Ten Things I've Learned This Summer as a Corporate In-House Law Clerk

1. If you remove the Snickers bars and other assorted chocolate covered, deep-fried delectables from the vending machine and replace them with Baked Lays and flax-seed Melba toast packages THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY
2. Sometimes the most appropriate response to a settlement demand from opposing counsel during a conference call is "Suck it"
3. On casual Fridays, if someone asks where you got your cute jeans and how much you paid for them, for god's sake, lie - wearing pants of any kind that cost more than their car will not make you popular
4. Complex legal predicaments are often best explained to upper management through puppetry and song
5. Brazilian interns, though extremely attractive, are ostensibly deaf-mutes; but not blind, as their frequent glances down my shirt and towards my ass have demonstrated
6. When paralegals ask, "What are you doing right now?", they should be understood to mean simply, "Actually, I don’t care what else you’re doing, because I have six-hours worth of filing that needs to be done five-minutes ago"
7. There is no observation too small, no request too petty to warrant a mass email to the plebes from Human Resources
8. Pretty green plant-life should never be entrusted to the care of my cubicle; no amount of water, sunlight, and sweet-talk can save it from the ominous force of my black-thumb
9. Attorney-client luncheons are the place to order the expensive steak and several desserts; they are not the place to order several rounds of martinis
10. When in doubt, a ten-minute Diet Coke break yields many answers

[editor's note: in an on-going effort to spare myself a harsh doocing, nothing has been, or will ever be, written here that has not been or wouldn't be said, or at least joked about, to the smiling faces of my lambent employers- the same goes for you too, Mom]