A Typical Day at Kazmi and Kazmi Legal Advocates

 Hi everyone! So far I’ve written about some of the extraordinary experiences I have been lucky enough to be a part of, such as sitting in on High Court and Supreme Court hearings, but I thought I’d also share what a usual day interning at the law firm looks like.

A memo I've been working on

A typical day for me at the firm consists of mainly legal research and memo/brief writing. I get an assignment on a topic I am supposed to research and then off I go, digging into law journals and online databases.  I have become quite familiar with the Pakistan Law Digest (PLD), which is a set of digests printed annually that contain summaries of all of the cases that have taken place in Pakistan for that year. The PLDs are organized alphabetically for each year. When approaching the PLDs, I first take out the relevant ones, based on which term or concept I’m researching. For example, a couple of days ago I received an assignment in which I was asked to research a document entitled “The Representation of the People Act 1976,” which details the rules and procedures for elections in Pakistan. I began my research by looking at the most recent set of PLDs and taking out the one that contained the letter “R,” for "Representation of the People Act, 1976." After I found the most recent one, I repeated the same process for previous years. I ended up with a big stack of PLDs, and I started looking through them, finding cases that dealt with the “Representation of the People Act, 1976” that were relevant to the case my firm was working on. When I found a case that I thought seemed promising, I would write down the name of the case and the citation. After compiling a list of cases with their citations, I give the list to the firm’s clerk who then finds those cases for me, so I can read the complete version of each one. This process is a bit new for me since I’m used to doing research mainly online, but it’s definitely a good experience for me to learn research the old fashioned way. It’s longer and more tedious than online research, but so much more comprehensive.

Stacks of PLDs

It’s been really great to be working on actual cases, alongside the talented lawyers at my firm. This is definitely not an internship where I’m asked to make copies, or answer phones, or run around doing trivial errands. Instead, I’m getting the chance to do the actual work of lawyers.  My favorite part of this internship is the interactions I have with the lawyers here. I never feel intimidated to ask any questions; in fact I am encouraged to do so everyday. As a student aspiring to be a lawyer, there’s nothing more I could have asked for!