Fight The Hypo » Law School Experience

The Formula for Success in Law School

Casebook Sherpa — Sun, 08 May 2011 13:41:06 +0000

The title is a bit misleading.

With just under three weeks until graduation and one take home to finish up tomorrow, I have concluded that there is no one formula to follow for succeeding in law school. My friends and I have each developed our own approaches for studying, preparing, and surviving in law school.

To be sure, there are several pieces of advice that are helpful. But how you make those work are very unique to each person. So for those who are preparing to begin the law school drudgery experience this fall, here are a few pieces of advice that I have found helpful or insightful over the last few years.

You’re not taking Civil Procedure; you’re taking “Civil Procedure from Goldman”

No matter how standardized your school tries to make the curriculum and method of teaching certain subjects, the content and method will vary from professor-to-professor. Focus on what your professor focuses on, learn to phrase things the way he or she phrases them, and fit any outside materials (e.g., commercial outlines) into your professor’s approach to teaching the course you’re in. Ultimately, your professor doesn’t care about the whole body of property law, for instance, he cares only about what he’s covered in the course and how he’s covered it.

Answer the damn question

This is most commonly given as bar exam advice. But I think it’s every bit as relevant for law school exams. When you write a law school exam, make a clear outline that follows a clear analytic path (e.g., IRAC) but make sure when you read back over it that you have answered the question. It’s true that this isn’t as big in law school as on the bar exam, but to the extent that you think law school should prepare you for the bar and for practicing, get in the habit of doing things that way. Get your encyclopedia of knowledge out to show you know the content, make sure it’s organized and that it leads to a conclusion that answers the question… even if your answer “it depends.” (as it often will be)

Do the reading & Go to class

These are self-explanatory. You are tested on the content. Read it. The class discussion can help you understand the content. Go to class. Whatever else you do in preparation, do these two things.

Outlining vs. Commercial Outlines vs. Hornbooks vs. Flash Cards vs….

I am a big proponent of outlining. But find what works best for you. You might need to ask around, ask professors, and ask whatever study prep your school offers for 1Ls. I have friends that have used other methods exclusively and some use a combination. You need to figure out what works best for you. In the few classes I didn’t outline for, I didn’t do as well. Even if you use a commercial outline or hornbook to supplement your notes and reading, the process of outlining your notes will help narrow the issues and focus your attention on how concepts fit together. If you choose another method, just be cautious that your study aids are discussing and reviewing the content you have actually covered in your course.

Study Group vs. Lone Wolf

I started as a study group guy. This was really great for my first year. But I realized that over time each of us learned what method and pace was best for us. No matter how close you are to members of your study group (and we are quite close still), sometimes it doesn’t make the most sense for you to study together each semester or for each class. There are competing schedules and competing learning styles. Whatever approach you decide to take, be clear about what you need to accomplish to be prepared for exams and what role each approach offers for helping you accomplish your goals. Going the lone wolf route will ensure that you study at your own pace and get done what you need to get done. Working with a group provides the benefit of community, accountability, and shared expertise — you can work through hypos together, compare notes, work old exams, etc.

Last Substantive Class

Casebook Sherpa — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:29:00 +0000

I couldn’t let this day go by without posting.

Tonight, I have my last substantive class in law school. Next week, two classes meet, but both will be review sessions.

So, at 7:35 p.m. tonight, I will be done with law school classes. All that’s left is a few exams.

“Lately it occurs to me, What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Most Useful Classes

Casebook Sherpa — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:22:50 +0000

Tonight, I finish up the 7th of 8 semesters (plus a summer) in law school. For all you kids out there thinking of doing law school at night… for FOUR years… rethink it. Seriously. If you can go full-time just do it. Going at night is rewarding and helpful for reducing debt, continuing to accumulate experience, and maintaining savings levels. I’ve reduced debt a bit and improved my savings but four years of law school at night PLUS a real job is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just think about it.

