What Doesn’t Matter

There is a wide range of One L common practices that are trumpeted by the powers that be as the keys to law school success. The standard law school orientation panel will tell you the conventional wisdom about what to do as a One L law student.

Conventional Wisdom Rule #1: Read your cases everyday, and brief them. Briefing cases, we are told, is the most important study tool for the One L. You will always be prepared for class, and the briefs will be a critical studying tool when fi nal exams come around.

Conventional Wisdom Rule #2:  Join a study group. Law school is about the volume of work. You can only do so much, and you need a group that can lean on each other to get it all covered. Plus, it’s fun! And we all need some fun now and then.

Conventional Wisdom Rule #3: Make sure you keep up with your outlines every day. Don’t let yourself get behind!

Look: what I am saying here is likely to get me in trouble. So come close and listen carefully as I whisper.  Briefing cases every day?  Doesn’t matter.  Being ready when you are called on in class? It doesn’t matter either. Being that guy that asks all the good questions in contracts class? Nope. Talking to the Professors after class? Doesn’t matter.  Being in a study group? Nada, nunca, nil. Outlining every day? Hear me: None of this matters.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  You need to read your cases. You need to pay attention in class. You will probably sink if you don’t read, and you will certainly sink if you don’t listen for the professor’s outline in class. And you are going to have to outline each class at some point. I am making a different point.

Most people approach law school day to day as though each of the tasks we do are ends in themselves.  For example, briefing cases before class is thought by some to be the most important thing anyone can do to be successful in law school.  Most One Ls I know measure the quality of their studying in the first year by how faithfully they brief each day’s cases.

If you are tempted to buy into this standard view, just try this: a week into classes, go find the smartest Two L you know and ask her if you can see one of her case briefs from the first week of her Two L classes as a sample. She will laugh out loud.

So too, others overvalue the importance of being ready for the Socratic method. So, right before class nervous One Ls can be seen going over their briefs for the third time, worried sick they are going to be called on. And what happens? They don’t get called on. Meanwhile, many are so nervous about getting called on that they are space cadets through the entire class, and miss virtually everything that has been said.

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.

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

Two Ls are almost never in study groups. There is a reason for that, and One Ls should learn from them.

I don’t have any illusions here about anyone taking my advice. There is nothing more sacrosanct in the One L experience than the study group.

Still, let me take a shot at persuading you to leave study groups out of your plan. Consider this: why do you think you need a study group? To learn from others. There is too much to learn by myself. Eight brains are better than one.

Okay. I hear you. Let me ask you: do you have any clue as a One L which others you ought to be trying to learn from? Do you have any clue which of your classmates ought to be in your study group? Remember: 70% of One Ls are not going to end up where you want to be at the end of the year. Seventy percent. Math was never my thing, but I am pretty sure that includes almost everyone that is in most study groups that populate your class.

If that is the case, what exactly are you going to do in your study group? Learn from the 70%? Or is it more likely that you are going to be doing the teaching? For goodness sake, Ninjas, don’t spend your time trying to learn from someone unless you know they actually have something to teach you. If you can get in a situation where you are the learner, rather than the teacher, fine. But that is almost never the case in a typical law school study group. Why? It’s a matter of demographics. Study groups regress to the mean, and the mean is exactly where you don’t want to be.

The truth? Law school study groups aren’t about learning the material. The reason study groups are so popular in the One L year is that they respond to a felt need of the truly desperate: to avoid the feeling of loneliness that inevitably comes with people who are in the dark about what they are experiencing.

And if ultimately you need a few meetings with a study group to address that need, then by all means go to a study group. But if that is not where you are, then let others fill study groups. You will be better off for it.

If you have the problem I had before I became a serious student—the sitting still five minutes problem I have been writing about—You need to do it exactly like I tell you. Unless there is something wrong with you, it will solve your sitting problem, and you will be able to do what law school requires. If there is something wrong with you and this doesn’t work, I am sorry. Withdraw from law school before the tuition refund rate starts going down.

My guru had been to law school, and at the time he was pursuing a Ph.D. A real smarty pants. He told me that he had the five-minute problem before he went to law school. Someone had told him what he was telling me.

“Here is what you do. Get a book, any long book you would like to read. Make sure it is not a simple book. No pictures. Go to the Library when it opens tomorrow. Take nothing else with you.”

“Then find a spot in the library where you are going to sit. Make sure it is reasonably comfortable, but make sure it is an ordinary chair and table. No padded chairs or cushioned seats.”

“Then sit down and read that book, every letter, for eight straight hours. Do not skip anything. Not the preface, not even the acknowledgments. Read every line of the table of contents and the index.”

“Don’t get up except to use the restroom or to spend a half an hour at lunch. Drink coffee if you want, but no food. Call me when you go home for the day.”

