>> My name is Craig Thompson and I'm an attorney.
I work with a law firm called Venable.
It's in Baltimore, but we also have offices in D.C., New York, L.A.,
and in other parts of the country.
I'm in the litigation division, so I represent clients
who are undergoing judicial proceedings either hearings or in trial,
counsel clients on issues regarding risk management to try to keep them out of court.
You know we try to stay out of court and certainly our clients like to keep us
out of court, but we represent a number of corporations who have been sued by individuals
who believed that they were harmed by a product or by a drug or by some other mechanism
and so a lot of times we're reading medical records.
A normal day would be going in, having meetings with associates, talking about new cases,
talking about old cases, doing quite a bit of reading, some writing.
There's a lot of going back and forth with court work and so a lot of the pre-court work relates
to what are called pleadings or briefings and so we're advising the court
as to what the issues are in a case, what our positions are in a particular case.
We're also going back and forth with opposing counsel in processes known as discovery.
So we're trying to find out as much about their cases as we can and they're trying to find
as much about our cases they can and so we have depositions
which are sit-down sessions asking questions of witnesses.
We also have what are called interrogatories that are paper discovery and so we ask questions
that we ask people to respond to.
And so a lot of the day is made up of doing things to prepare for ultimately going
to court or staying out of court.