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Personal Statement Myths, Debunked

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There are some prevalent myths about what a winning personal statement must look like. Aspiring law school students often do themselves a disservice by adhering to these myths. It’s not just that buying into them is not helpful; buying into them may turn an otherwise solid effort into something that makes admissions committee members groan and roll their eyes. That’s not a recipe for success. So, let’s take a look at just two of these myths and see how you can avoid them.

Myth #1: A personal statement must include a tale of overcoming adversity.

Don’t get me wrong. A story about overcoming adversity can be a powerful part of a personal statement. The operative word there, however, is “can.” Some people have truly harrowing tales. Other people have led relatively turbulence-free lives. For the latter, the tale of adversity is either an outright untruth — not recommended for a personal statement — or it is a cloying effort to cast a normal life experience as tragedy, which comes off as farce.

The classic forced-adversity tale is the death of a grandparent. Nobody thinks that grammy was unimportant to you, but the passing of older generations is, in the words of the great and noble Mufasa, just a part of the circle of life. Now, if you cared for grammy as she lay dying, maybe that will work. But if you saw her on holidays and some weekends, then that’s not adversity. It’s life. Trying to cast that as adversity will just make your reader think that you’re overly sensitive and blow things out of their normal, albeit serious, importance. That’s a strike against you.

However, even for people who have experienced true adversity, the tale of overcoming adversity must be a relevant and reasonable part of a personal statement, the main thrust of which must always be an argument that you will be a valuable part of the law school to which you are applying and a successful lawyer after law school. It must line up with the other experience that you put in your statement and in your resume. Someone who experienced grinding poverty and hunger as a youth can use that as a launching point to discuss an interest in legal aid for the indigent. Ideally, that tale would include volunteering in college to help the poor and the hungry in some way. If, however, the tale of adversity doesn’t dovetail with the argumentative purpose outlined above, it ought to end up on the cutting room floor.

The upshot here is that some people don’t experience real diversity, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to be a lawyer. It just means that a personal statement ought to look elsewhere for its rhetorical power.

Myth #2: A personal statement needs to be a laundry list of accomplishments.

Again, whatever goes into a personal statement must serve a cogent argument about the applicant’s potential. Some reference to accomplishments is necessary, but the admissions committee isn’t just looking to see if you’re an awesome dude/dudette of whom they ought to be in awe. If you reference an accomplishment, ask yourself, “Is this evidence for my thesis?” If so, keep it. If not, cut it.

Admissions committee members read literally thousands of personal statements, and they’ll see accomplishments galore. Eventually, they will become unimpressed by all but the most amazing accomplishments.

Instead of trying the above, try this: Take what you’re passionate about and use it as a springboard to make the argument above. Even if it’s not strictly related to law school your passion will shine through. Let’s say you loved playing football and were a star athlete. The grit and determination you showed, your competitive spirit, your sportsmanship, will all make a compelling case that you’ll be a good law student, maybe one who’s interested in practicing sports law eventually. And, best of all, it won’t be forced.


Law School, Actually

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What? Me? No, I was totally paying attention. Can you repeat the question?

Law school classes are very different from undergrad classes. Here’s how.

1. Cold Calling

One of the biggest differences from your undergrad experience is that most law school professors will cold call students from a seating chart or list of names. Law professors don’t like to wait for volunteers. What this means is that you’ll have to be prepared for most of your classes, instead of leaving things for last minute cram sessions at the end of a semester. Cold calling also means you’ll get grilled in front of about 100 other law students, which can be a bit overwhelming. Here’s how it could go:

Professor: Is . . . Mr. Soandso here?

Mr. Soandso: Here.

Professor: What were the facts in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.?

Mr. Soandso (profusely sweating) : Well Mrs. Palsgraf was hurt after a luggage scale fell on her. A couple of the railroad’s workers pushed a man onto a train, or helped him onto the train and—

Professor: Well which is it? Did they push him or help him?

Mr. Soandso: Ah well sort of both. They pushed him to help him onto the train. The employees knocked a packet of fireworks out of the man’s hand, the fireworks fell and exploded. The explosion caused a large scale to fall on Mrs. Palsgraf, injuring her.

Professor: Good. And what was the holding? Ah but first, who was the judge?

Mr. Soandso: Umm . . . umm . . . (trying to look it up)

Essentially, you will always be asked about the facts and the holding. Some professors will be very picky about how you frame the facts. They will also ask questions you’ll feel like you should know the answers to but that just didn’t occur to you when you were reading the case, like, what the judge’s name is.

Here’s the thing about cold calls. Almost everyone will bomb a cold call at some point, but it does not matter. No one will remember, and it will have zero effect on your grades. By the time you’re a third-year law student, you will just tell the professor you’d like to pass when you’re not ready for a cold call. Simple. Easy. However, some professors will be a little more intense. A cold call with an intense professor might go something like this:

Professor: Mr. Soandso, when I assign a case for you to read, I expect you to have read it, taken notes on it, and to have discussed it with a classmate in preparation for a possible cold call. I don’t want to see you leafing through your book to find an answer to my question. So do you have it? Who wrote the opinion? What’s the judge’s name?

Mr. Soandso (very flustered and terrified of the next question): It’s Benjamin Cardozo.

2. Push back

Unlike in undergrad, where you’re mostly asked to recall some detail you’ve read or give an opinion on a question where there is no wrong answer, law school professors will often make you commit to a position and then push back on whatever you say. They’ll make you develop arguments. Here’s what that looks like:

Mr. Soandso: So the Court held that Mrs. Palsgraf could not win damages for her injury because the effect of the employees’ actions was too remote and unforeseeable.

Professor: Do you agree with that?

Mr. Soandso: Uh yeah well it seems—

Professor: You think it’s too unforeseeable that someone might get hurt if you’re trying to shove people onto a moving train? Or is it too unforeseeable that an unsecured heavy object on a busy train platform might fall on someone and hurt them?

Mr. Soandso: Well, no I just think that they didn’t know that the man was carrying fireworks.

Professor: Shouldn’t the railroad have tried to keep passengers from bringing dangerous explosives onto their trains? How about a simple warning sign? “No explosives.”

Like with cold calling, there’s a great deal of variation among professors and how hard they’ll push back, but be ready for some back and forth.

3. Depth in Class, Breadth on the Exam

You have to quickly disabuse yourself from the idea that the point of attending class is to prepare you for the exam. In undergrad, professors will more or less directly test you on what they’ve been teaching you. You simply have to memorize what was said in class and repeat it on your exam.

