In my second year of law school I got a clerking job for an ambitious, sharp attorney in a lakeside town in northern Indiana. To be honest, I was in awe of this man. I envied his confidence and bravado. And as his law clerk, I aimed to please.

One day my assignments included getting an initial court date for a new divorce action. File in hand I headed down the street a couple blocks to the courthouse and up the stairs to the clerk's office. There the case was assigned to a judge and placed on the court docket. Job done.

When I returned to the office I handed the file back to my boss's secretary. I knew by the screaming that ensued that I'd done something wrong. Just what that wrong was, I couldn't have guessed on my own. But the locals in the law office knew what was what. I had managed to get the case assigned to the one judge in town who did not grant divorces due to his own deeply held religious convictions. Gee, they hadn't taught that one in law school.

Back to the courthouse I went. I suspect that a call was made in advance of my arrival. Suddenly a flurry of ink stamps were affixed, a liberal application of white out allied and a new judge was on the case and all was well with the world.

Different judges, different results. That never really came up in law school.

Years later, when it was my turn to be the lawyer on the divorce of a friend of a friend, well the system had changed and the computer did the judge assigning. So the judge assignment wasn't the problem, it was the clogged court docket that posed the hurdle.

You see, it was a couple weeks after I accepted the divorce case, the one of the friend of the friend. It was then that I learned just what kind of a rush this case was to be. It seems that the wedding invitations had already been mailed - the wedding invitations for the remarriage of my client, the one whose divorce was months and months away.

That's when I hired cocounsel, a guy with "clout" over at the courthouse. This fellow's retainer to get matters moving was eye popping - but he was the go-to guy when time was an issue. And suddenly, once the retainer check cleared, well my groom in waiting had a court date the very next week. That's when the aunt of the blushing brideto be stopped phoning my home to tell me how many lives I single-handedly was ruining.

Clout - it's really not a subject to be found in the course selections in law school.

Naive, you say? Well yes, I plead. I didn't know, what I didn't know.

At least in ethics class, the professor leveled with us. It was the last day of the course and he started the sentence with "and this is all fine and good, but..." And then he proceeded to give us a little practical advice for across the street in the courthouse. Back then there was a land registration system called Torrens. At the Torrens office there were countermen. The countermen took gratuities before they would file a deed or a mortgage. It was all terribly illegal and all very well known. That's just how it was. And our ethics professor wanted us to know. The Torrens countermen and Al Capone had one thing in common. It took the IRS to bring them to justice.

In law school I learned to respect and appreciate our legal system of justice.

Outside of law school, I learned that this same system, this system that is to be lauded and defended should at the same time be continuously questioned and disciplined and examined.