My Spouse and Litigation Support

Today is my wedding anniversary. It is marriage number 2 for me. I married Kel (short for Kelbert) 4 years ago on August 8, 2008. The date was a suggestion by a dear friend of mine, Margaret Havinga. She thought it would be cool to have an anniversary date of 08/08/08 and apparently the Chinese think the number 8 brings good luck!

So, why am I discussing my anniversary on a blog about litigation support? Well, the cool thing about this marriage is that we get to “talk shop” with each other and we actually really understand our spouse's occupation at this point.

A bit of background — when I met my husband he was working for a government contractor as a Network Engineer in an IT department. I was his first techie girlfriend and we still share our love of all things geeky. About two years into our relationship, he began to watch with interest as I worked with databases and data on my laptop many evenings and weekends. He would over hear some of my phone calls with attorneys, paralegals, vendors or team members. When I noticed he was getting more curious, I used to tell him “you could do this too!” I explained to him how his IT skills would come in handy and I talked about how gratifying and exciting this career can be. I encouraged him to consider switching from IT to litigation support.

Eventually, when one of his government contract positions ran out of steam, he decided to give litigation support a try. Now 4 years later, he has gained experience working for a government contractor, a few vendors and a law firm. He has gone through everything that I have seen other newbies to litigation support go through. He has reached a sweet spot in the industry now — he is no longer a newbie.

Almost every evening we get to share war stories of our day and any new things that we learned. We are always sharing tips with each other. Some people might not enjoy “talking shop” at home, but we do. When we share stories about our work day, we can each identify with the other. I think it's really cool. We both understand when our work might need to take priority over other plans. For an industry that is difficult to explain to family members and friends, I feel lucky to have that kind of connection with my spouse.

This photo was taken right after we got married. We went to the ILTA conference in Dallas, Texas that year. I was speaking on a panel at ILTA and I thought it would be cool to take my husband with me as sort of a vacation/honeymoon. The other reason is that my hubby is a Dallas Cowboy fan. Personally, I can't stand them, but I am a supportive wife. It happened to be the year that the old stadium was closing and the new stadium was being built. We did a tour of the old stadium and we attended the last pre-season game in that stadium. It was pretty cool and of course my hubby was beaming!