>> 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.