by AJ Murray, 2L

In this new blog series, real GSU law students tell you about their legal research experiences over the summer.

This past summer, I worked at a local firm. We dealt primarily in white collar criminal law, as well as trademark infringement. The first task I was assigned to was to work on developing a memo for multiple conspiracies. Conspiracies often come in two flavors: multiple conspiracies and multiple-object conspiracies. Multiple-object conspiracies are defined by an interest in multiple objectives that may or may not support each other, but support an overall plan of action whilst multiple conspiracies are not well-related save for a figurehead or ringleader who most of the individual conspiracies are tied to.

Our objective was to illustrate how a potential defendant might be innocent of a conspiracy to commit fraud. We wanted to argue that there were multiple separate conspiracies rather than one. We also wanted to argue that the indictment was duplicitous. As pulled from Wikipedia, “duplicity is the error committed when the charge on an indictment describes two different offenses. An indictment may contain more than one count, but each count must allege only one offense, so that the defendant can know precisely what offenses he or she is accused of.” Because there are multiple conspiracies, it is possible that one of the conspiracies could be duplicitous because it did not account for the difference between the conspiracies.

My first objective was to better understand what conspiracies were. Criminal Law classes can only cover so much! Using cases provided to me by a coworker, I used the cases’ notes of decisions, headnotes, and keycites to further develop my understanding. In addition to that, I also looked at the court websites for all eleven circuits to find their jury instructions to see how they help the jury understand multiple conspiracies. They include helpful cases in their explanation and I used those as well. Unfortunately, the memo was challenging to write because conspiracies commonly exist for drug-related purposes, not for financial abuse. You don’t necessarily want to compare fraud with the distribution and manufacturing of drugs when using cases. Plus, the more similar the case, the better its utility for offensive and defensive purposes. When all was said and done, I had provided some important nuggets of wisdom, but was unable to find exactly what my attorney needed. I read hundreds of cases in pursuit of that illustrative and similar case, but, as far as I could see, it did not exist.

I learned this summer that, while there are MANY cases, sometimes the one you’re looking for just doesn’t exist. It’s totally ok that I wasn’t able to find it. Not only did I find very useful quotes and caselaw, but because I was a first-year intern, a client could have potentially paid less for my services for researching than for that of one of our attorneys. Since I could do the grunt work of sorting, analyzing, and synthesizing cases, I provided a unique benefit that no one else at the firm could, considering no one had a paralegal or another intern. It was a wonderful and insightful summer!