Law school is a bit different. While what you learn in class is certainly relevant, it won’t be tested directly on the exam. Instead, you’ll have to take the rules you’ve covered and apply them to a completely new, vague set of facts. Class time, on the other hand, is more about exercising your critical thinking skills and having a bit of fun while discussing cases in great detail. Often professors will go into every nuance of a case. On the exam, you will not be asked to analyze any cases. Instead, you will be asked to apply the rules you learned from about a hundred different cases in about three hours. This is a very different skill that you have to prepare separately from your class preparations.

I hope this down and dirty intro to law school classes helps you be a bit more prepared for law school. Good luck!

Awww… Does the widdle baby have a dirty diaper? Let the administration fix it for you.

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STFU, baby.

With the surprise election of Donald Trump, colleges have stepped in to deal with some of the fall out. The responses have ranged from therapeutic cuddle time with puppies and kittens at the University of Pennsylvania to safe spaces where students can receive counseling at the University of Michigan-Flint.

Here at Columbia Law School, we’ve had student senate sponsored — meaning student fee sponsored — “safe spaces,” though without the free psychological counseling. I think we’re all adults and we can handle disappointment the way we normally do by turning to friends, family and ranting on social networks.

At law school, instead of safe spaces, I’d like to see more talks from experts and professors on how they think Trump’s policies will affect, say, international trade, the markets, immigration, and so on, and what the appointment of a particular cabinet member means going forward. One of the best aspects of attending law school are the daily lunch talks that often feature some of the country’s top experts in their respective fields. A professor at the school will often be invited to give comments or ask probing questions. True, most of these lunch talks are about scoring some free pizza, but when many are expecting a sea change in American politics and policy these opportunities for learning and discussion are especially useful and important.

For people frustrated with a Trump presidency, law schools should also create and expand existing clinics aimed to deal with some of the fallout from a Trump administration — for example, reduced civil rights enforcement, or increased deportation proceedings. Though law students waste a lot of time working for journals on articles no one will ever read, clinical work can make a real difference for underserved communities.

More discussions and more opportunities for involvement are surely coming, and I don’t mean to suggest that there is an inexorable trade-off between the two. But schools, professional and undergraduate, are overreaching, and our tuition and fees can be spent in more effective and relevant ways.

Law School Exams Are Different, In Ways Good And Bad

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Law school exams are very different from what you’re used to in undergrad. In a way, undergrad exams are more fair. If you study a lot, memorize the material that you’ve covered, and mange to demonstrate that you’ve done all this work on the day of the exam by basically regurgitating the material in a mad dash to fill as many blue books as you can, you’ll do really well.

Law school exams aren’t like that at all. You can put in a ton of work and still end up at the bottom of your class. There’s less of a correlation between hard work and good grades, but law school exams are actually a lot fairer than you’ll hear from most people. Here’s what you can expect.

1. There’s a lot more material to cover

In most of your classes you will have an unreasonable amount of reading to do. Frankly, I’ve very rarely managed to read everything that’s assigned in any particular class. So in the first place, it’s hard to cover everything your professor wants you to know if you just follow the syllabus. In the second place, it’s even harder to summarize everything and organize it inside your notes and your mind in a way that will be helpful to you on exam day.

What’s hard is letting go of all the detail and depth that you’ve uncovered both on your own study time and in class because on exam day you need to know the key points about nearly everything but you must not get bogged down in the details. Having made it through two and a half years of law school, and having TA-ed two classes, I really think that the main issue most hard-working law students have on exam day is that they’ve tried to do too much instead of focusing on key takeaways. For example, for each of the, say, one hundred cases you’ve learned about, you need to have a ten-word takeaway. That’s it. A lot of people will have a page. That’s useless during an exam where you won’t have the time to consult all your notes, even though you can bring them in.

Moreover, you’ll end up missing really basic points you need to know because you’ve gone so deep on some issues that you’ve completely missed the big picture. The big picture is how everything you’ve learned fits together. For example, in your contracts class you will have to apply each unit in the course in a step-by-step manner while you analyze the issues presented. If you don’t know what the steps are, and what the rational order to go through them is, you won’t do very well, even though you studied very hard.

2. There are great resources outside of what’s on the syllabus

While in undergrad you will almost never turn to any source than what your professor has assigned on the syllabus, in law school it is invariably a great idea to do so. First, you should find a reputable outline from a previous student. This will give you a great preview of the class and will help you fill in any gaps in your knowledge. Second, you should almost certainly try to get a commercial supplement on whatever area of law the class is supposed to cover. Usually, there is pretty strong agreement about which source is best. For example, almost everyone uses the Chemerinsky (wow spelled that right on the first go) supplement for their constitutional law class, and almost everyone uses the Glannon E&E for their civil procedure class.

Remember how there’s too much material to cover? Well this is where these outside resources come in to help you lighten the load. Instead of having to discover all the law from reading obtusely written cases your professor has assigned, you can cheat a bit and just look it up in an outline or a supplement.

3. You have to make good arguments

The major difference in actually writing out your exam answer at law school as opposed to in undergrad is that in law school you really have to make good arguments. I’ve “graded” mock exams as part of my TA-ing duties, and I’ve seen that a lot of people will try to just regurgitate the reading instead of answering the questions by arguing both sides of a position. So instead of feeling like I’m being persuaded for and/or against a position (and you should always argue both ways), I feel like I’m reading a summary of the assigned reading. That’s how you get a bottom-of-the-curve grade. It’s simple. You didn’t answer the question. You didn’t demonstrate any analytical ability. Instead, you need to apply what you’ve learned to the question or legal issue in a way a real lawyer would analyzing the problem from an objective point of view, that is, trying to be fair with the strengths and weaknesses of both sides of every argument.

Here, what you have to realize is that law school exams are less about right answers and more about through arguments. It’s not that there are no right answers at all, there certainly are. But more than trying to get to THE right answer, what your professors want you to do is demonstrate that you recognize all the strengths and problems on both sides of every argument.

4. Don’t bag it

The last thing I want everyone to know is that you shouldn’t expect to do as well on your law school exams as you did on your undergrad exams, at least not right away. Law school exams are graded on a curve—which means only about 10% of the class can get an A, and the vast majority will get a B-range grade or worst. So a huge portion of your class will have the nasty experience of being a “worse” student than they were in undergrad, especially if you go to a school where everyone was an A student coming in. If you have a middle-of-the curve or worse experience at law school, the temptation is to just bag it. You’ll hear people say things like, “Law school exams are just random. What’s the point of studying?”

Then you look around the room during your second semester and see pretty much everyone’s either online shopping, playing bubble crush (or whatever), and chatting away on Facebook. Anything but paying attention. While there’s a bit of randomness in law school grading, the randomness doesn’t nearly live up to the law school lore. Instead of bagging it, talk to some upper-year students who you heard killed it and try to figure out what you can do better. If you’re not into asking people for advice, get Getting to Maybe and read it a couple of times over. Getting to Maybe is the law school exam bible—it will teach you what went wrong and how to fix it.

