My "First" Day of Work

It's about 7:40am. Today is my first day of work. Or, should I say, today was supposed to be my first day of work. About two weeks ago I got a call from the Conflicts Dept. at the law firm I will be working at this summer. The call is pretty routine, following up on some of the legal work I've done in the past. One or two questions were about some work I did five years ago at the New York Public Interest Research Group, but most focused around the work I did at the firm I worked for last summer.

It turns out one of the clients I worked for last summer is a client that my new firm has a lot of work adverse to. So, my new firm had to call my old firm and ask them if they'd be willing to ask the client for a waiver so that I can start working. We're still just waiting on the client to sign the waiver. If signed, I can begin working. The waiver, however, does not let me work on any matters that might involve this client, so my new firm will create something called an "ethical wall" around me, which basicallly means I'm out of the loop on all of those cases and nobody can talk to me about them.

As of right now, I'm not allowed on the premises for my first day of orientation with all the other summer associates. Granted I always find orientation to be 2 or 3 hours of material stretched over 2 days, I still think it is important to go and meet everyone (including my summer mentor). A few of the coordinators tried to bend the rules a little so that I could just show up for training and social functions, but the idea didn't fly with the partners. My guess that it is just too big of a risk, even if I woudln't have computer access and wouldn't even start working until two days from now.

Although I'd like to start working, the weird thing is that I completely understand what is going on and why it needs to be done. I'm not mad at all -- I just feel like a fish out of water a little because it's Monday and I need to occupy myself by running more errands!