Way, way back before I went to law school I got involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I essentially volunteered as a legal intern for a couple of months, which turned out to be a good deal for me in several ways: I got my first, intense exposure to the technology civil liberties issues they advocate, I got my first experience being in a legal environment, and I got to meet and work with a whole bunch of fabulous people. Oh, and when the webmaster went on vacation, I got to be the EFF webmaster for a month. What they got out of the arrangement I can't imagine, as it was before law school and I doubt I was of much legal use. But I was welcomed to participate in meetings and discussions, and from time to time I probably mustered something resembling a constructive contribution. Or at the very least I didn't break anything...
Over the years I've kept in touch, and they've kept being fabulous people doing lots and lots of important work. So when the intake coordinator went on vacation, they asked if I'd mind covering for her. Mind??!!
So today was my last day there. I was there two weeks, minus the days for CES. It was a surprisingly hard job. Because the EFF, to its credit and as a result of extensive outreach campaigns, is considered such a "go to" source for help on technology civil liberties issues that lots more people ask for its help than can possibly all be served. So I was in the position of needing to figure out which cases it could consider taking, and then trying to point people in other directions for the ones it couldn't. It's two competing interests to juggle: the protection of scarce resources and the need to exude enough openness so that the people it could help in some way could get it.
And that was just one source of tension. There also was the tension between needing to provide people with information, and needing to not provide them with legal advice. It's a tension that lawyers in general are always confronting, as people are always asking them for help, and it's really hard to navigate this tension under the best of circumstances as the line between the two is pretty blurry. Given though that the EFF is also such a repository of information on these topics of law and technology it's particularly hard to unwind all the questions and provide answers in general ways, especially because for so many people the answer they really want is the one that applies to their situation alone.
Of course, the real challenge was more from needing to step into a completely new job and be productive from the get-go than from anything else. Not because anyone there necessarily demanded it of me, but because I so appreciated the opportunity to be able to help provide such important support to the public, and I wanted to make sure I really did.