Working for Wizards

This post will constitute the entirety of my Wizards posts, since the experience is already over at the time of actually writing this. I will sumarize my time there with two words: pointless experience. Yes, I have competed a perfunctory legal intern (paid no less) which gave me insight into the in-house counsel experience that will help inform my future legal carrer. And yes, it was pointless. Most of what I learned from a legal perspective I already knew, and the internship was not setup such that it was easy for me to get to know other employees or legal staff. Complicating matters was an hour and a half commute, each way, between Greenlake and Wizards HQ in Renton.

My primary task consisted of reviewing contracts between Avalon Hill, a game company WotC's mother company Hasbro purchased a few years ago, and a whole host of independent game inventors. My NDA bars me from saying much more ('cause, like, this blog is super non-annonomous). But I will openly question the utility of the project. Seemed more like busy work that was beneath the legal assistant (who was really nice) but deemed important my some person out in the corporate authority zone. I think if I didn't really need the experience and resume line, I would have left the job. It was just very unfulfilling and the attornies who I was supposed to be learning from didn't seem to have a lot of interest in teaching me anything.

Thankfully, I never need to actually quit, because someday in middle July I was approached by the head of the legal department who informed me that with the departure of my supervising attorney (she was off to join the Microsoft Legal Legions) and certain financial considerations at Wizards, they were simply notin a position to continue the internship beyond the first week of August. The announcement struck my work performance almost immediately. I tried really hard to care, to work hard, to do good work... but I just couldn't pull it together, and in the end I left Wizards with less than 1/3 of the total job completed, even though I had consumed more than half of the summer. Let's just hope that the experience counts for something when I start applying for real jobs next year.