In any event, as I prepare for my last semester I wonder what I’ve gained. Certainly a lot of useless books. But I wonder how useful my classes really have been. I mean useful in terms of what, if anything, does this class offer me beyond law school. Sure, as a general matter, law school classes teach you to read and digest cases (often quite quickly), identify material facts and pertinent rules, and pull out those issues that need to be addressed in an essay. But what classes have really been useful in terms or providing a body of knowledge that will be regularly applied in the practice of law?

I’ve endeavored to rank my classes in order of perceived usefulness (with #1 being the most useful). I also included things like clinic and journal since they take up credits and, arguably, offer useful information and skills. Since it’s not really based on my work as a lawyer (yet), it’s a bit like the BCS – pretty random and not settled on the field.

Some factors that influenced the ordering: teacher quality, casebook and course material quality, perceived need for the content in any practice of law, and anticipated career focus as an attorney.

Incidentally, I’ve not included my classes for next semester which, arguably will contain the most useful classes of them all, Virginia Bar Prep and Procedure. My other two are Professional Sports and the Law and Conflicts of Law.

So here goes:

Lawyering Skills (research and writing)
Evidence
Civil Procedure
Legal Drafting Seminar
Contracts
Clinic
Commercial Transactions
Corporations
Trusts & Estates
Journal Editing
Copyright
Bankruptcy
Professional Responsibility
Constitutional Law
Cyberlaw
Administrative Law
Criminal Procedure
Jurisprudence
Property
Social Justice and the Law
Criminal Law

So, what have I missed or misordered? What would you add? What would you change? Or is this like the BCS – it should just be scrapped altogether and accepted for what it is: a group of three-month long semi-meaningful learning opportunities that you have relearn in any event in order to take the Bar?

Myths About Law School

Casebook Sherpa — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:07:21 +0000

My advice for prospective law students has changed.

In my first year, I told people considering law school the hard work is worth it because of the opportunities law school gives you in the future. Now, I lead with: law school isn’t what you think.

These are some things I think are myths about law school. I’m certain to have missed some or have listed some you disagree with. Feel free to add or correct in the comments…

Myth #1: Law school will teach me what it means to fight for justice.

Fact: True and false. Law school is first and foremost about learning to think like a lawyer – analytically, dispassionately, and logically. If you are out to unleash your passion into fighting for the oppressed, you’re in for a rude awakening. Law school can be a means to that end, but in a different way than this myth assumes. The victor is not the most passionate or loud. Rather, you must learn to think and act like a lawyer and then figure out how to apply that to help the oppressed… or to your corporate clients who will reward you handsomely for doing so. Oh wait, they’re not what you mean by “oppressed”?

Myth #2: Law school is a ticket to riches.

Fact: False. Sure, if you’re at a big firm in a big city, you can make a lot of money. But if you’re at a smaller firm in that city, a regionally-focused firm in the suburbs, or a firm in a rural area don’t count on the big paycheck right away and even after making partner we’re not talking about the untold riches you might find at a big firm as an equity partner. It’s a good living, just not what you’d assume.

Myth #3: Success in law school is about intelligence.

Fact: False (sort of). Sure you need to be intelligent, but hard work and patience are infinitely more important.

Myth #4: Law school trains me to be a lawyer.

Fact: Sort of. You learn certain core skills you’ll need. But I suspect (and partly know from my summer experience) that law school does not prepare you for the rigor or slow burning intensity of working at a law firm. You can only learn certain things in the real world.

Myth #5: The debt doesn’t matter.

Fact: Of course it matters, you donk. Do the math before you start law school and consider what your monthly payments will be once you’re done. Consider that you may not be making $120K or $160K right after you pass the bar. If you graduate $90,000 in debt our financial aid office says a good benchmark is to assume $10 for every $1,000 financed. How does a $900/month tab sound to you? Not a big deal for the $160K first year associate at Latham Watkins. Definitely a huge deal for a first year associate at a 5-lawyer firm.