Alright, I better get back to studying.

The Nitty Gritty of Getting Hired Out of Law School

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Just before the Great Recession legal hiring at the top law school in the country was like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel.” Since then, things certainly haven’t been as good. Here’s my take on law school and the job market.

Employment Statistics Could Be Better

New law students have their hearts set on one of four job options: big law, federal clerkship, public interest, or non-legal. While we have great employment statistics in the aggregate — that is, you can find out what percentage of a law school’s grads work in each of these fields — we don’t have the stats that really matter. What I’d like to see is, for example, out of all the people who wanted to land a clerkship, how many actually got one. Out of all the people who wanted to get a big law job, how many actually got one. And so on.

When you see that a school has an XX% employment rate for full-time, JD-required jobs you don’t really know how many people were forced to take jobs they didn’t want because some job is better than no job.

One stat the schools know for sure is what the offer rate was for all the folks participating in on-campus interviews. If you’re participating in OCI and you don’t get a job, it becomes extremely difficult to get a firm job afterwards. Not to mention, you have to potentially go through two more years of law school not knowing if you’ll have worthwhile work to go with about $250,000 of debt.

While you could argue that one big law job is as good as any other, the range of public interest options is extremely broad, and it is here where more precise stats would be welcome.

Kudos to Michigan Law, which, as far as I know, is one of the most transparent when it comes to employment outcomes. You can see all the employers that have hired Michigan Law grads from 2013 to 2015.

A Significant Number of Law Students Strike Out at OCI

I don’t know the official numbers for any school, but I personally know people who struck out at OCI in my year and previous years at some of our best law schools. They struggled mightily afterwards and some ended up taking jobs in sectors they have no interest in. At many of the top schools, a lot of people like to say, “Everyone gets a job. Everything will be okay.” While everything may very well be okay in some grander sense, not everyone gets a job. Even at one of the best law schools, taking out loans is a very risky thing.

Grades Matter a Lot

The best thing you can do for yourself to improve your job prospects is get good grades. The problem is you don’t really know how well you’ll do until you actually start. Some people figure out law school exams very early, some never do. You’re also likely to end up at a law school where everyone is pretty much as smart as you are coming in—at least as far as LSAT scores and undergrad GPAs indicate.

But Other Things Matter Too

Grades aren’t everything. As far as I can tell, all law firms care a lot about diversity, many care about technical backgrounds (think patent related work), and many care about relevant work experience (former paralegals at big firms do well, so do former finance people). But these are pretty narrow categories. Don’t count on some other mysterious X factor — save for great connections — to get you into a job you otherwise may not have the grades for.

For a very narrow slice of public interest jobs, grades don’t seem to matter much at all. For these jobs, what matters more is a commitment to the job and your ability to communicate that in interviews. Some public interest jobs, however, can be as grade selective as the best firms in the country.

Talk to Recent Graduates

To get a better sense for what’s actually happening at your prospective law schools, you need to talk to recent graduates or current students. Talk to as many of them as you can, because you won’t get the whole picture from any one person. If you know what kind of job you want, talk to someone who managed to snag that kind of job.

Be Conservative in Your Projections

Not being able to tell how you’ll do on law school exams, your best bet is to imagine you’ll end up in the middle of the pack at your school and then check if the types of employment outcomes look acceptable to you from there. Again, resist the idea that you’re somehow special and will outperform everyone.

The 3L Winter Break

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The third year of law school is regrettably still a thing. Most people will line up jobs at the start of their second year, which leaves you wondering what the point of the third year is. At any rate, here’s what I’ve been doing with my third year.

Traveling

Judging from Facebook statuses it seems like half the law school is studying or traveling abroad right now. I plan on taking my own trip to Japan in a few weeks. It’ll be my first time in the country and I’m extremely excited to try as much authentic Japanese food as time will allow.

The highlight of my trip will be a full day at a sumo tournament. I’ve been casually following sumo for years. The highest rank in sumo is called yokozuna. There are currently three active yokozuna. I’m hoping to see one of them lose to a lower ranked wrestler. Whenever that happens, all the people in the posh seats throw their seat cushions into the ring, and since my girlfriend was awesome enough to get us into the posh seats, guess what I’ll be doing?

Experiential Learning

By the time you’re a 3L you’ll be pretty sick of regular classes. By now I feel like I have law school classes figured out. You read a bunch. Find a good outline and supplement. Get your notes together into an outline . . . Yaaaawn. So instead of wasting a whole year on classes, many 3Ls will do some sort of experiential learning.

Experiential learning includes internships, clinics, and role-play classes (where you might work on a pretend deal or appeal). I’ve opted to go the internship rout. I’ve signed up for three internships during the year. Last semester I got to prosecute misdemeanor domestic violence cases and work for an amazing federal judge. Next semester I’ll be working on antitrust cases with the Department of Justice. As a third year, you’ll get significantly more responsibility than you would earlier and it can be incredibly satisfying to do real work.

Hobbies

You should know that as much as law students whine about how hard law school is, it’s really not that hard. And you have plenty of extra time, especially as a 3L. So why not get into a new hobby? I’ve started learning Japanese. I can recognize about a thousand Japanese characters using a cool mnemonic method called “Remembering the Kanji.” And thanks to Japanese Level Up, I can read and understand very basic sentences. My favorite is: 俺はつまらないから結婚できないだろう。It means, “I’m boring, so I probably can’t get married.” If you’re going to a big firm after law school, you probably won’t have a ton of time to start a new hobby. But if you can get fairly decent at something in a year, it’ll be much easier to keep it going when you get a busier.

While it’s lame that you have to spend another year’s worth of tuition on law school, 3L can be fun, if you make the best of it.

The Cautionary Tale of Charlotte Law School

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Danger! Danger!

Rumors of the demise of Charlotte Law School have not been grossly exaggerated. The school has been derided, sued, and, now, cut off from federal financial aid. Well, in reality, I should say the students are the ones who have been cut off from federal aid. Some might say that the government’s action needlessly targets the students, rather than the school, but I do not share that opinion. I, for one, am glad the government recognized the school’s failure to adhere to minimum standards for aid, and perhaps finally this will shutter a school that’s closure has been a long time coming.

The denial letter clearly made the case for denying federal aid — the school’s admission policies did not ensure that qualified students entered the school, and, in recent years, resulted in a very high attrition rate. The government should not provide access to federal aid for students who have no business attending law school in the first place. The student debt epidemic in our country is widely documented, and it is growing. If students choose not to incur a tremendous amount of debt because they won’t have access to federal funds, then I applaud the decision.

