Burned a lot of energy last weekend working on confidential memos related to my OLA cases. You write confi memos to give the law intern who might end up with your cases a background, as well as some bits of wisdom you learned along the way. Given enough time, I’d go for archiving some of these cases as well - some of them have been resolved, one way or another, and I need to put them to their final resting place.
The thing with OLA, the thing with our justice system, is that cases drag on for so long that individual lawyers may never see the consequences of their actions. In OLA, Law Interns could be turning over cases thrice a year (Summer, 1st and 2nd Semesters). Few of us ever had to deal with a heartbreaking defeat, or a sweet victory. The internship program passes by, and for the most part it’s disconnected drudgery. File this motion, attend that hearing. Do the legwork. With never enough time, you’re forced to deal only with these atomic bits, far removed from the beating, bleeding heart of the case.
Lucky for me, I’m the intern on the terminal point of one of these cases. Lucky for me, I’m going to be the one who’ll receive the final final decision from the Supreme Court, and I’ll have to face my clients and say that after years of work by supposedly the best law students in the country (I could be wrong) - I’m sorry - but this was all we could do.
The way we do legal internship in U.P. is an achievement. No less than the Supreme Court has praised OLA’s work (a fact they never fail to tell us during orientation). Law schools all over the Philippines are trying to imitate it, with varying degress of success. I think that all things considered, it’s a force for good. I wonder though to what degree this success has been examined and interrogated - or maybe we’re just proceeding out of sheer inertia. Just about every class, every teacher in U.P. is exposed to some feedback process. In the humble college where I come from - students get to evaluate their internship program, and the administration is not totally insensitive to them. At the barest minimum, we’d want to check if the internship program is getting in the way of their learning. Feedback keeps us honest, helps us improve. I don’t know if they’ll let us evaluate the program at the end of our internship - more of the same thing, because that’s how it’s always been done.
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