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This is a follow-up to this blog:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=153211
I ended that blog post saying I'd update with admissions, so this is what I'm doing now. I got into a decent amount of schools, probably as a result of applying mostly to safeties. Some of those were UC Davis, UC Hastings, and Loyola. My only rejection was from USC, which was expected to be honest. I'll be attending Loyola, with orientation coming up in two days.
I'm looking for advice from other law students, preferably from those from the U.S. since what they say will be most applicable. Things like how you got your textbook for cheap, how you managed your busy schedule, and what to focus for in exams. Even if you don't have any advice, I'd be interested in hearing about your experience at law school in general. Did anyone find time to play sc while in law school? I've heard so many people say how hard the first year will be.
I got a generous scholarship from Loyola, but it comes with a top 1/3 stipulation, so I want to do all I can to keep it. I foolishly thought it would be easy to keep the scholarship at first, but there's really no good reason for me to assume I'll do better than average. So what are some things I can do to maximize my chances of keeping my scholarship and doing well in law school?
Thanks a lot!
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To be fair as much as I hate to say it if you want to excel in your first year and not fall behind and get constantly beaten down with more work once behind you won't have much time for sc (still some don't lose all hope). Also I would recommend if you really want to be in the top % of your class that you do some case studies on your own on really famous cases. Not only are questions often asked on them so you will be already prepared but in those really big cases there are a whole bunch of very important concepts that are played out.
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4th year here , even tho our systems are different. The general material and amount of stuff you gotta study are the same. From my personal point of view , its not hard at all just annoying because you gotta spend a lot of time reading semi pointless stuff that are required ( easy , but required to be read or understood at least once ). Find a good balance between everything you gotta do and don't cut your personal time off your daily schedule. Dont panic , aint hard at all  GL sir
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Good luck with 1L year! =]
Only piece of advice I can give you is to encourage you to go to all networking events possible. You'll learn things in class, obviously, but where you learn the most is working and in this tough legal services market networking is key to landing a job for your next summer.
Do all the readings, ask questions, think about the material and you'll do fine in the exams. But ya, if I had to do 1L year over again, I would take much more advantage of the networking events and job fairs as they are golden and really prepare you more for "thinking like a lawyer," than anyone of these jerk off teachers (except for a few gems of course).
Enjoy the experience, 1L year is really a mind fuck and it really changes your view of the world.
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I graduated from law school in 2008 so hopefully I can be of some help.
Used textbooks are awesome, and you can get them from the usual sites. The best part is that books with tons of highlighting are sold cheaply and are awesome (assuming the previous owner had a useful highlighting scheme). Sell your textbooks back asap after classes are over too. You're really never going to refer back to any of your books for any reason for the bar exam or as a lawyer. Case book publishers come out with new editions constantly so the longer you hold onto books, the worse off you'll be. If you're stuck buying a new edition, expect to pay $100+.
The most important advice I can give you for succeeding in law school is to figure out what kind of exam your professors give at the start of the semester. As you probably already know, the standard is to have one final exam that makes up the entirety of your grade, and it's almost always going to be 1-3 essays. If your professor does something unusual like a multiple-choice or take home exam, you'll probably be told that early in the semester. However, even for the standard exams, you need to figure out the professor's style. For example, some professors will give specific essay prompts like comparing the holdings between two cases or two judges' rationales in a case that you read. If you don't remember those cases, you're obviously boned so in that class you'd want to memorize important cases/holdings. What you need to do is to get old tests from that professor either from the law library, the professor him/herself, or from 2Ls/3Ls. Also, don't trust what professors tell you about their exams.
No matter what kind of exam you're up against, you need to practice. Since your grade is going to be based on one single exam, you aren't going to have any opportunity to do so in class, but the difference between practicing once or twice versus going into your first exams cold is HUGE. Your law school will probably have special practice sessions organized by various clubs when exam time rolls around. Take advantage of these! They will be the best use of your time possible. I didn't do this because I was a moron. If your professors have optional or un-graded midterms, do those too. If there aren't any organized practice runs scheduled, ask your professors for an old exam, write a response at home, and then ask your professor for feedback. This will take 3-4 hours of your time, but it's worth more than spending 9999 hours of reading cases, attending class, or anything else.
