Frankly Francs: Week 1
A welcome party consisting of assorted cheeses, red wine, and laughs about my—now corrected—belief that blue cheese simply had blue food dye. International Bridges to Justice Geneva immediately proved to be a wonderful work environment.
International Bridges to Justice (“IBJ’) seeks to ensure timely representation for ordinary citizens in developing countries. Providing a lawyer early ensures due process rights for individuals by shortening unnecessary pre-trial detainment, and helps prevent torture of the individual while detained. Currently, there are forty-eight country offices and the Geneva headquarters working to make the IBJ mission possible.
I will be working broadly on compliance during my ten weeks. IBJ is in the process of complying with two procedure audits conducted by funders. Both audits identified a lack of standardization in contracts across offices. With many offices comes many employees, and as attorneys know, many employment contracts. So, my first task is creating a set of standardized form contracts for employees, contractors, fellows, and interns working with IBJ. I began by collecting the contracts used at headquarters and in various country offices to compare. What began with reading one open-ended employee contract quickly became a large stack of employment contracts on my desk. Sifting through the language of contractor and employment contracts, addendums to those contracts, and mysterious “agreements” that looked closer to letters than contracts made me realize how critical of verbiage I’d become in my first year at William & Mary Law School.
An arbitration clause is placed throughout all the contracts of IBJ employees. When I discovered discrepancies in the cited governing arbitration law from contract to contract, I knew I had to put my newfound legal background to hard work—it was time to use Google Translate. I silently thanked my Civil Procedure professor for having prepared me for this very moment. Then, I researched the Swiss Rules of Arbitration, and the Swiss Civil Procedure Code. Interestingly, the same general procedures cover contentious matters, bankruptcy courts, and arbitration. Seemingly, the Swiss have discovered that arbitration allows cooler heads to prevail.
My first six days in Geneva have been a whirlwind. Just in the first thirty hours after landing I found my apartment (which was like playing a game of Clue), settled in by unpacking and grocery shopping, went to work, got a new SIM card, bought my transport pass, and went to Lake Geneva. My true successes thus far include finding a bottle of wine for three francs at the grocery store, seeing the confluence of the Rhone and Arve rivers, and discovering the transcendent universe you enter while eating an almond croissant.