Moreover, I am a strong proponent of closing down underperforming law schools. The legal market is oversaturated, and yet few law schools have closed their doors. To the credit of some, certain schools have reduced the number of admission offers in order to maintain their standards, but this is not true across the board. If it takes external pressure to remedy the problems in our legal education system — or even, in some cases, to save students from their own rash decision to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt without any job prospects in the future — then it isn’t the worst thing in the world.

On the other side of the equation, however, there are a number of students at Charlotte Law School who now have no access to federal aid. While federal loans have lower interest rates, generally, there are still a number of private loans available to the students at CLS. It is not as though students who are unable to independently afford law school will now be unable to complete their education (although, perhaps, they should throw in the towel before it gets more costly). And, again at the risk of sounding harsh, I have little sympathy for students who chose to attend CLS after its widely reported decline and continuing issues.

As a general rule, I’d prefer the legal market correct its own issues and schools maintain accountability by putting the best interests of students over their bottom lines. But that is not happening, and there is no sign of it ever happening. As a result, in a fairly desperate situation like this, I am happy with the government’s choice to issue a strong message about the falling standards of a school like CLS. The collateral costs — while not insignificant — do not outweigh the need to address this situation.

The Back Nine, 1L Edition

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You’re gettin’ there, li’l buddy. Just keep that chin up.

Grades are starting to roll in for 1Ls. Getting your grades from the first semester of law school can be devastating. But I have some advice that might help get you through the next two and a half years.

The first semester is by far the toughest semester of law school. Everyone is working harder than they ever will again — being as yet unbroken by the 1L curve. And because everyone is graded on a curve, everyone working hard just makes getting good grades even tougher. But most people will become B-students — thanks to the curve — for the first time in their sixteen years of schooling. That’s rough. And it’s probably gonna happen to you.

So what do you do if exams didn’t go your way? Well, a lot of people are going to essentially bag it. They’ll tell themselves grades in law school are just random. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, so why try anymore? This is all crap. Grades aren’t any more random in law school than they are anywhere else. The trick in law school is that writing a law school exam answer is a lot different than what would pass for an A-level answer in undergrad.

If you haven’t already, do yourself a huge favor and read Getting to Maybe and Open Book—both are available on Amazon. These books will teach you how to take law school exams and turn all of your study time into top-of-the-curve grades. If you’ve read these already and didn’t do so hot on your exams, read them again. You can’t really appreciate the advice they give you until you have a bit of law school under your belt. These books are especially useful once you’ve already taken an exam or five.

But to actually pull yourself up off the floor you’ll need more than just instructions on the mechanics of scoring well on law school exams. You’ll need to spend a fair bit of time on anything but law school to keep your spirits up. If you found that you didn’t have time for anything but reading last semester, you probably did it wrong. You can’t expect yourself to keep up with the unreasonable amount of reading professors assign and still either stay sane or do well in your classes.

The reason you’re actually hurting your grades by obsessively doing all the assigned reading is because on exam day you will not be tested on your reading ability, and if all you did was read during the semester you will not have prepared for actually writing your exams. Reading to prepare for law school exams is like swimming every day to get ready for the Tour de France.

So to cut your reading time down so you’ll have plenty of time to focus on what really matters — that is organizing all the information into one sentence takeaways that you can remember easily and deploy on any novel set of facts and having some time to relax and enjoy yourself — you need to rely more on the outlines from past years and on supplements.

What I like to do is learn about the specific area of law for the week from a highly recommended supplement. Basically, I match up the syllabus topics with the supplement for the week and I jot down some notes as I read through the supplement. I will then write out all the black letter law. Just the names of the rules/doctrines with a list of their elements underneath. Then I’ll take a quality outline and use it and my supplement to write out one sentence takeaways for all the cases we were supposed to read. My takeaways are informed by what I learned from Getting to Maybe—so I’m looking for all sorts of “forks” and I’m constantly thinking about how I could use a case on the exam. I will almost certainly not read any of the actual cases because they’re not edited down aggressively enough and they’re mostly poorly written, at least for a law student’s purposes.

I’ll do all this before class, so I can bring my case takeaways and black letter rules with me. Then during class, I’ll edit my takeaways and rules to match up with what the professor’s takeaways seem to be. Usually that means very little editing. Mostly I get to pay attention to what the professor is saying instead of furiously trying to write down everything, and I can look for other “forks” or ideas about how to use a case or rule in a much more focused way because I’ve anticipated his lecture from outlines and supplements.

That’s it. Doing this takes much less time, and it’ll leave you much more prepared for exams, which by now you should know, are a lot more about breadth than depth. With all the extra time you’ll save by not reading cases, you can pick up a hobby, spend more time at the gym, or just catch up on Netflix.

If last semester didn’t go so well for you, hang in there. I know plenty of people who took a semester or two to figure out law school and are now killing it. Good luck!


There are law schools you shouldn’t go to.

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Can’t tell if this is Charlotte Law School, or just a regular dumpster fire.

Last week, the Department of Education flagged five law schools for failing to meet its gainful employment standard, a measure of graduates’ debt-to-income ratios. If the law schools in the hot seat fail the standard again next year, their students will no longer be eligible for federal student aid.

The news is a sobering reminder that some law schools, in some circumstances, are simply not worth the investment. Here are some red flags to keep an eye on when deciding whether and where to go to law school.

Your welcome packet includes a primer on “paying back your crushing student debt by 70.”

Law school debt is no joke. Law students borrow an average of about $140,000 to finance their degrees, which is a significant burden on even the lucky few who get those plush, soul-sucking Biglaw jobs after graduating – and getting one of those jobs is far from guaranteed. There are far, far too many stories about unfortunate grads who are unable to find work in the legal field and are struggling to even make the minimum payments on their loans.

To avoid becoming one of these people, do your due diligence, including digging into law schools’ employment statistics. For instance, when reporting the percentage of recent graduates who are employed, many law schools inflate their numbers by including “JD advantage” jobs (for which passing the bar was not strictly required, but was supposedly a boon) or by hiring their own recent graduates for short, temporary stints after graduation. Do your homework to ensure that you have a clear and accurate picture of the true stats of any law school you’re considering.

Your law school touts its super-great, “LSAT-optional” application process.

The LSAT strikes fear in the heart of many a prelaw student, and we’d be the first to agree that it is an extremely difficult and time-consuming test. That said, the fact remains that the vast, vast majority of reputable law schools require LSAT scores as part of the admissions process.

As we discussed in a blog post many moons ago, there are LSAT-free alternatives – in California, you can take the bar without even having attended law school, and there are certain law schools (some accredited by the ABA, and some not) that don’t require the LSAT. Those law schools will be quick to point out graduates who have gone on to do great things, but the fact is that the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against you. As torturous as the LSAT can be – although we’d be quick to add that it doesn’t have to be! – you’re generally doing yourself a disservice by trying to go to law school without taking it.

