Diary of a First Year Law Student

A new series from a former UT undergraduate navigating his way through his first semester of law school...

October 23, 2009

Law Fair

Seeing as the UT law fair is rapidly approaching, I started thinking back to my own experience at the law fair and wondering if I really made the most out of the opportunity. After half a semester of law school there are several things I wish I could have done differently. The law fair was an intimidating experience. When I went for my first time I was a junior and I was incredibly uninformed about specific law schools and law school in general. I only talked to schools I recognized regardless of their specialties, programs, or resources. In fact, I had no idea about any of these things because I had never looked. I found myself talking to schools solely due to location and ranking. Since I really knew nothing particular about the individual schools, my questions tended to be rather trivial. I engaged the recruiters in conversation primarily to pick up their literature which undoubtedly had all the answers to the mundane questions I was asking them. When I went as a senior, I had already pretty much hand-selected the schools I was applying to and thus I never branched out to other schools.

So what would I do now? Well for one thing I would be a lot more prepared and a lot less nervous. I treated the law fair as a career expo. It is not at all. The recruiters at a career expo are there to inform you of their company, but they are also attempting to see if you are a correct fit for their company. The law fair recruiters are there to help you, inform you, and promote their school. They do not accept resumes and the majority of them are not going to remember your name. I wish I had realized this at the time so I could have relaxed and simply explored the various resources at the fair.

Most importantly, I wish I had asked certain questions that would have made my law school choice much easier. Instead of simply asking every law school, “What are your median LSAT and GPA?” or “What does your school look for in an application?” I would have asked questions that actually helped me to decide if that’s where I wanted to go rather than if I could get in. I am more than happy at the law school I ultimately chose, but I had to do a lot of research on my own in order to find out if the school was right for me. All this information was available at the law fair if I had simply asked. I wish I had talked to the individual schools about their various clinic opportunities and when a student can take a clinic. I wish I had asked what classes all first year students are required to take and what if any are the required courses for upperclassmen. These are questions that I was curious about when I was applying to law school but had never thought to ask when I actually had an admissions counselor in front of me. Most importantly, however, I would have been much more curious about what the law school’s mission is and what they strive to specialize in. A law school ranking is only so important. If the school is the number one corporate law school in the country and you are confident that you want to do public interest law, than why is that ranking even relevant to you? Each law school has a goal and an agenda they are trying to push. If I could go back and do anything, it would be to talk about these goals and find out which ones interested me the most. Every law school is different. Not every law school is right for everyone and the law fair is the perfect place to weed through all this.

October 16, 2009

Societies and Mentor Groups

Law school certainly is not all fun and games, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to enjoy yourself while struggling through some of the hardest years of your education. Law Schools know how much stress you’re going through and they know how hard the transition from undergrad to law school is. To promote community among law students, my law school has instituted a mentor program. All students are sorted into Societies of 50 students and then further sorted into mentor groups of 25. These mentor groups become your law school family. You have all your classes together for your first year and each mentor group is provided with a budget to plan events and activities.

My mentor group has done things ranging from BBQs in parks, nice restaurants downtown, banquet dinners, boat cruises, and movie nights. At first you don’t know any of these people. You find yourself having forced social conversations with people that it seems like you have nothing in common with. After a few weeks, however, you realize just how much you do have in common with these people. You can complain about the same professors. You can whine about the same amount of work that you have. And most of all, you can meet up to study, review, and discuss the cases you are all doing in class. The mentor group activities really give you a break from your school life, however, and thus it tends to be an unwritten rule that nobody brings up “the law.” Our mentor group has not only become closer, but I have made several of my good law school friends from this very system. We have a flag football team together and we also tend to go out once a week for dinner. Almost all activities we do are paid for out of the mentor budget which is part of tuition and so, in some way, these activities are all free.

