One of the staples of law school life is the study group. After all, what about a study group is not to like? Eight people, sitting in a circle facing each other, doing a sort of Socratic method Q and A with each other, in their best imitation of Mr. Chips. Everyone is surrounded by piles of paper everywhere. Spent beer cans and coffee cups abound, there are half-eaten pizzas at everyone’s feet. Some guy in a college sweatshirt is in the middle with one hand holding a casebook and his university Polo® wire-rim glasses in the other, while grasping a big clump of his hair in confusion. Bafflement is on everyone’s faces, and no one seems to have any clue what is going on in the next day’s class, or the class as a whole.

Ah, the One L study group. Isn’t it glorious? 

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Shortly after I finished my undergrad degree I somehow managed to get into the University of Chicago for graduate work. Looking back, I am not sure how this occurred.  Someone with authority got a little reckless, I think. But I digress.

When I got my acceptance letter from Chicago, I was thrilled. I thought “this is the greatest day of my life.” After all, it was the University of Chicago and that is where all the smart people like me go to grad school. Right? “Congratulations! You have been admitted. . .” That is what that letter said. It must be true. I called everybody. “Mom, I got into the University of Chicago. I must be a genius.”

What a joke. Nothing against the U of C. It was and is a great, great university. But, at the point I was at in my academic life, I can tell you that it was not good for me to get into that school. At least at the moment I got the letter. You see, I didn’t understand what had actually happened to me. I didn’t realize that I had just been accepted into a school that would totally expose me. The University of Chicago is the intellectual equivalent of a full body search at Leavenworth prison.  

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Sit in a law school class for very long and you will know there is good reason for One Ls to fear the Socratic method. I will grant that. Even so, if you think that the Socratic method should be abandoned because of its brutality, or that it is autocratic, or its Eurocentric, or whatever. . .you need to reevaluate that opinion. You are plainly wrong. Here is the great beauty of the method: Professors who practice it faithfully spend each class—an entire 50 minute or one and a half hour class—on one concept. Usually two cases, maybe three, all about the same concept.

Think about it: the poor jerk who actually slogged through real classes in college, and who ended up in med school—mom and dad were very proud—well that guy is sitting in advanced organic chemistry about now, and the professor is covering about 60 concepts a class at light speed, and our poor sap is going to be responsible for it all when exams come. You? One concept, maybe two a class.

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One thing about law school: If you have never had to digest large amounts of material before, you are going to have something to get used to. If you don’t keep up you will fall behind, and about five weeks before exams—when you should be doing your outlining—you will be in serious trouble.

Now that is the bad news. The good news is that, in fact, there isn’t that much reading to do. It seems like a lot to the ordinary One L, but that is only because the ordinary One L is soft. The ordinary One L skated through high school because, well, high school is easy to skate through if you are smart enough to eventually get into law school. College? Sheesh. There are very few truly demanding college programs anymore, unless you are in the hard sciences or engineering. But if you were in one of those programs, you probably aren’t reading this blog.

Most of us came to law school from the law school ticket degrees: Poli Sci, English, Sociology, Criminal Justice, or History. Frankly, unless you went to a handful of super-rigorous schools, you never really learned to read and digest anywhere near the amount of information you are going to take in during the One L year. But here’s another dirty little secret: it isn’t that much.

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One of the most important reasons for the changing demographics in the legal market is that law schools figured out that the more One Ls a school washes out—by flunking them—after first year, the less tuition revenue it will receive in the second and third years.  It is much more financially prudent to pass students along and collect two more years of tuition. Let people finish their degrees and the let the job market sort out the ultimate winners and losers.

The result is that the real sorting happens in the job hunt that takes place in the Fall of the Two L year, after One L grades are in concrete, and then again during the Fall and Spring of third year, when the job search is on in earnest. Let’s be plain here: the top 30% or so of law students—the same students that would have been the only ones to survive law school in the past—are the ones that have the easiest time finding jobs. The bottom 70% struggle.

Now, of course we all know there are a host of factors other than rank that figure into the hiring process to some degree. Your personality matters. If you are obviously a jerk or a moron, it is going to be hard to get a job. If you have relatives that are lawyers or have solid connections to significant legal employers, that will certainly help. Can you interview? That makes a difference, of course. Miscellaneous other factors play a role, small and large. True enough. But say what you want, all other things being equal, the place you rank in the class is by far the most important factor in the job finding process.

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