My First Real Law Job

- will be proofreading.

BUT hey it's a start and at any rate I prefer it to fetching people coffee and muffins (technically the most comparable thing I've done is two lots of grocery shopping for Friday-afternoon chips and beer, but my point still stands).


I had the interview this morning alongside my future-fellow-colleague/proofreader, who seems like a nice girl and who is also a law student in the year below me - let's call her B. We were both originally told by the secretary to whom we sent our applications that it would just be an informal meeting to discuss the work and clarify any issues - so naturally it was a mutual surprise when we both realised a few minutes into the interview that we'd pretty much already been hired. But like, SWEET.

Anyway, the office is less than 5 minutes walk from campus and 15-20 minutes from the other campus, as well as good pay and flexible hours (so I can keep my other job fine, though I may have to cut it down a bit during the last few weeks of trimester), provided that B and I manage to finish 300-400 pages per week over the next two (at most, three) months. We start next week, or at the latest the week after, once the documents arrive.

So, the actual project:
The Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) is trying to make legislation more accessible. Apparently they did a big thing in 2008 and/or also the general 2000s at the recommendation of the Law Commission, to put all the legislation as enacted (i.e. the original statutes that Parliament passed, including those that are no longer in force, as well as those that have since been amended) from 1841 online. All legislation from 2008 is and has been automatically uploaded online in an easy accessible and searchable format, and amendments etc are noted accordingly. Now they want to go a step further.

As I understand, New Zealand legislation including statutes passed from 1841 to 2007 are all online, but are hosted on the New Zealand Legislation Information Institute (NZLII), and PCO want to host it on their own website, properly, with like an improved interface so it's easier to search things and download them and stuff.

Okay, having just looked at the preview of the New Zealand Legislation website, and comparing that to what my new boss said, I am now confused as to what exactly will be changing, which is probably why my wankyseriouslanguage deteriorated somewhat in that last paragraph.

Anyway, PCO have contracted some tech company to take all the 1841-2007 statutes and convert them from whatever old format they are in, into a new OCR PDF, or something like that. (These are the documents that we are waiting for, which have been divided into 6 batches of LOTSOFTEXT.) The contractor claims that their work has a 99.5-99.8% accuracy rate, which new boss lady says - even if they ARE correct, and not just telling us they'll get our statutes whiter than white and sparkly clean - would mean that there would still be like, one error per 3,000 characters, which, for a hundred-something-paged piece of legislation, is a decent amount.

-> That is where B and I come in.

Pretty much, PCO give us a hardcopy of the original legislation, then a copy of the new converted legislation from the contractor. Where necessary, we have to update the converted legislation into modern format (because the old way is pretty much just massive chunks of tiny fonts and marginal notes, and few if any spaces between sections and paragraphs). For the most part though, we make sure every word and punctuation mark is faithful to the original.

Naturally this is going to take a lot of concentration. Luckily (or not so much?), I spent one summer at my existing job reconciling four years of bank records with the office's personal account records (in which there were a lot of careless errors), and I really don't like numbers.

WORDS, on the other hand, are my precious little babies. So, while I mainly hope to take advantage of the next couple of months to fund my French adventures, I think I shall - in a geeky law student, dictionary-wanderer, word-collector, crossword-setter, pedantic linguaphile way - enjoy this :D

IKUZO!