I went to law school knowing that I really didn't want to practice traditional law, but by the time I graduated, the kinds of jobs I thought I wanted were simply not available. When my tentative position as a law clerk for an Administrative Law Judge for the Department of the Interior became a victim of the federal budget process, I accepted a position with a small general practice firm, and later transferred to another small firm. There I spent most of my time doing a little bit of everything (as is typical in such firms), including working as both a guardian ad litem and a special justice. After five years, I realized that I needed to find something else to do.I began supplementing my income by writing chapters for legal compliance manuals, which was my first experience (other than client conversations) translating legalese into plain English. I was positively eloquent on the subject of FIFRA-- the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.I found my home at The Michie Company, which has since become LexisNexis. In my almost 30 years here, the legal publishing world has experienced a ground shift as the publishing industry has moved from print-centric to electronic formats, and my job has changed along with it. My current title is Senior Legal Analyst in the Indexing Department, where we bring light into the darkness of primary law research. My job is to read and translate legislation, statutes, constitutions, court rules, administrative regulations, and other legal writings. I answer the questions: What did they say? What did they MEAN?Where will people try to find it?In addition to overseeing the index updates for several US federal, state, territorial, and tribal jurisdictions, I also have extensive experience developing our editorial processes and tools, including working extensively with programmers and engineers, where I frequently serve as a translator between the folks writing the programs and the users who will put the new tools and processes through their paces. Recently I've also been working with the Lexis+ AI team to help improve search results and make our AI products more accurate. It's rarely boring!