Day 8. Fruitless attempt to make up word count.

Okay, I know I vowed never to work for an attorney ever again. Ever. I worked for Prewitt Fox for six years and, although he was an excellent attorney and considerate employer, it took at least six months for my eye to stop twitching and my bowels to return to normal.

The law is often a long, boring, drawn out process. But not always. Sometimes it goes to the other extreme and becomes intense, stressful and incredibly fast. So when Fox announced his retirement, I was incredibly relieved.

And, to make extra money, I started selling items on U-Buy. I had a lot of extra knick knacks and collectibles lying around the house and it usually went okay. I enjoyed selling some of the items in my Favorite Fairy Tale Princess Collection – slivers of apple from Snow White’s throat, for example. I also had some egg shell segments from Humpty Dumpty after his fall, things like that.

So I knew I’d have to put the U-Buy business on the back burner, as it were, and devote most of my waking hours to the case.

And it promised to be a doozy.

You might not know it, but doozy is actually a real legal term. It means – wait, I should probably get everyone up to speed on certain words that will be coming up in the rest of the novel. Here are just a few.

Legal Definitions

1. Doozy - something more than just a bit out of the ordinary.

2. A/K/A – short for also known as, but sounds cooler.

3. Court – where the Plaintiff and Defendant take their problem. The Judge is also referred to as “the Court” because he or she decides who is right.

4. Defendant – the person who’d better have a good explanation for what someone said they did.

5. et al – means that there are more people on the list but it takes too much time to write all of them.

6. Go hence without day – lawyers like to use this phrase because it sounds important, but it only means to do it today, now, immediately if not sooner, what’s taking you so long, should have been done yesterday.

7. Libel and Slander – when someone says something so bad about someone to so many people that it ruins his or her life. This is way beyond just talking bad about someone behind her back, which isn’t very nice. Libel is written and slander is spoken.

8. Original Petition – the first paper that the Plaintiff writes that complains about the Defendant.

9. Plaintiff – the person who is complaining about something someone else did.

10. WHEREFORE PREMISES CONSIDERED – this phrase is often the opening line of the last paragraph on legal papers. Secretaries write it in capital letters because they are so happy the typing is almost done.

Those are just a few. I’ll put in more as they come up.