Law Schools Take On the Immigration Ban

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You’ll get overwhelmed with doing well on your exams during 1L. But once that’s over, you can actually do something that matters in more of a big picture sense. If your law school is worth anything, it’ll provide you with plenty of opportunities to serve. With Trump trying to ban immigrants from the country, let’s look at some of the ways law students are doing real work and doing a lot of good for immigrants.

NYU School of Law

NYU Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, partnering with WilmerHale, created a program aimed at helping NYU students and staff who are at a risk for deportation, as a result of Trump’s executive order, or otherwise. The NYU Immigration Rights Clinic itself has a broader mission, which includes litigation as well as immigrant’s rights advocacy on behalf of their clients. To learn more about the clinic, check out their website.

Yale Law School

Yale law students helped ACLU lawyers successfully challenge Trump’s immigration ban in New York City. The thrust of their argument was that the immigration ban violated their client’s procedural and substantive due process rights. You can read more about the case and the Yale Law School Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic here at their website. The court documents are also available. Law students may actually get to write portions of these briefs, but at the least law students will research discrete issues that will inform the arguments in the briefs.

University of Houston Law Center

Students at the University of Houston Law Center Immigration Clinic have helped numerous refugees win permanent resident status. This includes people fleeing violence aimed against women, LGBT, or religious minorities. To read more about their work, check out their website and newsletter. So many law schools have identical immigration clinics whose students make the same kind of huge impact in their clients’ lives. They might not make the news every time, but they should.

University of Notre Dame Law School

At Notre Dame Law School, students can participate in the National Immigrant Justice Center Externship. Externships are generally less work than a clinic, so they provide a way for those with a busy traditional course load to get involved. The externship has law students help immigrants obtain immigration benefits. You can read about one extern’s experiences here.

Law school clinics and externships can make your three years back in school feel a lot more rewarding and practical than they otherwise would. You can also get rid of that nagging feeling that going to class is kind of a drag on society. If you’re also have a hard time choosing between law schools, try to check out what kind of clinics or externships they’re offering. For example, Columbia offered over a dozen externships this semester, and students could even create their own.

One of my externship professors said that one of the best things about the externship was that we’d all become more interesting people. He was right. No one cares that you took evidence, corps or fed courts, but people will want to hear about the clinical or externship work you’ve done.

Is law school your way to #resist?

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Do your job! Do your job!

You think you want to go to law school to fight the Tangerine Voldemort in court?

Maybe you were inspired by the stories of lawyers camping out at the JFK International McDonalds trying to get immigrants, international students, and refugees out of detention? Or was it the judges who struck down Trump’s travel ban? What about Mexican-American judge in the Trump University case?

Though Trump has his critics in Congress—from both sides of the aisle—, the media, the international community, and pretty much everywhere in between, lawyers have taken a central role in the opposition to President Trump. I wouldn’t be surprised if personal statements this admissions cycle are heavy on the Trump references.

So is it a good idea to go to law school because you’ve been inspired—in a way—by Trump? This is about as good a reason I’ve heard. But here’s what you need to know.

1. Your commitment to public interest law may change.

First, there are very few 3Ls who are on their way to do exactly what they wanted to do before coming to law school. The ones that are, had significant work experience before law school that allowed them to figured out what they really wanted to do.

A lot of public interest minded people will end up going to big firms, and a lot of people who wanted to work at big law firms will end up going into public interest or government work. Law firms will make a good pitch to people who are interested in doing some good by hyping up their pro bono programs. Government offices may appeal to people who realize just how hard biglaw lawyers work and that it’s not for them.

Whatever the reasons, the point is, what you think you want to do will change over the course of your three years at law school.

2. You need relevant work experience to tell a credible public interest story.

Don’t assume that espousing a strong interest in social justice work will help you get into law school. It might actually do the opposite. If you talk a big game in your personal statement, but you have nothing on your resume to back it up, you may come off as insincere.

3. Public interest law takes a lot of commitment.

Legal hiring is very rigid. If you want to work in biglaw, you will almost certainly need to get an offer after your first summer—that’s at the beginning of your 2L year. If you don’t, you will have a much harder time (close to impossible) of getting an offer later.

If you want to go the public interest route, you will need to work for years (a decade?) before your loans are paid off through an LRAP program or forgiven by the government. The trick is, if you start in public interest law after law school, you will almost certainly never work at a big firm. Moreover, your LRAP program will probably require you to keep working in public interest legal jobs, even if you figure out it’s really not for you.

So you have to be very sure you want to pursue a career in public interest law, because your opportunity cost may be very high.

4. Don’t lock yourself in early, if you’re not sure

A more conservative approach to a public interest career I’ve seen some students take is to go through the on-campus interview process and get a biglaw offer first anyway. Law firms have to keep your offer open late into 3L year if you tell them you’re considering a public interest career. My feeling is that most firms would keep your offer open anyway, so don’t be shy. This will give you some flexibility and time to decide if a public interest law career is really for you.

5. Take advantage of experiential learning opportunities

Here’s my final piece of advice. There will be loads of experiential learning opportunities at your law school. Check out this list of externships at Columbia, for example. You may also get a chance to do some pro bono work at your summer associateship, if things are slow, or your firm thinks it’s important to show off their pro bono work. Take advantage of these opportunities. You may think you know what it’s like to do a certain job, but you really have no idea unless you’ve had some actual experience with the work.

Good luck!

Rafting Down The Law School River. Literally.

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The University of Colorado Law School is putting on a “Law of the Colorado River” seminar. This is hilariously outrageous.

First thing you need to know is that a seminar is exactly like a class but no one does the reading and everyone has to speak, every class. So essentially, once a week you exchange completely uninformed opinions with about a dozen overly (passive) aggressive people who grew up priding themselves on the fact that they love to argue. This is usually such a grating experience that to entice students into participating in seminars, law schools will make the professors grade on a much easier curve than usual.

The University of Colorado has figured out a way to make seminars even more insufferable. The Colorado River seminar will take place on a freaking raft, on the Colorado River, over a fourteen-day period. I can barely stand being in the elevator on the way up to my seminar classroom with the other people. Fourteen days on a raft? How did that meeting go? “Hey, let’s spice seminars up by adding motion sickness, the body odors brought out by two weeks in the wilderness, and putting the statistically least athletic segment of the population into a life and death battle with the elements.” Brilliant.

What I’d like to know is, who are the freaks signing up for this thing? If you’re one of them and you’re reading this, I want to interview you, but only if they roll you into the room in full Hannibal-level restraints. I’m not taking any chances. After all, we are still that same exact species that ran through Europe murdering and cannibalizing the Neanderthals.

