As for lessons that I wish I had known.

Work smarter, not harder.

By this I mean really sit down and try to figure out how you learn best. When I got to law school I really tried to change my studying habits. I knew I needed to ramp them up, that’s all anyone talks about once you get to law school. What a lot of people don’t tell you though is that you shouldn’t change how you study, just kick it up to a post-grad level. I won’t know for sure how well this worked until I get grades back in about 3-4 weeks but I can attest to the fact that fall semester was a chaotic mess of trying to go through all the material and figure out the best way to retain it all. This past spring semester I really sat down with a clear head and tried to ensure that the means achieved the right ends. I think it worked out well, we’ll see and I’ll write more on it later.

Secondly, don’t stress.

The fall semester everyone is trying to one-up another and stressing over “doing well”. You’ve just got to relax and breath. Law school grades have nothing to do with how well you do. They’re strictly on a curve. It’s all about how well everyone does. You don’t have to beat your professor in an analytical analysis. You have to analysis the specific material on the exam better than the other people in the room with you. That’s it. It’s not how much do you know. It’s how well can you speak to what the question asks and can you do that in a more clear manner than the other people taking the exam.

I’ll have more once I know if my revised ideas worked. Suffice to say, if you’re questioning whether you should go to law school I’ll be one of the few to say do it. True, you probably won’t get rich but if you’re in it for the money go get a job on Wall Street. If you legitimately want to be a lawyer and if you want an intellectual challenge then law school will do that for you.

If you haven’t landed anything yourself yet I highly encourage everyone to look into some of the more public interest or governmental agency type of work. It’s not a big New York City corporate litigation style firm but it’ll offer practical work experience and it’ll give you something to talk about at your on-campus interview next year when the pressure’s really on to land something that pays well.

There are a ton of grant opportunities as well as Federal Work Study that students who work in the non-profit legal sector are eligible for. You won’t become rich but it’ll keep you going through the summer and like I said before, it’s all really about getting work experience. Who knows, maybe you’ll even find you really love a legal field you didn’t even consider before.

Here they are.

My main goal when writing it was to make something that provided some contrast to all of the other law school books out there, particularly some of them that I’ve reviewed here on the blog. I love the ones I read before getting to law school. However, it always hit me as odd that everyone writing a law school book was doing so after a substantial break from actual law school. Sure, there’s great advice on taking exams in those other law school books, but none of them capture the struggle and daily stress that you suffer as a law student.

By writing this short(because 1Ls don’t have tons of free time) Kindle edition I was really trying to capture a lot of the advice I wish I had received before I got to law school. I hope you’ll find it informative and I went out of my way to make it not overly verbose. You do enough reading in law school as it is, so why add to that more than is necessary?

I’ll be making the book free this weekend to encourage lots of you to check it out. Please leave a review and remember I tried to keep it short for a reason. It’s meant to be a supplement of the blog here and vice versa. My hope is people will use both in tandem.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of some law school stuff though, I’ve been contemplating what bar prep service to use. I know, I know, the bar exam is two and a half years away. Well, at the beginning of the school year I bought into the Barbri “lock in your price” routine. I put $250 down to make sure the price wouldn’t rise on me. Since it’s already $2,900 for the Connecticut Bar Exam you can imagine why I was so worried.

However, after reading a recent National Jurist piece on bar prep courses, I’m having my doubts that Barbri is the way to go. There are easily a dozen plus bar prep courses out there and not one of them carries the same price tag as Barbri. Kaplan looks like it’s probably the second most expensive and most others run in the $500-$1,500 range. Considering even the most expensive of these alternatives are about half the cost of Barbri, even factoring into account the fact that I’ve already sunk a few hundred dollars into Barbri I think it’s safe to say I’m going to be doing some serious thinking over where to invest a decent chunk of money in the next two years.

All and all, I’m still enjoying it and I’m frantically trying to get things in line to find some kind of legal employment over the summer. It’s not all work though, Barrister’s Ball is quickly coming up and there’s even a law school trip to the Connecticut Supreme Court. I’ll be sure to post more on summer employment opportunities as they arise. Oh, and I’ve also recently gotten a job as a Bloomberg Product Advocate at the law school. I’m really looking forward to starting and I’m excited to be getting a little more in-depth on the practical end with one of the legal services out there.

• Briefing cases is everything and nothing.

Sounds contradictory? Well, it kinda is. Case briefs are great, and I definitely recommend doing them all the way the first few weeks of class. By this I mean the whole model of Facts, Issues, Procedural History, Rule, etc. This makes sure you learn how to do them but you don’t have to do if you don’t need to. Within two or three weeks you’ll know what each of your professors expects from you. Some professors focus on just the facts, some just the issues, some want a little of everything. Learn early on what your professor is looking for and focus your work for class on those things. There’s no need to waste time looking up the procedural history of cases for a professor who is never going to ask about it. Remember, your cases are (usually) not on the exam, the concepts are. The work you spend on your briefs probably won’t even make it into your outline. Do what you need to do for class but don’t spend unnecessary amounts of time on it. Is it rough and embarrassing to mess up in class? Of course it is, but remember to work toward what your grade is, the final exam. If it doesn’t get you to that final exam grade don’t stress over it.

• Exams are 100% of your grade.

As I mentioned in the last point, focus your efforts where they matter. Whether or not you’re a great orator or not, your classroom performance probably doesn’t factor into your grade. Don’t fall asleep and certainly do your best, but there’s no reason to kill yourself to look up the cases cited as footnotes in your casebook for that day’s material. Exams are where you’ll get your grade, not your ability to recite the plaintiff lawyer’s name from every case you read that semester. 

• Attendance, while you only have to be there 80% of the time it’ll affect 100% of your grade.

 The ABA mandates that you have to be in class at least 80% of the time. I haven’t had a professor take points off for missing anything until that threshold. However, every class you do miss is that much material you’re not digesting. You’d be amazed how much you can learn by just being their while it’s being said, regardless of if you take notes. Plus, are you really going to rely on people you’re competing against for 1/5 of your course material? Think of it this way, why take a risk missing any classes you don’t absolutely have to. Any particular lecture could be the lecture that boosts you (or drops you) that 1/3 of a letter that you’ll need and/or want.

• It’s a marathon with a final sprint.

Each semester is one long drawn out marathon and your final exam is the sprint at the very end. Don’t exhaust yourself early on in the semester. You really need to make sure you take time to recharge your batteries on a weekly basis or you’ll simply be too out of steam to perform at the end of the semester. I for one made sure I never did anything pertaining to the law on Sunday. I simply used that day to recharge. It involved waking up late and watching football with friends. 

• Have fun.

I’m not saying law school itself is fun, but if you don’t at least enjoy some tiny aspect of something about the law during your first semester I’d highly suggest considering if it’s going to be the career path for you. My understanding is it doesn’t get any easier it’s merely that you now have an idea of what to expect.