Somewhere along the way, I think when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress, I thought it would be an awesome idea to sign up with Feedburner to handle my RSS feed. The idea, as I recall, was I could somehow keep the same feed regardless of where my blog lived so that anyone subscribed to my old feed would remain subscribed to my new feed. Magic. Awesome. Great.

Except… not, because now it doesn’t seem to work and I’m really not sure what to do. Feedburner’s troubleshootize page is not really helping me. Any other suggestions?

Oh, also, this may have to do with how my WordPress template describes the feed, but, well, what should I change?

I’m getting too old for this stuff. Playing around with the guts of a website/blog was just much more fun 10 years ago when I started a blog. Things were so much simpler then! And yes, I know I sound like an old grump, but, well, grr….

Meanwhile, you spell meringue m-e-r-i-n-g-u-e. Just so you know.

Also, this writ of supervisory control was the highlight of last week.

The problem is, I can’t figure out how to keep track of what I’m doing on all these cases in a meaningful and still manageable way. Our technology people decided to invest gazillions of dollars² in the latest and supposedly greatest version of Justware Defender. Huge mistake. It’s a worthless, bloated, glacially slow kitchen sink of features. Trying to do too much, it does absolutely nothing well.³

So here’s what I need: I need a very lightweight database that runs on Windows that I can customize to allow me to enter a string of notes all day long, associate those notes with names, and have each note tagged with a date and time. I need to be able to arrange the data in chronological order so if I want to go back and see everything I did on a given day, I can do that. Just as important, I need to be able to narrow my view to just one client so I can quickly and easily see all the notes I’ve taken/interactions I’ve had w/that client — also preferably in chronological order. Ideally I could also characterize the type of interaction I had with the client or related to the client’s case — was it a phone call, a visit at the jail, an office appointment, a court appearance, or what? That way, if I wanted to see all the dates/times I saw a client in jail, I could quickly focus in on that.

What I need is sort of like what you can do w/email. You can view your inbox by date messages were received, or group by sender. You can sort based on whether a message has an attachment. You can sort based on whether you replied. You can sort by message subject, etc. I need to be able to take case/client notes quickly and then save them in a way that allows me to use the data in more than one way later on.

So tell me, wise readers, does anything like this exist?

1. I did tell him about that 10-year mandatory minimum before he entered his guilty plea, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Yikes!
2. I exaggerate, but I know it was a lot and way way way too much, considering the total budget of the PD’s office
3. Oh wait, it’s built on Microsoft “.NET” technology. No wonder it sucks!

One of these new public defenders said that one reason she wanted to be a public defender is the quality of people she works with:

“I think that public defenders in general are great people to work with,” Dyerly said. “They have huge hearts.”

Sounds like a bright-eyed, idealistic, newly-graduated law student, doesn’t it?

How about it, folks? I know just about every public defender out there w/a blog is the kind of person Ms. Dyerly describes, but is the same true of the people you work with? Are public defenders big-hearted in general, or are they just as petty, selfish, and egomaniacal as any other attorney? Inquiring minds want to know…

1. This would be assuming that public defender clients read newspapers. Your instinct might be that the average person who can’t afford a lawyer probably also does not read the newspaper. That may be true so long as that average client is not in jail. If your clients are in jail, be prepared: They probably know more about local news (especially as it relates to criminal justice) than you do.

I don’t know how to get all my work done in a 40-hour week, but I’m realizing I have to try harder b/c I don’t actually end up getting that much done when I go in on weekends. How do other people do it? How do you do the best job you can for my clients and still have a bit of a life?
[tags]work, balance[/tags]

Is it true that 60% on the MBE is usually a passing score? Can anyone fill me in anymore on how the “scaling” works? Do they scale the test according to all results nationwide, or do they scale each state independently?

I don’t really want to do just the bare minimum, but at the same time I don’t need a good score, I need a passing score. The MBE is worth 35% of the total exam score here so doing well on it can help cover mistakes on the essays and MPT. My hope was to be getting about 70-80% correct on the MBE by this point for just that purpose, but alas…

Aside from the score, the practice exam did seem valuable in that it showed just how very tiring it can be to sit for three hours straight doing question after question after question. (It’s especially hard if you’re getting almost half of them wrong; talk about discouraging!) A good night’s sleep before the real thing is going to be critical!

So do any of you who have grappled w/the bar exam and Bar/Bri have any thoughts on this dilemma? Are the books pretty good? Were the lectures very helpful?

Another “grr”-inspiring thing about the Montana bar exam is that I have to do it all by hand—no computers.³ I’ve probably written a total of two pages by hand in the last decade (much to the chagrin of my friends who enjoy the personal touch of a handwritten missive) so handwriting a bunch of essays ought to be a real joy.