Myth #6: My law school career office will volunteer all the data I need to make an informed decision.

Fact: This is not the case, for various reasons. I’ve learned this recently in researching some firms in the area – mostly regional, some small (5-10 attorneys) and some a little bigger (15-30 attorneys. I had assumed that a starting salary at such firms would be in the neighborhood of $95,000. I was wrong but I wouldn’t have known that for sure. The publicly-accessible information from NALP is helpful but nationwide and not region- or city-specific. So I asked the career office for region-specific information and they were able to share some of that data with me. I found that the starting salary was lower than I’d assumed. That’s not a problem but it gave me data to help me make some truly informed choices. Just ask for the information you want or will find most helpful. I genuinely think that career offices have this information and will share it willingly to students who need it, but there are some legal and resource obstacles to sharing it publicly and voluntarily.

So what did I miss or misstate?

More For Me

Casebook Sherpa — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:08:13 +0000

Ethan Haines is on a hunger strike. As the self-appointed spokesman for all law students, he is “disillusioned by law school employment statistics, commercial school rankings, and antiquated career counseling programs.”

Evidently, he’s “being the change” he wants to see. (What does that even mean anyway? I want my law school to do more to get me a job so I’ll starve myself? If law schools are really as negligent and out of touch as Ethan appears to believe, would they really care if he starves himself to death?)

Go get em, Ethan. In the meantime, I’ll eat the food you would have. Seriously. Can you pass that month-old cookie over here?

While I sincerely hope that Ethan’s protest has some impact, I doubt it will.

I’m glad for the attention Ethan’s effort is focusing on the shortcomings of law school career counseling offices. I wonder what more they can do though? The travesty that is employment data reporting and commercial rankings formulations have been well-documented. But the law school career office has not gotten as much attention.

Our career office manages fall recruiting, hosts a job board, schedules mock interviews, runs lectures, maintains an alumni database, helps with resume and writing sample review, publicizes and co-hosts job fairs and networking events. At some point, isn’t up to the graduate students to do some legwork too?

Obviously, it’s not that simple. And in many ways it’s not the career office’s fault that the economy has tanked and they have very little control over the size of their budget. However, when I think of my interactions with our career office, I wonder what value they really add. Herein is what intrigues me about Ethan’s effort.

Despite all the “activity” the career office appears to be engaged in, I have a hard time knowing whether that activity is worth anything, or whether it really can be worth anything. The career office isn’t a placement service or a staffing agency. They help students put themselves in a position to find a good job by providing resources to connect with other alumni and notifying students of open, publicized opportunities. Beyond that, the career office is at the mercy of the law school’s budget (often just an allocation from the University and not a direct correlation to tuition payments) and the quality of students and education the law school produces – neither of which the career office has any control over.

So… there are a few of my thoughts. What do you want your career office to be doing that it’s not already?

The Sense of Impending Anything

Casebook Sherpa — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:04:14 +0000

Have I told you my new favorite joke?

Most don’t find it funny.

Frankly, I love it.

I crack myself every time I tell it. That’s probably because I’ve never been much of a joke teller and this one qualifies more as a witty rejoin than full on joke.

Anyway, goes something like this…

Someone: Wow! Entering your last year of law school. That must be a great feeling.

Me: Definitely.

Someone: Must be nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Me: It is. I just can’t tell whether it’s daylight or a train. Either way, it’ll all be over soon.

Someone: *Stares quizzically* (Unless they’re a lawyer or law student. In that case, I get a chuckle.)

Me: **Laughing uproariously** (mostly on the inside)

Some gallows humor never hurt anyone I suppose.

I think it’s the sense of impending… what exactly? doom? elation? freedom? crushing debt payments?…. what?….

It’s this sense of impending anything (and everything) that’s exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

Thousands of law students in classes past entered this last year with that future, at least in the short-term sense, determined. A job offer in hand, ready to be bored to death during their last year of school. The last few years have changed that, particularly at second tier schools like ours where even summer gigs have been hard to come by.