That reminds me. In the extreme circumstances following a shipwreck, you can — it’s possible with a sympathetic jury — get away with cannibalizing the weaker seamen (or women!). How annoying do your fellow classmates have to get during a fourteen-day rafting mistake for you to justifiably cannibalize them?

The other shocking thing here is that this seminar will cost $4k per person. Does this fee include the resocialization programs we’ll have to put these students through so they can reintegrate into society on their return? Three-Ls are already enough of a drag on humanity without further straining Obamacare.

Finally, what about bar review? “Bar review” is what most people call Thursday. But in law school, Thursdays are for law students — having made it through a whopping four-day work week of 4 to 6 hour days — to get trashed and make other bad choices in front of all their peers. Do you think there is any chance that this self-selected group of poor decision makers will pass up on holding a bar review on the river? Me either.

Anyway, by the time this piece get published, if anyone has passed away —from cannibalism, dysentery, or whatever other Oregon Trail malady these people have in store for them — I sincerely apologize for my rant and my thoughts are with the family of the deceased.

A law school’s cost is only one factor in assessing value.

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One of the biggest factors driving students in their choice of law schools is cost. Forbes recently put out a list of the most expensive law schools for 2017. Even when you know exactly what a school costs, it is still difficult to recognize the best value. I’m going to cover some of the factors I would recommend considering, beyond the mere cost of attendance.

Employment Statistics. There may have been a time when jobs were handed out like Halloween candy to recent grads, but we don’t live in that world any more. Once you get past the historically consistent top-14 schools in overall rankings, employment odds almost universally dip below 50%. You’re basically betting your tuition and cost of attendance on odds that are slightly worse than a well-played hand of blackjack. I would (and I did) value high employment statistics over lower cost. Obviously, this only applies to a point. If you can save $200,000 by going to a school with slightly worse employment odds than your first choice, obviously (in a vacuum) I would recommend going to the exponentially cheaper option. Essentially, the choice comes down to how risk averse you are versus how debt averse you are—it is a very subjective choice. If I were weighing factors, employment odds would be at the top of my list, taking into account specific career goals (i.e. a school might place well at large corporate firms, but if you want a public interest job then those numbers won’t tell you very much). The better the odds of employment, the larger your safety next against incurring massive debt you may never pay off.

Geographical Preferences. Some schools, even ones in the top-14 (like Cornell), generally only place their graduates in one legal market. Flagship regional schools like the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, or Emory University can be a great value for students who are dead-set on staying in practicing within that one legal market. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to practice when I started law school, so I chose Columbia because I thought it had the most geographical portability—I didn’t want to close doors to any market. If I had known exactly where I wanted to practice, I likely could have chosen a cheaper school to accomplish my goals.

Individual Fit. This is a little more nebulous, and it didn’t drive my decision at all (I had never been to Columbia or lived in New York prior to making my decision), so it is harder for me to ascribe any real “value” to it. But I’ve heard from my classmates that visiting schools and getting a sense of the environment helped them narrow down their options. If you would hate your life at a particular school (more than the baseline level of hatred most law students have for their lives during the first year), then you should probably weigh that in your analysis. With that in mind, I would avoid relying on generalizations about a school’s reputation. Columbia, for example, has a reputation of being ultra-competitive and cutthroat. I spoke to several recent alums before making my decision, and they all told me that wasn’t a true reputation. You’re much better off either visiting a school or talking to students than you are relying on generalities.

One additional factor I would consider, specifically for public interest students, is the school’s loan repayment assistance program (or LRAP). Assuming there isn’t a massive gutting of LRAP (which isn’t guaranteed), most schools will help you pay off your loans if you stay in qualified employment for 10 years. If you are sure you want to do public interest work, the LRAP becomes more important than the cost of attendance. There is a huge caveat here, which is that many students come in to law school thinking they want to do public interest work (like become the next Amal Clooney and work exclusively on human rights issues) and then realize they either don’t want to practice in that area or that there simply aren’t people hiring. If you’re going to rely on LRAP, you better do your homework on your preferred area of law before you go to law school—talk to practitioners, build your resume, and make sure it is a realistic option.

The face value cost of attendance is a relevant factor in your analysis. The published cost of attendance is usually fairly accurate, and it will give you a sense of your debt-load and monthly payments (assuming you have no outside funds or outside assistance). But it doesn’t give the whole picture. There are a variety of other factors that should come into play.

Is the Bar Exam Getting Less Terrible?

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Ugh, the bar exam. After the third year of law school, and closely following law review work, the bar exam is the next biggest drag in a young lawyer’s career. It’s supposed to be a minimum competency test, but making everyone cram the same general legal knowledge, no matter what kind of law they will go on to practice, only to never use this knowledge again, seems rather bizarre.

There are some signs of hope on the horizon, but first …

You Won’t Learn How to Pass the Bar in Law School

You’d think that after three years and about $300k you’d be all set to sit down and rock the bar exam. You’d be wrong. Pretty much no law school prepares its students for the bar exam. In fact, there seems to be this attitude that most law schools are too good to lower themselves to that task. Instead, you’ll have to go to a company specializing in bar exam preparation to get the training you’ll need to pass. This will also set you back about $1,000 to $3,000.

Do Bar Exams Keep Bad Lawyers Out?

Some law schools are having a hard time getting their students to pass the bar. Here are the worst offenders:

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One theory is that these schools are simply admitting students that have a very low capacity to pass in the first place—meaning their students have low GPAs and LSAT scores. Another theory is that the bar exam has gotten harder in a lot of places. I’m more persuaded by the former. Admissions standards are fairly low at these schools.

What’s annoying about these schools is they make it seem like the bar exam is doing society a lot of good by keeping A TON of “unqualified” lawyers from harming people with their bad legal services. That makes some sense, but bar exams are so broad in scope that it doesn’t seem likely that only bad lawyers fail them. For the most part, legal work requires hard work and professionalism. What it definitely does not require is a thorough memorization of the actual law. What? Yes! Pretty much all lawyers need to look up the law, save for a few routine matters. But bar exams require memorization of the law, as if that’s part of a lawyer’s job description.

The Uniform Bar Exam Movement

Anyway, I’ll be taking the bar exam in New York State. New York is joining this wonderful new movement called the Uniform Bar Exam. Usually, you have to pass the bar exam in each state you want to practice law. The Uniform Bar Exam does away with that rule for participating states. If you pass the New York bar, but get sick of working in New York City and you want to make a move to, say, North Dakota, now you’ll be free to do so without having to take a separate North Dakota bar exam.

The problem is that only half the states have signed on to the UBE and NY is the only “big player” so far. If you want to make a move from, say, NY to California, you’ll still have to take the California bar exam. It doesn’t matter how long you had been practicing in NY, or how good of a lawyer you are. You’ll have to spend at least a few hardcore weeks cramming for the California bar exam. This makes no sense. To anyone. But here we are.

