partner’—you like that better?” Mickey asked.
Sarah sipped her beer and took a few more moments to consider. Her partner the year before had been an older woman who was an excellent writer, and had done a great job on her portion of the brief, but who began to fall apart the moment they argued their case in front of the judges. Catherine had barely gotten out two sentences of her prepared statement before the judges began firing questions at her, one after another.
That was how Moot Court was supposed to go—it was an imitation of arguing an appellate case in front of a panel of judges primed to interrupt and ask questions, and generally to overwhelm and challenge the lawyers. And for the past two months Sarah and Catherine and everyone else in Moot Court had been rehearsing exactly how to deal with that.
But suddenly Catherine seemed very tired. She rested her arms against the podium and her head started to droop. The next thing Sarah knew, Catherine was swaying to the side, and both Sarah and one of her opponents from the other team leapt up just in time to catch the woman before she fainted. They helped her back to her seat, and Catherine folded her arms on top of the counsel table and laid her head there. Her breathing sounded ragged. Sarah hoped her partner wasn’t going to throw up.
“You’ll have two minutes, counsel,” the chief judge informed her. “If you don’t resume by then, you forfeit.”
Sarah wasn’t sure her partner would recover in time. Her face—what Sarah could see of it—was still deathly pale, and Sarah could hear a soft moan.
“Catherine?” she whispered. “Are you going to be all right?”
Catherine gave a slight nod.
Sarah glanced at the timer ticking away in front of them. What a disaster. If only the rules allowed her to take over for Catherine, it would have been all right. But as it was, all Sarah could do was rub the woman’s back and say soothing things to her, like, “You can do this. It’s almost over. You only have to argue a few more minutes.”
When the chief judge warned of the last ten seconds, Catherine slowly rose to her feet. Sarah helped steady her back to the podium. Then Catherine made a valiant—and successful—effort to remain on her feet until the allotted time was over. Then she sank back into her chair and laid her head on the table again.
Needless to say, they lost.
But Mickey Hughes didn’t seem the fainting type. If anything, he looked like he’d enjoy the spotlight while judges tried to hammer holes in his argument.
“You’ll have to make time for this,” Sarah warned him. “I don’t care what your class load is, I want to meet at least three times a week.”
“Sounds good,” Mickey said.
“We’ll divide up the briefing and decide who researches and writes which part.”
“Great,” he said.
“And before you start saying yes to everything,” Sarah added, “let me tell you this is strictly professional. This isn’t you getting into my pants.”
“All right,” Mickey said with a grin, “I’ll deal with that separately, on my own time.”
“I’m serious, Hughes, it ain’t happening. I’m here to work.”
He gave her a salute and downed the rest of his beer. “Want another?” he asked, getting up. “I have the feeling you’re more fun when you’re drunk.”
Just to prove her point, Sarah pushed away her still mostly-full glass. “Time to go study,” she said, also rising to her feet. “See you tomorrow. We’ll divide up the work then.”
“See you, beautiful,” he said.
“That’s the last time you say that or we’re done right now.”
Mickey chuckled. “I meant see you, scrawny, high-strung girl with the big brain.”
Sarah smiled at that. “I’m never high-strung,” she said. “You’ll see. And you’d better be a lot cooler in court than you are trying to pick me up.”
“I definitely am,” Mickey assured her.
She held out her hand for him to shake. “Guess you’ll do for now.”
***
The next time Sarah checked the sign-up sheet, she could see Joe Burke and his partner Ellen Kiptar were the other team working on the same case. They had signed up to represent the respondent—the hospital which had failed to protect sensitive patient information from someone who hacked into the computer database—whereas Sarah and Mickey represented the petitioner, a woman whose medical records had been exposed. The question was whether the patient had a constitutional right to privacy that the hospital violated by being so lax with its computer security. Sarah