For my part, my summer has given me much more hope that the daylight I’ll at some point emerge into will in fact be what I’d hoped – a hard won, rewarding career.

Still, I’ll never let go of the truth to my joke that this economy and any long-term changes it has yielded may not make it easy or possible to emerge unscathed into a job that is relatively well-paid and stable as many of our predecessors have done.

Sure, that weighs on me, but not nearly as heavily as some assume when I tell the joke or talk about school or law or whatever.

It is after all really just a joke.

And I am after all generally optimistic about my last year in school and what comes next.

Sometimes, It Just Doesn’t All Fit

Casebook Sherpa — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:21:25 +0000

Pardon my ending of our recent hiatus with a bit of whining…

Sometimes the accumulated fatigue of working full-time and going to law school part-time catches up with you and you need a day off. This normal mental health breather is to be expected.

Other times school and work stand in direct conflict. Even when you are eager to do both, your commitment to one must override the demands of the other. I ran smack into such a time yesterday – or rather, learned yesterday that next week such a collision was going to happen.

For my day job, I’ll be in California next week for some market research we’re doing for a client. It’s a good project and the research will yield good results. I travel Tuesday evening through Friday morning with my flight on Friday getting back to DC around 4:30 p.m. Next week is our Spring Break so I thought it would be a good time to take my turn traveling since my co-workers often pick up the slack when my school schedule keeps me from traveling or attending evening events. No problem, right?

Enter the clinic.

Yesterday, I received a call from the professor who serves as Managing Attorney of the clinic I’m working in. It seems that the Judge in a case I’m managing would like to hold a hearing on a request we filed in November 2009. The hearing is set for next week. On Friday morning. Of the 15 weeks I’m working in clinic and the three months this request has been pending, the hearing is scheduled on one of the three days I’m traveling this entire semester. One of the three days I just can’t be there.

Ugh.

I’ll be out of town, but I know my partner in the clinic is spoiling to get into court so I gladly point out to our supervisor that I’m sure he could do it.

Later that night I begin to wonder whether I can rearrange my flights and meetings in California to get back.

The airline I’m flying offers either a 2:55 p.m. flight on Thursday or the Friday morning flight that I’m already booked on. The Thursday flight won’t work as it’s right in the middle of our work in CA.

Okay, what about other airlines? The cheapest one-way ticket I can find is more than $350. Since I’d be paying this one myself that’s just not doable right now. I could drive an hour or (during rush hour) two to get to another airport but even the Thursday night redeyes I can afford don’t get me back to DC until late morning.

Ugh.

Work and school have collided in the past. But it’s never really bothered me in the past. It’s just how it is.

This one bugs me.

The important thing is that our client is in good and capable hands in court next week. I just wish they could be mine.

Bull or Bear Market for your Law School Investment?

Casebook Sherpa — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:16:53 +0000

Today, I’m reading this interesting debate over at the New York Times website, asking the question whether MBA students are “students” or “consumers.” I wouldn’t say the arguments made are earth shattering or particularly insightful. But the question posed is an interesting, albeit purely theoretical, one to me. So pardon the completely impractical discussion, but feel free to opine away with me…

Are law students “students” or “consumers”?

Students who learn or consumers who purchase a good?

Students being trained to join an institution or consumer viewed simply as a cost and profit center?

Students to whom a teacher’s duty is owed or consumers who are simply economic actors and entitled only to having certain material information disclosed?

My gut reaction is to say that we are more student than consumer. In spirit – the very heart of a legal education, the animating spirit behind it – we are most certainly “students” in the classical sense of the word. Learning how to think and reason and question. Of course, we don’t really learn what we need to learn for the real world. We learn, perhaps, how to stay afloat in the “real world” as a lawyer but not how to actually swim. The consumer moniker, in this sense, is helpful to frame law school as a place to serve the law student and provide the very best product possible with the market rewarding innovation, excellence, and return on investment. (However, I think it’s fair to question whether the supply and demand principles of any market have applied to law schools or lawyer salaries at all for decades.)