Shorter Bar Exam in California

California isn’t all bad. Perhaps under pressure by the superiorities of the UBE, or maybe just trying to be less of a drag on society, California is cutting its bar exam from a three-day to a two-day ordeal. This is okay news, but the Golden State could do much better.

I’m looking forward to the day when law school is a three-week course, the bar exam doesn’t exist, and law journals have lost all credibility. But baby steps are okay too … I guess.

Even with the Resistance, It’s a Buyer’s Market for Law School

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In the aftermath of President Trump’s initial travel ban, ACLU lawyers became heroes—donations surged and people around the country (all right, maybe not so many people in the deep red states) applauded their efforts. Some suggested that Trump would inspire more applicants to law school, but the applications are about stagnant from last year. If you’re considering taking the LSAT and applying to law school, this might strike you as a discouraging sign for your career prospects. Quite the opposite, however. The longer applications stay stagnant, the better for applicants.

In recent years, the law school “market” has been decidedly in favor of the buyers (i.e. you). For some historical perspective, the years leading up to the recession were a “sellers” market. Schools had an abundance of qualified applicants, and they could be highly selective with their offers of admission and financial aid packages. When the recession hit, employment opportunities dried up, and an already over-saturated legal market became a nightmare for new associates—there were lay-offs and cancelled offers at firms everywhere. As a result, applications to law schools dropped off steeply. Potential applicants realized that attending law school was far from a sure path to a guaranteed, profitable job.

When applications declined, it benefitted the students who persevered in their decision to go to law school. Schools dropped their admission standards (some, like the top-14, did so far less than others). Students with GPAs/LSATs outside the typical range for those schools suddenly found themselves with offers of admission and financial aid packages that were unheard of in years prior. As long as applications remain relatively low in comparison to the peak years prior to the recession, applicants will reap the benefits of the buyers’ market.

As a word of caution, legal employment opportunities remain limited. Even though going to law school is potentially more attainable, it would be extremely unwise to take a sweetheart deal from a school with a weak employment record just because it looks like an offer you can’t refuse. There is a persistent myth that a juris doctorate is a portable degree that will help you in any career field. Nowadays, you won’t receive much of a bump just for having a J.D., and, at minimum, it will cost you three years of your life.

Students should take advantage of the current law school market if and only if they have the option of attending a school that will facilitate their potential future employment. If your numbers are strong enough to allow you to attend such a school, then don’t be deterred by the stagnancy of applications—law schools’ loss is your gain.


Law School Study Hacks from a 3L Who Mastered It All

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Studying in law school can be terrifying. A lot of people screw it up. Here’s my take on it.

1. Study for the Exams

This might seem obvious, but I promise you it is not: you have to study for the exams. One of the things I took away from my years of LSAT prep before law school is that you have to practice and study the specific skills you will be tested on in test-like conditions. You can read thousands of pages of The Economist, but unless you actually take LSAT reading comp passages and learn the strategies for dealing with them, you won’t do so hot on the actual test.

This same sort of thing happens in law school. What’s worse is your professors will actively (though probably unintentionally) get in the way of your law school test prep. Every day in class will be an in-depth analysis of the 50 to 100 pages of reading you were assigned. The problem with this is that the exam at the end of the year, which will 100% determine your grade, will be very broad—not deep!—and it will have nothing to do with analyzing texts. Instead it will be about applying the actual law—not your professor’s musings about the law—to a hypothetical client’s story about something bad that happened to them.

So what you’ll do every day according to the syllabus at home—the reading—and what you’ll do every other day in class—the analysis of that reading—will have very little to do with the skills you’ll need on exam day. My take on this was to ignore the syllabus as much as possible and focus on practicing for the exams. This went really well for me. What’s more, by ignoring the absurd amounts of reading each day, I was always well rested, I had time to enjoy myself, and I was never stressed out by law school.

2. Buy the Supplements

During your first year, you’ll be taking very standard courses for which your professors will assign very standard cases, no matter which school you attend. One thing you have to understand is that almost all professors were hired purely for their research potential, not for their teaching skills, and they tend to be pretty poor at the latter. They’re good at researching nuanced points about the law, but often struggle teaching first-years about the black-letter law.

So the thing to do is to go on Amazon and buy yourself a supplement for each course you’re taking. A supplement is essentially a textbook that will teach you the law without making you read all the primary materials like cases and statutes yourself. Very few professors assign supplements, but the ones that care about teaching certainly do.

To find a supplement, just type in “[Course name] supplement,” like “crim supplement,” and get yourself something that looks good. You can buy several different Kindle versions and just return the ones that don’t look up to snuff. The more efficient way to track down a good supplement is to do a bit of research online. Just google something like “TLS forums best crim supplement” and you’ll get tons of discussions on what the best criminal law supplement might be.

The absolute best supplements you can get are the supplements that are “keyed” to your casebook. What this means is that the supplement will summarize all the main cases, articles, and notes covered by your casebook. So instead of having to read 1,000 pages (I’m not kidding), you’ll end up reading 200. To find a keyed supplement, search for “[Casebook’s author’s last name] keyed supplement” on Amazon. Remember, these are rare, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t find one.

3. Outline Early

One thing I never got about law students is that they all think that an outline of the course is the most important thing for their exam prep, but almost all of them will start outlining in the last month of a semester. What are they doing in the meantime?

Well, most are wasting their time following the syllabus and the massive amounts of readings you need to do to impress your professor during class discussions. If you like to do that, that’s fine, but realize that you’re trading off exam prep for feel-good points that won’t affect your grade.

Back during 1L, I would start outlining right away. Before the first class. I would use the syllabus as a guide through my supplements. I would also use an upper-year student’s outline of the course. This way, I’d try to cover all the substantive law (that’s cases, rules, statutes, and so on) before class. Usually, I’d manage to cover the whole week’s worth of material in one night, because I’m not doing the readings in the syllabus.

When I get to class, I’d have my “outline” out and I would edit it as the class progressed. For example, I’d change language or the particular formulation of a rule I got from the supplement to match the professor’s preferred language or formulation. I would also pay special attention to any ambiguities the professor brought up. These are what A-level law school exam answers are made of.

My outlines would also be very bare-bones. You have to understand that law school exams are all about breadth, so if you get bogged down in unnecessary details, you won’t do as well on the exam.

Here’s what a page in my crim outline looks like. That’s about a week’s worth of material. And here’s what a summary of all my property cases looks like. And here’s what a page filled with ambiguities in about two week’s worth of tort material looks like. Outlines are supposed to be brief summaries. Not treatises on the law.