In addition to the mentor group activities, the law school is always sponsoring events for all students. It is a very rare occasion when there is no free lunch in the law school at least one day a week. There is always some sort of event, activity, seminar, or presentation which tries to recruit students with the prospects of free pizza. Unlike undergrad, the students also have real relationships with their professors. My Civil Procedure professor invited our entire class over to her house one night for tamales. Another one of my friends has a Professor who goes down the roster of students in his class and has lunch with groups of three of them at a time every week. The professors are just as interested in meeting you as you are in getting to know them. In fact, my Torts Professor the other day was so offended that none of his students invite him to their parties that he planned a party for our whole class at his house. Needless to say, this is different than undergrad for most people. But the idea really is that law school is hard…The professors know this! They want to make it as bearable as possible (without making your life too easy, of course).

Without this social life outside of law school, I don’t know if anyone could really survive the stress and the work. I can almost guarantee that every law school has some sort of program like this one, and if they do I highly recommend taking full advantage of it. For one thing, you’re already paying for it with your tuition and another because you never can know too many future lawyers. It only makes sense to network while in law school since the chances of you working with these people once you enter a law firm is incredibly high. The school wouldn’t plan these social activities if they didn’t think you could make the time for them. Too many people I know choose not to hang out with their mentor groups because they feel they need to study instead, but if all you do is study all day every day, the work load becomes too much. There is life outside of law school. Slowly I am realizing this…

October 12, 2009

Picking Electives

This week we’re supposed to pick our classes for the Spring Semester. Luckily, four out of our five classes are picked for us. Every first year student has to take the same first year courses, but in the Spring Semester, we also get to pick an elective out of a pool of classes. At first this sounds great. Finally we get to take something we actually want to take right? Well, I’m not sure this is really as great as it sounds. Who can possibly know what elective to take after only about five weeks of law school? On top of this, first year grades are so critical to your job search that you don’t want to take anything that too challenging which might ruin your GPA regardless of how interesting it sounds.

So on top of Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Property, and Legal Research and Writing, I need to pick a fifth class that is not too challenging, not too boring, and most importantly, fits into my already packed schedule. There is still one more complication. Only a few of the pool of classes are first year only classes. In other words, the majority of these classes are going to be a mix of first year students and upper classmen. As if taking a law class isn’t intimidating enough, now we have to take classes with students who have one or two years more experience than we do. The biggest problem, for me at least however, is that I really know nothing about any of these classes. Short little course descriptions can only tell you so much about what a class like “Environmental Law” is going to be like. The topics are so broad and the professors are all unknown to me. We had a couple seminars where upper classmen talked about some of the electives they had and which ones they liked and didn’t like, but that can also only help so much.

Finally, choosing classes, at least at my law school, is not based on a first come first serve system like it was in undergrad. It is not a matter of who can get onto the system in order to register the fastest. Everyone registers and picks their classes and then the system goes in and tries to put everyone into their top classes based on preference rankings. So even once I figure out what class I want to take, it is still not certain I will get that class. In fact, I have to list five classes ranked in order of priority in order to ensure that they can place me in at least one of my choices. Needless to say, this has been a stressful and frustrating process. I have narrowed my options down, but I still have not decided what my preference order will be. Just to give you an idea of the classes available to first year students, I am considering these classes: Brief Writing and Oral Advocacy, Environment Law: Air and Water, Energy Law, Employment Law, Capital Punishment, and International Litigation and Arbitration. Hopefully by my next entry, I will have a better idea of what my ultimate Spring Schedule will be like.

October 2, 2009

So law school started off pretty smoothly. I didn’t get called on. No teachers yelled at students and the workload was pretty light. Don’t get the wrong idea. Not everyone is having the same law school experience. In fact, just last week I was talking to a law school friend who told me that his professor “cold calls” people each day. He’s been called on several times already and people in the class have been told flat out that they are “wrong and should go back and learn how to read.” Granted this might be an extreme case, but it appears that it does happen. After talking all about how law school is not as bad as it was supposed to be, I think it is only fair to give you the other side of how law school has been in the first 4-5 weeks of law school.