As for classes, I found them to be very useful for learning "how to think like a lawyer" (prepare to hear that phrase a thousand times), but mostly useless for getting good grades on exams. Law school lectures generally work like this: you get assigned a few cases to read ahead of time, you read them, and then you go to class and regurgitate what you read in answer to your professor's questions. If you didn't read, you probably won't get much out of lecture. If you did read, you probably won't need the lecture. Some of the professors I had were awesome, but 80% of the time I was just wasting my time by attending class (which I didn't do a whole lot of for some classes). You'll likely be "required" to attend classes your first year, but I found that to be an empty threat.
When you do attend class, sit in the front row so you aren't distracted by your asshole classmates who are on facebook or playing Bejeweled throughout the lecture. Your professor will probably have one or two one-liner sound bites that sound like political slogans in every lecture: write those down at least. They're probably copied straight from a commercial outline though.
There's no correlation between people that answer lots of questions in class and their final grades. Some professors say they'll bump up students' grades for participation, but I found that to be bullshit. I got an A- in Constitutional Law II after attending it maybe twice, and it was supposedly a mandatory attendance class with mandatory participation. Yeah right. Got my fair share of C's in classes that I never missed and answered tons of questions in too. Exams count; class doesn't.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with law school yet, but you're going to have two things drilled into your head in orientation and your first few weeks: briefing cases and outlining. Briefing cases is bullshit. Outlines are awesome; outlining can be awesome, but isn't required. Briefing cases is the process of distilling a case into its constituent parts: facts, rule, holding, etc. This is all stuff that professors will ask you in class so if you've briefed the cases, class is a breeze. However, as I said above, class doesn't count, and briefs are worthless for exams (unless you get an open note exam or a professor that asks specific questions about cases). The idea of briefing is that you'll then compile your briefs into an outline, but you can do that without briefing and skip the tedious, useless part. For class preparation, just highlight or underline with pencil (better resale value) the various parts of the case you'll need to talk about in class.
An outline is essentially everything you learned in class put into 10-20 well-formatted pages. You can buy commercial outlines (and commercial book briefs too), but these are typically 100-200 pages and need to be pared down anyway. Depending on the nature of the class, they can be useless or the best $20 you spend. Some people swore by them; some thought they were useless. You'll probably want to buy one or two for whatever classes you're having the hardest time with and find out for yourself. If you can get by with a commercial outline and not have to read cases, you'll save a lot of time. If briefing cases is worthless for exams, reading the damn things is even worse. You can also download outlines off the Internet, but you run the risk of including material your professor didn't cover and not including material he/she did. Making your own outline also helps you memorize it much more easily than reading it over and over.
As for the scholarship, everyone at Loyola probably has that same scholarship or something similar, and they'll all be vying for the top spots. It won't be easy to keep it. Just work on your exams, ignore everything that isn't going to help you on exams, and don't stress out. Your fellow students are probably going to be reading/studying/briefing/outlining for like 12 hours a day and driving themselves crazy. Don't be like that. Use your time wisely and you'll have tons of free time to play games and relax.
Also, I know it's a long way off, but don't sweat the California bar pass rate. It's only low because people can take it as many times as they want, and California is much more lax than other states about registration requirements. Students that graduate from accredited California law schools pass at like 90% on their first try, everyone else has like a 20% pass rate and drags the average way down.
This is probably the longest post I've ever made on TL. Any specific questions I'd be glad to answer, haha.
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Have you already committed to Loyola 100%? If not, you could try and bargain with them to drop the top 1/3rd requirement for your scholarship. Apparently people who try this are frequently successful.
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Sultan.P: thanks for the networking tip. That's actually very helpful because I was thinking time spent at those events could better be spent studying/reading instead.
ShadowDrgn: damn that post was very helpful. Thanks for putting the time. The stuff about briefing/outlines was informative. I keep hearing those words thrown around, but wasn't certain what they meant. Hoping I'll feel less lost once I attend orientation. I will have to read your post again a few weeks in to school to refresh my memory. And yes, many people have talked about the importance of practice exams, so I'll definitely try to get my hands on those.
HCastorp: I've already committed, but like ShadowDrgn suspected, a lot of people do have the same scholarship. I wouldn't be surprised if more than 1/3 of the incoming class has it, which inevitably means that some students won't meet the stipulation no matter how well they do. I haven't personally tried to remove the stipulation, but that's only because I've heard from multiple people that Loyola is not willing to remove the stipulation at all.
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Hi There -- I have been practicing law for 5 years... graduated in 2006.