But it gets better! Lucky for me, Montana decided to add the MEE (Multistate Essay Exam) and MPT (Multistate Performance Test) to its battery of fun this year. The MEE sounds like extra special fun:

The Multistate Essay Examination (MEE) is a three-hour, six-question essay examination covering agency and partnership, commercial paper, conflict of laws, corporations, decedents’ estates, family law, federal civil procedure, sales, secured transactions, and trusts and future interests.

Three hours of handwritten essay goodness! Good thing the only classes I took in the tested subject areas were corporations and civpro! I wouldn’t want to be over-prepared or anything.

The MPT sounds like the NCBE‘s attempt to test how you might do in “real world” situations:

The Multistate Performance Test (MPT) consists of three 90-minute skills questions covering legal analysis, fact analysis, problem solving, resolution of ethical dilemmas, organization and management of a lawyering task, and communication.

So there’s another 4.5 hours of super good times to look forward to! And, of course, the regular Montana portion of the exam will have its own essays to write, plus the MBE. So it will be like this: The state portion comes first on Monday, July 24th (4 60-minute essays), followed by the MEE (6 30-minute essays) and the MPT (3 90-minute “skills questions”) on Tuesday, and finally the MBE (200 mult. choice questions in 6 hours) on Weds. It’s nice the way they leave the MBE for last—it really gives you something to look forward to.

As for other random bar data miscellany, Montana appears to have a similar passage rate to most other states—about 80% (PDF). The pool of test-takers is not large—just over 150 each year (counting both the Feb. and July test dates). A quick glance suggests that puts Montana in about the bottom 10-12 states and territories in terms of the number of people who take the bar exam each year. I guess that’s a good thing? [tags]barbri, mbe, mpt, mee, ncbex[/tags]

1. The Bar/Bri course for Montana only costs $795 for books-only, $945 for books plus classes. There is no tape, cd, or iPod option.
2. Gas each way would probably be about $30, plus a hotel if I wanted to stay overnight. That means attending two classes in a row would cost me about $100, three classes in a row about $140, a whole week $220). And how often will I really want to take 10 hours of potentially valuable study time to make that trip?

   On the other hand, I’m pretty far from the world’s most self-disciplined kind of studier. ((Yeah, sure “studier” is a word. One who studies. I don’t need no stinkin’ dictionary!

3. Apparently this is fairly common—it’s the same way in Maryland and Michigan, for example. My question: Why!?!

Not.

But face it I must. Interest rates are going up again July 1 so if you’ve got student loans you might want to consolidate. Of course, if you have student loans, I’m sure your lender has made sure you know all about consolidation—perhaps much more than you ever wanted to know.¹ However, in doing my own second consolidation I’ve learned a couple of interesting bits of new info, including:

1. Private loans have 9 month grace period from date of graduation. You should get a letter 45 days before repayment begins. That letter will tell you when payments are due and allow you to choose your payment plan.
2. Make sure your lender has your correct address for that 45-day letter! You never want to miss any payments or pay late, obviously, but being late in the first couple years can have even worse consequences than you think. I think. ²
3. If you’d like to learn a bit about your loans you might want to with the Student Loan People. Once you login there you should be able to get a list of all your loans, including details about amount you owe, interest rate, and whether the loan is in repayment or deferred, and when your next payment is due. Try the NSLDS for info about your federal loans only.
4. Judging by the change in my loan amounts from yesterday to today, it looks like I’m paying at least $10/day in interest. That amount will only grow until I start repayment…
5. The loan consolidation interest rate a year ago was 2.7%; the current consolidation rate (before July 1, 2006) should be 4.7%.
6. If you consolidated any federal loans last year and you graduate(d) this spring, those loans will go into repayment about a month after you graduate. If you don’t have a job (like me) and you’d like to defer repayment until you do, check w/your loan servicer to get an Economic Hardship Deferment Request.

As interesting as all that is, I’m still not sure what to do about consolidation this time around. Since my last consolidation I’ve borrowed another $18,500 in federal loans I could now consolidate. Those loans have an interest rate of 5.3%. If I consolidated them, they’d only be at 4.7% (but probably a couple tenths more b/c I probably won’t get the lowest available rate). So is it even worth my while?

Loans. So not cool. [tags]debt, loans[/tags]

1. Access Group must have called me a dozen times in the last couple of month before I finally told them that if they called me one more time I would go elsewhere to consolidate. They haven’t called since.
2. Can anyone verify this? I remember something like this from my loan exit info session, but, of course, I didn’t write it down. I remember learning something like if you make all your payments on time in the first three years (or something like that) the lender must (by law) reduce your interest rate by some amount—like a half or quarter percentage point. Does anything like this ring a bell w/anyone? This came in the part of the lecture where the “expert” said that the most common payment to miss or be late on is the first one and that it’s our responsibility to know what’s due and when b/c the lender wins if we ever mess up. Please please comment if you know anything about this b/c, while I’m planning on paying everything on time, I still want to know I’m not remembering things that didn’t happen.