At the time, I thought his plan was a little crazy, a bit draconian. But I had a lot of miles with this guy, and I trusted him. So, I did it. It was painfully hard. Every inch of me rebelled against it for eight hours. But I did it.

I called him in triumph. “Jim, I did it.”

“Ok. Now, go back tomorrow, and do the same thing. And then go back again the next day.” “What?” “You need to do it three days. If you do it three days in a row, exactly as I said, you will be able to do it forever.”

And you know what? He was right. Dead on. It was like magic. I went to the library the next day. I took with me Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. I committed to sitting there just as he said, for three days, reading that book, and doing absolutely nothing else.

And you know what? After three days, years and years of bad habits were gone, washing off me like a layer of filth in the shower. I was a new man.

What I found out was that during the three days everything about me was being retrained. It was like a boot camp for me. My mind was being retooled, sure. But it was not just my mind being reformed; it was my body as well. I found that on Day two, or three, as I was walking to the library, and then towards my table—the same table and chair every day—as I did this over and over on those days, I felt my body and my mind gearing up to study. It began to feel right to sit down in that spot, and it began to feel wrong to get up. Not just wrong, actually; morally wrong.

It sounds crazy now, but eventually when I entered the library, my mind, my body, everything began to crave sitting down in that spot and getting to work. My desire to get up and mill about faded, and more quickly than you might think. I started dreading it when someone I knew started heading my direction to interrupt my reading. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone.

I also found that the quality of my concentration improved. The Gulag is a great book, and terribly important. But it isn’t exactly a trip to the children’s zoo. What I found was that I began to challenge myself to the mental discipline of more closely reading the text. I don’t know if you have this problem, but when I used to read about some concept that was new, if the explanation of it wasn’t immediately clear or compelling somehow, or if the argument was theoretically complicated, I would have a tendency to gloss over it.

I liked to read past the difficult parts, to move on without really understanding the point I had read, assuming that I would figure it out later, or that it wasn’t important. It was another form of intellectual laziness. I was doing the reading, but I was tempted to just shrug when a hard section appeared.

So, in day two of boot camp I started demanding more of my concentration. I was going to read every word. No. I was going to understand every word. If I read something I didn’t immediately understand, I forced myself to back up and read it again. Again and again I stopped myself from glossing over difficult concepts or paragraphs, and literally forced my mind more deeply into the text until I mastered what it was saying.

Early on I would sometimes reread a sentence or a paragraph a few times before I understood what the author was conveying. But I found that over time, my concentration and intellectual capacity to understand even the most diffi  cult concepts the first time improved dramatically in those three days. As the immediacy of my comprehension improved, my reading speed also accelerated.

I started this boot camp with volume one of the Gulag. But I was reading so well and enjoying making these great strides in my capacity to work that I decided to just keep coming back to the library until I had read the next two volumes of it as well. I ended up finishing all three volumes of it—about 2100 pages— in six days. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that hard.

This was my pre-grad school boot camp. Do it. You do this for three days, and you will change your academic life.  You will walk around the halls of law school and realize that most everyone you see is a chump, who could never pull this off . Tell yourself that these chumps will be backfill for the curve on every exam you are going to take for the next three years.

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.  

You see, the U of C is not where all the smart people like me go to graduate school. Chicago is a place where people with brainpower go to grad school, sure. But not ones like me! The U of C is for people who are smart, but who also are serious students. People who can study for hours, let alone five minutes. You walk around the U of C library, and people are not jacking around. Nobody is worried about updating their Twitter. What was true about the U of C, I did not yet understand: If I tried to skate along like I had been, I was going to get hammered. Major train wreck hammered.

Thankfully, a wise friend who saw all this coming, a seer, a prophet, asked me to go to get a beer to “celebrate” me getting into Chicago. “Let’s go get a beer to celebrate,” he said.  OK. I like beer. I went.

I didn’t know what was coming. It was like showing up at your friends house and its an Amway® meeting.  He let me have it. “Gary, you can’t go to the University of Chicago.”

“What?”

“You can’t go to the University of Chicago. You will get eaten alive.”

Dumbfounded look. “Look, I got a 99% on my GRE. I’m the smartest guy you know. I can handle grad school.”

“You have no ability to succeed at the U of C. You will get tossed by the end of the fi rst quarter.”

“Huh?”

He went on. “Gary, I know you’re smart enough. I like you. You’re my best friend. You can be the guardian of my kids. But you have no idea how to study, you have no ability to do what you are going to have to do. Not even close.”

I started to blurt out something. It was no use. This guy had been through the Socratic method. “Your problem is not that you are not smart enough. It’s not that you can’t study. Your problem is that you cannot sit still for more than fi ve minutes.”