A few quick points:
1. Don't brief every case. The cases in your assigned reading are each utilized to illustrate one or more rules. Just worry about the rules provided in each case. If you know the rules, you can apply them to the fact scenarios in your final exam (which will probably be 100% of your grade). Then just write a nice essay using the IRAC format (Issues, Rules, Analysis, Conclusion) and you should get decent grades (assuming you applied the right rules properly to the fact pattern).
2. Make an outline for each class. You will be tempted to use others' outlines. People in your classes or study groups may propose assigning different outlines to different ppl and swapping. I found that the single best way to prepare for an exam is to CREATE YOUR OWN OUTLINE which merely lists all the rules you need to know. Then, with your outline, you should...
3. Take old exams. As many as you can get your hands on. Professors very often are lazy and will present the same issues in every exam, just with slightly different fact patterns presented. After you make your outline (either throughout the year or in one huge two week cramming session before finals like i did), take as many old exams as you can. The law library at my law school had the last 10 years of exams.
4. Study groups are pretty useless. Unless you are someone who needs everything spoonfed to them, or you are trying to hook up with some hot chick, I would stay away. My study group was pretty much us just wasting 2 hours every wednesday talking about bullshit and then going to a bar to talk about more bullshit. Waste of time unless you are trying to get laid.
5. Don't sit in the front row like suggested above. You will look like a tool and be more likely to get called on. I tried to blend into the middle and stay out of it. You don't get any better a grade for being the douche who is constantly asking questions or constantly volunteering answers.
6. NETWORK. You are going to a pretty shitty law school (sorry), and the job market is HORRIBLE right now. Make as many connections as you can in law school. My biggest regret in law school was my failure to network, which made it harder to find a job.
7. Stand Out. Find ways to stand out. I stood out because I have an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and took the patent bar. If you have (insert CLA degree here), then you are just one of the crowd. Get as high class rank as possible and make sure you do at least one of (1) law review; (2) moot court; (3) journals. These will make you stand out.
8. FIND A JOB 2L SUMMER. Even if you don't get paid. You need this line on your resume, trust me.
I will post more if I think of it. Good luck man... law school and the bar exam will be EASY compared to finding a good job after law school. Just remember, the point of all this is to get a job. This should be constantly on your mind. Stand out from the rest and make friends in high places if you can. Get into your career services office ASAP. Go to informational presentations by law firms. Get your name out there. You are making a big investment at a VERY risky time. If you do not stand out, you could become just another one of the temp attorney whiners doing contract work who post at http://www.jdunderground.com.
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All good advice from talleyhooo. I only said to sit in the front row to avoid distractions, but don't be the ONLY person in the front if everyone else leaves it empty. I never got called on more for being in the front, plus most professors call on people based on the class roll anyway.
About the 2L summer job: law firms extend full time job offers to like 90% of their 2L summer recruits. It might be lower due to the shitty job market now, but I'm sure it's still high. That pretty much means that getting a 2L summer job equals having a job after you graduate, plus the firm will almost definitely pay for your bar study class ($3-4k) and the cost of the bar exam (>$1000). So try really hard to get a job. Taking an unpaid internship/clerkship or something is better than nothing, but not ideal.
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- I graduated Law School in 2008, I also have another degree in Commerce majoring in Information Systems. Whilst I didn't go to practice law, I was accepted into the graduate program of an investment bank.
- Pure law is not very useful (at the moment) to actually get a job (unless you want to go straight into an academic career or the public service). You need to have another specialisation, whether it be another undergraduate degree, speaking another language, previous work experience etc.
- Make sure that you get work experience in a relevant field to seperate you from the pack. The job market (particularly in the United States) is terrible at the moment. Most of the people in your class will not find jobs that match their qualifications, or will not find a job at all.
- So far as the study, it is *alot* of reading compared to other courses, about 80% common sense and reasonably objective logic with some "that rule doesn't really make sense, but it's been passed down through tradition so we still use it'.
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This is what I wish someone would have told me (quick and dirty):
1) Be in the top 15%
2) Take as many externships / internships as possible (especially if there is the possibility they might hire an entry level associate / recent graduate
3) Get on your school's main law review (obviously if you can't do this then at least be active in one of the other journals)
4) Get some type of moot court experience (especially if you would like to be working in the area of litigation)
5) During your 1L and 2L summers try to work somewhere that will hire entry level associates / recent grads to get your foot in the door now.
6) During your 1L and 2L summers work in the geographic location where you would like to practice.
If you have any further questions just PM me. Good luck.
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EPT
