Dad decided when I was ten or so that I should totally start helping him practice law.

[snarp]

This was basically just spell-checking pleadings and asking me if his “wording made sense.” He didn’t actually usually change his wording if I said it didn’t, he just enjoyed it when I tried to tell him he was lawyering wrong.

When I was thirteen, though, he had a case in which someone had been found to have some illegal material on his work computer. This guy assured Dad that he’d just gotten said illegal material as attachments to spam, and that he hadn’t wanted any of it.

The prosecution gave us copies of the emails in question with full headers, and the headers obviously rendered these documents far too intimidating for Dad. He got home, handed them to me, and asked me to look over them and explain them to me.

I hope that the information which I have presented here has instilled in you an appropriate sense of dread.

The actual illegal stuff had been redacted out, but the “benign” files had not. These included a photo of a woman posing suggestively next to her horse. This image formed an important part of a long-running conversation that Dad’s client had been having with her!

I have never stopped telling my dad that he is lawyering wrong.

Comments

[niqaeli]

All I can think of is the girlfriend of "his wife, a horse," guy.

oh, internets. D:

[malkingrey]

Now my mind is trying to figure out how one "stands suggestively" near a horse. Brain bleach may be required.