Let’s pause my story for a minute. Maybe one of your wise friends never came to you to celebrate you getting into law school. Maybe you don’t drink beer. Fine.  You are reading this blog, and so like it or not: I am that prophet for you, and we are having a beer. So listen to me, friend. Here’s a fundamental law of nature: the first step to learning how to do law school is not learning to study. The first step to doing law school well is learning how to sit down and not get up.

“However,” he said, “you can fix it; it’s easier than you might imagine.”

Oh sure, I could do what 90% of college kids do when they go somewhere to study: open a book in the library or in a noisy coffeehouse and look around at other people most of the time. I could have terribly interesting discussions about various important matters with lots of people in those coffee houses.

There wasn’t “Facebook®” or really even many laptops around when I was in law school, but there were plenty of things to occupy me when I studied. I became an expert at finding them.

So, I could sit for about five minutes and then get up and do all kinds of things until I sat down again for the next five minute spurt.

Here was the real problem: I could not sit for more than about five minutes. I could do anything but sit down and study for long periods of time. Sitting and studying? Five minutes. And for many of you, I will bet you can’t either.

So what happens when the typical One L goes to the library for the typical law student’s four hour long-haul aft er dinner? He gets into the library, wanders all over to find his study buddies, sets up his spot and cracks the book. Then he sits down for five minutes and starts to read the first case. Five minutes goes by and half way into the first case—blah blah blah, offer and acceptance, consideration is no more than a scintilla, blah, blah, blah—he gets up.

For the next 55 minutes he wanders about doing a whole bunch of “studying” with his buddies, i.e. screwing around in every non-obvious way imaginable. He wanders down to the vending machine. He texts his girlfriend, IMs somebody else and then checks the Daily Kos® or the Drudge Report®. He complains to someone else about his dreadful legal writing instructor, or laughs about how someone was such an ass in class today.

Before he sits down, he checks his email and Facebook again. Then, back to the table, and the cycle starts again. And again. And again. At the end of the night he goes to his car in the dark thinking: “boy that was a long day,” “boy, I am really working hard,” or “this is just like what that guy in The Paper Chase attempted suicide for.” Tomorrow he will say to someone: “I closed the library again.”

And the next day in class he can’t figure out why he couldn’t get more done in his long hours of study.

In fact, in the typical day our One L has spent about 20 or 30 minutes in real study. He didn’t get his four or five cases even read before class the next day, because that would have taken him an hour. And at the end of the week everybody is at the bar saying “Boy law school is a ^&%#!” to one another.  And we all stand around—all of us who did the exact same thing—nodding our heads in agreement.

Raise your hands: How many of you are guilty of this “studying” approach, or something approximating it?  In my next few posts I am going to blog about how to fix this problem, forever.

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.

Do the math. Basically, each law school class period you cover one case, maybe two. At five pages per case in a law school case book, you end up with ten pages a class, three or four classes a day. That’s 40 pages a day.  And each case? When it comes down to it, you are going to take one sentence from each case you read, and put it in your outline to memorize at the end of the year. One sentence per case.

Now, believe me, I know: there is no one group of people more willing to exaggerate the amount of work they face than One L law students. But 40 lousy pages a day?

Take heart One Ls: 40 pages a day is, in a word, nothing.

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.

If you devote eight hours a day to law school—four hours for class and four real hours for reading and other things you need to do—reading 40 pages in four hours is a snap. You won’t believe this for a while, but if you do what I tell you, in a month or less you will get to the point where reading 10 or even 15 cases a day ought to take you about an hour. That’s right: an hour.

You ever start thinking that is too much for you, or you’re something special for pulling it off, just remember those people in med school end up memorizing about a hundred technically difficult theories, formulas and facts, every day.

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.

Now, the ordinary law student hates the Socratic method. And the hate runs very deep. It comes from a couple places. First, the Socratic method is a source of enormous fear.  Unless the professor is a total softy (not likely) the professor can and usually does take the student of the day and forcibly shove them through an intellectual woodchipper, head first, in front of dozens of people. It is horribly humiliating, and there is very little you can do about it. It does not matter how prepared you are, or how smart you are, or if your father is on the U.S. Supreme Court. You are going to get pummeled with body blows for an hour.

About the third day of my One L year, I am sitting in a class called “legal process” with a professor that went to Harvard about the time that Turow chose as the setting for his book. This guy absolutely loves the theatre of the Socratic method, and he loves to brutalize his students with it. Don’t get me wrong: he was a fabulously nice guy outside of class. But whatever hippie love and peace sensibilities he had in the Sixties were apparently thrown out the window on his way to class every day.

