Write Your Own Talibunny Adventure

Some of us who are members of the Stinque Legal Eagle club may experience (or remember) on a daily basis the lovely hell that is known as “doc review” — where you are sitting in a cubicle with five bankers’ boxes full of pieces of paper and you’re supposed to read every single page (which hopefully has been Bates-stamped) in the next 8 hour shift and stick a post-it pad on any paper that looks like it might help your side of the case.*

One normally is paid anywhere between $15 and $100 an hour to do this drudgery. Well, now the New York Times is inviting you to do it for free with the Palin Papers! And you don’t even have to have a J.D. or a bar card!

Somehow I find it amusing that this request for assistance (even HuffPo isn’t stooping this low, last time I checked) occurs the same day as the obituary for Leonard Stern, the creator of MadLibs.

So if you’re not doing anything or anyone else tonight, give it a whirl! Fill in Caribou Barbie’s email message:

The ___[adj]___ media are ___[verb]____-ing with ___[developmentally disabled prop/child/grandchild name]____  because they ____[verb]___ America and are a bunch of ____[noun, pl.]___. Well, I tell ya, __[Intej/verb]__ that!

*I have heard a rumor that fancy pants law-firms now can do this on a computer, but I still do it with paper. I have the cuts on my fingers to prove it.

6 Comments

A couple of solid scanners with good OCR software should make quick work of digitizing the text so that people can run useful scans for key works like “sniper” and “bribe” and “abortion” and “kick-back” and “pestork”. Better for just making a web hosted archive and have everyone everywhere searching his own favorite strings.

@FlyingChainSaw: I’m not ashamed to admit that I was searching for the words “pregnant” and “abortion” within about 30 seconds on the NYT site – but I love how the Juneau Chamber of Commerce and Visitors’ Bureau had such an influence over the state government that they refused to release the docs on disk or via email like every other county/state/federal agency and instead demanded that reporters schlep to Juneau – inaccessible by car – with scanners and satellites in hand – to physically pick up and download the docs.

@SanFranLefty: I didn’t get passed the headlines. Could you download the text files or archive if you physically showed up with a USB stick or something? In that case, you throw a local journalist $500 to run in and get it for you and email you the attachment. Is the full text available on the NYT site already?

Rest assured that any document having to do with her ‘pregnancy’ was removed. The truth will never come out.

Doc review has paid my rent since July 2006. It’s all online now, but just as tedious.

@FCS: The state would only release on paper so the reporters had to go there with scanners. No flash drives would have helped.

@SanFranLefty: The good think is some solid commercial scanners are fairly inexpensive these days. Ideally, they would come up with a script to capture and immediately scan for key words like ‘fuck’ and ‘assassinate’ and send those immediately to an editor for consideration as a blog post and then into a queue for indexing.

This stuff with that staffers book which was based on his inbox should be able to yield some new forensic narratives.

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