ROGERS — Employees in the Rogers City Attorney’s Office huddled around a laptop computer Tuesday, greeting a former co-worker on the other side of the globe.
“I miss you guys,” said Giedre Tarnauskaite (pronounced Ge-ad-ray Tar-nous-ky-ee-tay ), called “G” by her co-workers, who spoke over the Internet from her parents’ home in Lithuania.
Law clerk Nichole Manning has been trying to get Tarnauskaite a work visa since January, something Manning said has become an obsession.
“I check the immigration status usually twice a day,” she said. The visa was supposed to be issued by Oct. 1, but Manning said she probably won’t have an answer by then.
And while Manning often thinks about Tarnauskaite, Manning is anything but idle.
Manning is in her third year of law school, with a full 14-credit load. She has a part-time job as a law clerk and a full-time job as an accounts manager for Stefco, which provides towels, toilet paper and dispensers to Wal-Mart.
“You have to be pretty organized, and you have to want to do it,” she said.
“I’d like to say I put school first,” Manning said, but if it’s a choice between a book chapter, ordering toilet paper or working on Tarnauskaite’s immigration papers, Tarnauskaite wins.
It means Manning sees lower grades than she’s used to, but she also gets the same degree and more experience than most of her classmates.
One of her courses is working on The Innocence Project in Arkansas. As part –of her efforts, she will interview a woman at McPherson Women’s Correctional Facility on Oct. 4 who wants to change her testimony of a murder trial. Manning will tour the state Crime Lab and supermax prison later in October along with her class.
But while in the City Attorney’s Office, much of her work is researching recent court decisions, sending plea offers, answering phones and taking out the mail.
But her favorite work takes place in the two to four days each month she’s in the Rogers district courtroom.
“I like being in the courtroom,” Manning said, where she typically tries traffic violations, domestic abuse, DWIs, thefts and drug possession. “There’s always something going on, and it can be a rush.”
She said she remembers her first trial, when City Attorney Ben Lipscomb let her sit at the attorney table and take notes. “I remember thinking, ‘This is pretty cool.’”
After the trial, Lipscomb would answer the questions she jotted down about why he asked certain questions and not others, and rarely, Lipscomb would see a question he hadn’t thought of, Manning said.
Manning is in her third year at the University of Arkansas School of Law and can now start trying cases under Lipscomb’s supervision. She started in the City Attorney’s Office in April of 2005 at the age of 32, though she’s wanted to be a lawyer since she was 11 years old watching “L. A. Law.”
After she graduates in May, Manning plans to move to Chicago — a middle ground between her family in Minnesota and her husband’s family in Ohio — and work for a district attorney and perhaps The Innocence Project there.
Manning started researching how to obtain a visa for Tarnauskaite in January but was told to apply in April because the government quota had already been met. Tarnauskaite’s one-year visa expired in May, so she applied to graduate school and remained in the country on a student visa, Manning said.
But rather than pay for tuition after spending $ 2, 200 on applying for a work visa, Tarnauskaite flew home to Lithuania, where she is waiting for an answer. For a cool $ 1, 000, she could get an answer quicker, Manning said.
Manning has contacted legislators’ offices, immigration offices and immigration attorneys, getting more names and numbers to call — and each day awaiting an answer.
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