April 6, 2011 – 10:00 am
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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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April 3, 2011 – 10:48 am
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Law school classes are typically built on the Socratic method. By now you probably know what that means: Everyday you go to class, and the professor calls out a name—presumably randomly—and that person is on the spot for the entire class. There is no way out. The professor then starts grilling that student about one concept—the key concept—in one lousy case that was in the assigned reading for the day. What proceeds is a brutal Q and A session on that case with the lucky student of the day, who, no matter how well prepared she is, will end up looking like a total moron.
At the end of this ritual sacrifice the bloody student stumbles out of the room with everyone else, who are grateful that today, at least, their number didn’t come up. That is the Socratic method in a nutshell.
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April 3, 2011 – 9:00 am
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You need to be very careful who you take advice from about how to succeed in law school. It never fails: One Ls are scurrying about in the first weekend parties asking every Two L they see for advice about how to excel in the One L year. Or, they read every blog from a Two L they can find on the World Wide Web.
But think about this for a minute. The chances are good that virtually every Two L you are asking for advice on excelling in law school ended up in the middle of the class. Why? They don’t know how to excel in law school. They know how to be average, and we can give them that. But are you trying to be average?
Here’s a tip: If you are going to ask advice from someone, make sure that they know more than you do about excelling in law school. Otherwise, keep your own counsel and keep following the plan in my book.
March 31, 2011 – 9:54 am
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Before I went to law school, I did a short stint at the University of Chicago, in a graduate program. How much did we read? A book a week, per class. That’s three books—about 1200 pages—a week. I repeat: 1200 pages a week.
Pause and take that in: there are whole graduate schools full of students as smart as you are who will end up—most of ‘em —teaching half-wits in some community college in backwoods USA making about a third of what you are going to make if you survive the One L year. These headstuffers are reading 1200 pages a week, trying to remember pages and pages of complicated postmodern theory of this or that, evaluate paradigm shifts, consume piles of data in studies and surveys, and blah blah blah. I know from experience: If you want to be ground like a piece of sausage, grad school is the real deal.
And what do you have to get mastery over? 40 lousy pages a day. 200 pages a week, maybe. And really, when you read about 40 cases a week, that actually ends up in 25 or 30 sentences of real stuff you really have to know for exams. Do you hear that? 25 or 30 sentences a week. That is what it boils down to.
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March 28, 2011 – 10:00 am
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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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March 25, 2011 – 9:19 pm
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Talk to anyone who went to law school in the 1950s and they will tell you that one half to two-thirds of their class failed to survive the One L year. “Look to your left, and look to your right,” the old law school deans used to say in deep voices, like reapers. “By the time this class graduates, only one of you will remain.” In that model, 150 One Ls meant only 50 Two Ls and Three Ls.
That may make for great stories for Senior Partners in old school silk stocking law firms, but consider how silly that was for law schools as a business model: as long as they held up high grading standards, they flunked out about one-half their annual revenues. Not exactly a good business plan. But once they got wise to this, law schools stopped flunking people out. These days only a tiny percentage of the students in a 150 person One L class is gone at the end of the third year.
The good news from all of this is that you are likely to survive the One L year. Congratulations. The bad news is that so are virtually all of your classmates who are going to be competing with you for jobs when you get out.
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March 2, 2011 – 10:05 am
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As I mentioned in my last blog post, most people that finished well behind me in my law school class worked a good deal harder than I did. My experience as a law student and as a teacher has led me to the opinion is that the reason most people end up in the middle is not primarily related to the amount of work that a person is willing to do. I think it is something else.
If you go to a law school orientation meeting at your school on how to be successful in law school, what are you told? The conventional wisdom about law school. This includes advice about reading your cases, briefing, outlining, and so on. And everyone that is in those workshops nods their heads and tries to implement that advice.
But consider this: if everyone is implementing the same conventions to succeed in law school, where is everyone going to end up? Where the conventions say they will: in the middle, along with everyone else.
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February 26, 2011 – 9:00 am
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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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February 23, 2011 – 9:16 am
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There was a day when graduating from law school was a surefire ticket to the upper-Middle class, if not the Country Club. The old model was demanding, but simple: survive the One L year—however hard it is—and then coast through the second and third years. The fact that law schools pumped out only very limited numbers of lawyers each year would ensure that most anyone would make a decent living, no matter where he or she finished in the class.
In the salad days of the legal profession, lawyer production from law schools was more regulated like it is now in medical schools. The medical profession strictly limits the number of med school entrants each year. The impact of this approach is that the supply of doctors is always well below the demand for medical services. Demand forces prices up, and so doctor’s salary levels are kept artificially high by this practice. All things being equal, if the medical world stopped placing severe limits on the number of doctors pumped out of universities and residency programs each year, you can bet the price of medical services would drop significantly.
Well, friends, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but unlike the medical field, the salad days in the legal profession are over. The fact of the matter is that these days you probably can’t make a great living out of law school unless you are in the top 30% of your law school class. You have to end up on the right side of the curve to get anywhere in the legal profession. Stay tuned. We are going to focus on how to do that.
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February 15, 2011 – 10:00 am
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I graduated from law school in 1995. Technology has improved, but substantively speaking, law school has changed very little since then. I know this because shortly after I graduated from law school I was hired as an Adjunct Law Professor and have taught the basic legal writing and research class that every One L takes in their first year for 12 years now. I remain in the thick of the first year law school environment, and from time to time I actually enjoy speaking with a One L student.
Let me admit one thing about me in law school: I was a grade hound, pure and simple. I am a very practical person, and so I am not afraid to admit that I shamelessly focused on grades. I wanted to end up at or near the top of the class. Why? I am not an egomaniac. I wasn’t looking for recognition. I wanted top grades for one reason: I understood the importance of grades for getting a good job. I didn’t have any illusions about it, and I still don’t. Class rank mattered then, and it still does. Anyone that tells you differently is either clueless or a liar.
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