this:

• As Bilzin Sumberg summer associates, we get to choose our assignments from an online assignment pool. 
• When an attorney comes up with a project, he or she lists that project along with a short description and an estimated duration (anywhere from four hours to 100 hours) in the pool. 
• We then go in and select the projects we want to work on, and they are removed from the pool and added to our personal agendas.

I had feared that assignment selection would be a sort of free-for-all, with all of the summer associates (or “summers”, as we are colloquially known) competing for a limited number of “good” projects.  I have been pleasantly surprised to find, however, that there is never a shortage of “good” projects in the pool. 

Bilzin Sumberg is constantly engaged in stimulating, cutting-edge legal issues.  My first project was no exception.  Case law has been slow to catch up with the realities of E-Discovery (the discovery of electronically stored information), and preserving privilege in the technological era is a sparse, yet contentious area of the law.

Given the obvious importance of first impressions, I was a little  daunted by my first assignment.  Fortunately, attorneys all around me were eager to help me sift through a complex legal web.  Everyone at Bilzin Sumberg has gone out of his or her way to make the summers feel at home. My hospitality award of the week goes to Eric Singer (Land Use) and David Massey (Litigation) for ever-so-patiently teaching us the basics of proper wine tasting at the Land Use event, Wines of Portugal, this week. 

The event was well-timed, for I had just finished my memo that afternoon!  Wine tasting did mean missing Bilzin’s weekly yoga class, but there is always next week.  Namaste :-)