But I think the fairer metaphor is that we’re more an investor in something. In return for our vast sum of money and sweat equity we are promised a spot in a relatively lucrative, stable, challenging career path. Law school administrators and faculty are officers of this undertaking charged with maximizing profit and reducing costs. Or perhaps they are fiduciaries of a trust we place in “law school,” a risk we absorb by enrolling, and the trustees are, consequently, obligated to ensure the return we expect is relatively likely to be realized. Not guaranteed, but that those in a position to take care of our investment are acting with our best interests in mind and that the information they provide and we rely on is reliable, transparent, and devoid of false (fraudulent?) promises of any future, guaranteed earnings.

On this side of graduation – with roughly 16 months until that glorious day – I have serious misgivings about how this enterprise will turn out. In my more honest moments with myself and others (often after a slug of whiskey or two), I find myself bitterly lamenting the work load, job prospects, and, most of all, the seemingly endless stream of stories about disenchanted attorneys writing about “How to use your J.D. to fix up old cars” or some such alternative career for an attorney.

Yet, I’m hopeful as well. Law school has enabled me to take charge of my career and be challenged in ways that I never have before. Intrinsically, I think it’s been a worthwhile investment. Kind of like hol Whether it yields real world, external returns remains to be seen. But I think they’re far more likely to be realized with a J.D. than without it.

So… are we students or consumers? Or something else, like an investor or stakeholder? Are you bullish or bearish on the long-term prospects of your investment?

CUA Law Professor on e-textbooks

Casebook Sherpa — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:09:43 +0000

Catholic University Law School Professor, Robert Destro, was quoted in this New York Times piece about the prospects for e-textbooks in the classroom…

Electronic textbooks may one day offer a convenient way to study, said Ms. Epps, literally lightening a student’s load. That’s already happened at Catholic University of America in Washington, where Robert A. Destro, a professor of law, and his students are testing a version of the eDGe. Professor Destro has 13 textbooks on his device.

“It’s wonderful not to have to lug those books around,” he said.

I’d be all for having an electronic way to store and read my casebooks, so long as it actually reduces overall cost and allows for adequate note-taking or copying and pasting of text into my notes.

“At least, that is how I read Hubbell. No one is really sure.”

Casebook Sherpa — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:30 +0000

This was a quote at the bottom of a page of our Criminal Procedure syllabus.

Hubbell refers to United States v. Hubbell, a case that grew out of Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation (which, of course, grew into the Monica Lewinsky investigation, President Clinton’s impeachment, etc).

The case itself is significant in that it dealt with the questions of how the act of producing documents in response to a subpoena does, or does not, impact a person’s 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and whether a government’s offer of immunity in order to secure production of such documents precludes prosecution of the person producing the information.

There is some disagreement among lawyers over Hubbell‘s effect and our professor has a reading of it that seems reasonable to me. Naturally, for the purposes of the class, the professor’s view is the “correct” approach for the exam, whatever ends up being the “correct” approach in real life. (Though the professor in question is a former prosecutor, has decades of teaching experience, and has written extensively on issues in evidence and criminal procedure. So I’m inclined to think he’s more likely to be at least mostly right.)

The interesting thing is that this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered an unsettled area of case law (Crim Pro is basically all case law) where our Professor has proposed what he thinks is the correct way to settle the conflicting cases and principles (another one being Montejo‘s impact on the 6th Amendment right to the assistance of counsel).

This is an interesting function of a professor and it hasn’t really happened in other classes where the rules we needed to know are more settled. But it’s a vital function for students to rely on.

It’s not we’re not capable of figuring this all out on our own. We are. Really once you’ve completed first semester you’re capable of doing that.

But let’s face it: professors know more than us at this point and we don’t have the time to catch up fully. Plus understanding how an experienced attorney settles these issue provide a good picture, a learning experience, of how we will do it when we’re out of school.