Compounding this problem for us was that the dreaded class this Grand Inquisitor taught was a class that had no other purpose than to persuade young law students that there really is no firm law. Written constitution? Nah! Statutes? Worthless! There is no law; there is only process. The law is what you make of it, and so on. It is not terribly firm footing when some wordsmith with absolute power over you starts to ask you to actually answer legal questions in front of several dozen people staring right at you.

So here we are the third day in class, and the professor calls on a poor One L immediately behind me. “So, Ms. Williams, Lord Coke said that the law was a shipman’s hose. What does this mean, a shipman’s hose?”

Here we go.

Williams started in, stammering: “Well, Professor Jones. . .”

And then it started: the hmming and hawing, the pauses and starts and stops, the flipping of pages in the text, the searching frantically, the “nothing is coming out of her mouth” moments, the dreadful silence.

Then it dawns on all of us newbie One Ls on our third day: She hasn’t read the assignment.

Professor Bow Tie, having seen the law school tap dance far too many times, did not badger her. No, he knew what he was doing. He didn’t say anything.  It got very quiet in that room in a big honking hurry.

Finally, she said it: “Well, to be perfectly honest Professor Jones. . .”

Jones burst in before she could finish this terrible thought.

“MS. WILLIAMS. . .” He didn’t shout, he didn’t even raise his voice. But he did use capital letters. We were quite sure that his words could be heard in every room of the school.  He turned to the grease board and wrote on the board in huge red ink: “PERFECTLY HONEST.”

“Ms. Williams, perhaps you can explain to us what that term means: ‘perfectly honest.’”

“Uh, well. . .”

“How does one perfect honesty?”

“What I meant was. . .”

“Tell me, what would it mean to be honest and not perfectly honest?”

Uh, mutter, stammer.

He wasn’t interested: “Tell me. Could you be imperfectly honest, Ms. Williams?”  “Why don’t you give us an example we can work with. ..”

And so it continued, for all 50 minutes left in class. One brutal question after another. One stumbling, mumbling response.  You’ve seen those famous film clips of the trial of the German officers who were hanged for plotting to assassinate Hitler? It was like that. It was 16 years ago that I sat in this class and I can still feel Professor Bowtie’s eyes glaring over me right at Williams.

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.

We will consider how that is possible in a future post.

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.

The problem with taking the conventional advice route to success in law school is that to be successful—more successful than the huge middle students—you have to be unconventional. Right? By definition, excelling in law school beyond the norm means that you are not following the norms. You have to beat the norm.

Ultimately, the conventional wisdom serves one important purpose: to equip a person to survive law school. If you do what everyone else does, you are going to survive. And if that is your only goal, that is a fine tack to take.

Surviving law school isn’t good enough anymore, jobwise. You need a strategy that outstrips the curve; you need a better outcome than the norm. You need to be in the top 30% of your class when you graduate.  The techniques I describe in my blog and my book can have a very substantial impact on you getting into the top 30%, the top job-getting category of students. In fact, I would predict that if you are in this huge middle group and you use the techniques I teach, you will end up in this desirable group.

Let’s consider why that is.

What is likely to be the case is that for the most part, all the people in this middle group–virtually all of you reading this book–are going to be sitting in essentially the same place before exams begin. If you follow the conventional approach to law school, you will all know the same material. You will have studied the same notes, produced roughly the same outline and approached studying in the same way. And sorry about this: your raw brain power is all pretty much the same as well.

But here is one key insight: almost everyone follows the conventional wisdom. Reflect on the importance of this reality a minute. If it is true, in order to get into the money bracket of law students, you don’t have to end up in that top 10% group, or even the top 20% of the class. You don’t have to pull some rabbit out of a hat to turn yourself into someone you are not. All you need to do is get even a slight advantage over the group you are already in. If you have a slight advantage over the large middle group then you are going to end up on the right side of the curve in your class: the top 30%.

Do you hear this?  You don’t have to be any smarter than you are now, and you will not have to know any more than you will know prior to exams in order to end up where you want to be. All you have to do is identify a way—or two or three ways— to get a slight advantage over everyone else just like you.

Law School Ninja is a collection of tactics to get you these advantages.

I hate to be crass but I speak the truth: Job chasing is grade chasing, pure and simple. There are two crucial times when class rank is most firmly established in any law school class: (1) after Spring exams of the first year when all students are ranked for their first year performance; and (2) during the climbing and falling that occurs during the second year of law school.

The purpose of this book is to show you a number of techniques you can use to get a slight advantage over all the people in your class that are just like you in these two crucial time periods. Forget slight advantages, in many cases, you can gain a large advantage over your classmates.  It’s not that we don’t like our classmates, or that they are bad people. But when the time comes, these people are going to be competing with you for the job you want, and that is the brutal reality of the matter.