For one thing, law school has not been what I expected. I always thought that law school was where you learned “the law.” We are supposed to learn the rules and the different statutes and memorize these so that we can apply them to similar cases right? We are supposed to learn the concrete facts that will be tested on the Bar Exam and that all lawyers need to know right? Well… apparently not. According to each of my professors, there are no rules. The rules mean nothing. You can make them up, you can interpret them however you want, you can even ignore them as long as you can make an argument. We are in law school to “learn how to think like a lawyer.” We are not here to learn the law. We will learn that when we study for the Bar Exam or when we start working as a lawyer.

So what are classes like? Everyone’s heard that law school is taught with the Socratic Method, but very few can really imagine what that is like. The professor teaches by asking questions to the class and then responding to those answers with more questions. The problem? All your classmates are answering these complex hypothetical questions, but are their answers correct? Who knows! Your professor certainly isn’t going to tell you. He’s just going to ask another question based on how that student answered. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat in class listening to a student give a 5 minute in-depth and well thought out answer while thinking, “I didn’t even think about that,” only to hear the professor tell him “that was the worst answer I have heard in years.” Well I guess the answer wasn’t as well thought out as it seemed (as I feverishly scratch that answer out of my notes). The point is, it’s often hard to tell what is worth writing in your notes and what is just “nonsense.”

Finally, everyone’s used to reading. In undergrad everyone has reading regardless of your major, but reading in law school is different. For every case that I get assigned, I read it once to get an idea of what the case was about, a second time in order to annotate in the margins, a third time to brief it, and then a fourth time to review it before class. I, for one, never read like this in undergrad and I feel like very few probably did either. Law school is a change for sure. It’s not impossible, but it hasn’t been easy.

September 22, 2009

So I’m three weeks into law school. Why am I here? What have I even been learning? My professors keep calling me out in class and asking questions I have no idea how to answer. Everyone seems smarter than me… At least this is what I am supposed to be saying…

Let me go back three weeks. 1L Orientation.

All 400 of us are crammed into an auditorium where we listen to lecture after lecture about how our life is going to change. We are so lucky. We are one of the few that have been admitted to law school. We will work hard. We will make sacrifices. But we will be making an investment in our future. Ok. That sounds good. But then comes the down-to-earth lectures. “Everyone is going to be embarrassed the first time they are called on in class. Everyone is going to be made to look stupid at some point.” Ok. That part doesn’t sound as good. “First year law students think they know how to study, but they don’t. They think they know how to read critically, but they don’t. They think they know what to expect in law school, but,” you guessed it… “they don’t.” Just like that, the optimism and the excitement is drained from the room. But that’s not all. As I sit in the auditorium taking all this in, I hear the lecturer talking about some of the more traditional professors. These are the professors that you have heard the horror stories about. These are the ones that throw you out of class if you didn’t do the reading or continue to pound you with questions until you admit you have no idea what you’re talking about. And as if I wasn’t worried enough already, I find out that my Contracts Professor is known to be the worst. According to one student, “he literally made a girl cry in class and then laughed at her.” Great… I have a psychotic contracts professor and apparently I am not even close to being prepared to start law school. And what was all this for? To scare us? To inform us? To warn us maybe?

Let’s put it this way. My first class, on the first day of school, was Contracts. I spent hours the night before reading my cases over and over and over again. I just knew that I was going to be that one to get called on. I was going to be that student that he erupted on. I sat down in the class and noticed the same look of terror on everyone’s face. You would think that would make me more comfortable. It didn’t. The professor came in, started lecturing, and after an hour and 15 minutes I was utterly confused. And I wasn’t confused over the material. Nobody was called on. Nobody was made to feel stupid. In fact, my contracts professor was not only not psychotic, he was rather entertaining. He was supportive of people’s responses and he was glad to answer any questions people had. I thought, “maybe this is just the first day. He is going easy on everybody because it is only the first day.”

But yet, here I am three weeks into law school, and I am not asking those questions that I am supposed to be asking. None of my professors have called on anybody. They simply take volunteers, and when someone volunteers they don’t make them feel stupid but rather are supportive and helpful. Nobody has been thrown out of class, and nobody has run crying out of class. I am either the luckiest law student in the world or this law school myth was nothing more than a scare tactic.