Because I’d start outlining so early, and because I mostly ignored the syllabus reading, I’d be done outlining with about a month of classes to go. From there, I would do practice exams and then revise my outlines from what I learned by taking the practice exams.

So there you have it. Ignore the professor’s syllabus, rely on supplements to learn the black letter of the law, start outlining early, and then do some practice exams. If you can manage that, studying in law school isn’t nearly as scary as some students make it seem.

Law School Admission Standards Have Been Declining. That’s Good News … Right …?

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Harvard Law recently decided to allow applicants to submit GRE scores in lieu of LSAT scores. The move has added fuel to the fire that law schools are needlessly lowering their academic standards. Good news for those who are about to apply, right? Well … lower standards come with ramifications both positive and negative.

First and foremost, declining admission standards shouldn’t lead you to choose a school at which you’ll be unable to compete academically. I would strongly consider looking at historical data about a school’s admission standards before you choose a school. If, a few years ago, you wouldn’t have received an offer of admission to a certain school based on your LSAT/GPA, then I would advise a hearty dose of caution before accepting an offer.

I don’t necessarily put much stock in the predictive value of the LSAT, but it has been a hurdle for generation of law students. If you haven’t put in the work, or just aren’t geared toward the type of information the LSAT test—and you’re barely eking out an offer of admission—it isn’t going to bode well for your performance at any given school. While schools might be lowering their standards to fill the class, odds are that many of your classmates will have a leg up on you. Three months of studying for the LSAT without it yielding much fruit can be extremely frustrating, but if you multiply it over three years of often banal legal studies, then you’re in for a much more tedious experience. In sum, just because schools are deviating from their norms doesn’t mean you’ll perform well once you get to the school.

Now, on the other side of the coin, if you are a strong candidate for a school based on its past admission standards, you can benefit from lowered admission and academic standards. At the application phase, you’ll likely find yourself with a higher financial aid offer than you’d traditionally receive. During school, you may also get a boost on the curve if other students aren’t as prepared for the academic rigors that await them at your school.

Zooming out a bit, I believe in high admission and academic standards precisely for the reasons articulated above. I think it is patently unfair to applicants and to students to lower admission and academic standards to fill out a class. Those individuals on the margin will find themselves struggling once they arrive at a school, merely because the school wanted to pad its numbers.

At the end of the day, the takeaway from all of this is that you should do your utmost to prepare for the LSAT. Not only is there more of an upside now, as potentially weaker candidates are able to apply, but you should use the LSAT as a litmus test for your ability to run the pedantic marathon that is law school. Schools may be relaxing their standards, but that will only hurt you if you don’t study hard and gauge your ability to succeed (before you commit three years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars).

I applied for law schools only a few years after the economic collapse. My brother applied shortly before, when applications were at an almost all-time high. Even then, admission standards were declining, and I received better offers than I would’ve when my brother applied. I benefitted from those lowered standards, but I also knew that my scores historically put me squarely within the 25th and 75th percentiles for LSAT/GPA at my school, so I was confident I could hold my own with my classmates. If I’d managed an offer without being safely in that range, I would’ve thought long and hard about my decision to attend. I would encourage you to do the same.

Some Real Talk on Student Loans

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Student loans are in the news again. This time, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has announced that her department is rescinding some policies issued by the Obama administration. It’s all a bit complicated, but the rescinded policies were aimed at changing how student loans are serviced, with some emphasis on protecting borrowers by ensuring adequate customer service.

It’s hard to tell exactly how the new approach will shake out. But let this be a reminder: student loans are something to approach very carefully. Lenders aren’t on your side. In today’s environment, only you can protect yourself.

You want to be a lawyer. That’s a great goal. But in pursuing that goal, many law students don’t give student loans much thought beyond seeing the loans as part what they need to do to get to law school. If you borrow indiscriminately, you can end up in big trouble.

Law school is expensive. Law careers can be lucrative, but many aren’t. Those two facts can get you in trouble when they collide. Let’s take a look at UC Hastings, for example. I didn’t pick it for any special reason; it’s just the closest law school to my house. US News ranks it #54, for whatever that’s worth. As far as law schools go, you can do better but you can also do much, much worse.

Most students at Hastings get some kind of scholarship money, with a median discount of $14,500 off of tuition of roughly $44-50k (plus living expenses). If you’re among the roughly 20% of students who pay full price, and we’ll assume in-state tuition, you’ll end up with a loan balance of $245,745. If you take 20 years to pay it off, you’re looking at a monthly payment of $1,765, or $21,180 a year. All these numbers come from Law School Transparency. It’s a resource you should get to know well as you consider your law school options.

Now let’s look at salaries. The median salary coming out of Hastings is $80,000. The unemployment rate among recent graduates is 15.3%. If you’re making 80 grand, those loan payments are tough (more than a quarter of your pre-tax income!) but you might make it work. If you’re making less, things get really difficult.

Hastings isn’t any kind of horror story. There are many, many law schools that are just as expensive to attend but with far worse job outcomes. Be careful out there.

What if you can’t pay your student loans? It’s very hard to get out from under that debt. Don’t expect lenders or the government to help you. The federal government offers some plans for loan repayment assistance if you go into public service work. If you’re interested in that, investigate carefully what those programs cover or don’t cover before you go to law school. It’s a big mistake to assume they’ll cover what you think they’ll cover.

I don’t mean for this post to be a downer. The job market out of law school looks better than it did a few years back. Lots and lots of people are graduating law school and beginning the career they want. But let this be a reminder to make your decisions carefully. If you let your goal of being a lawyer blind you to the risks you accept along the way, you can end up in big trouble.

Finally, let this motivate you to put together the best application you can. Get that GPA up. Work on that LSAT score. The stronger an applicant you are, the more likely you are to get good scholarship money. You’re also more likely to get into the law schools that give you the best chance of finding a job that’ll let you repay your loans and still have spending money.

Choosing Your Law School Wisely Has Never Been More Important

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Between the troubled state of Charlotte Law School, where the students can’t even get loans, and the recent closure of Whittier Law School, the risks of choosing a subpar law school have never been clearer.

Choosing the right law school is important for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it has a huge impact on your likelihood of employment. The top fourteen law schools in the U.S. News and World Report rankings all employ at least fifty percent of their classes, with some employing closer to ninety percent. When you get past those historically-consistent schools, the results vary substantially. Apart from the obvious reasons for wanting a strong employment record, two aspects of law school make it even more important—the cost and the time-expenditure. Law school is expensive.

For my school, Columbia, the estimated cost of attendant at face value (with tuition and living expenses, etcetera) is approaching $300,000. I would think long and hard before investing that much money in a school that could not guarantee better than 1 in 2 odds of employment. This is especially true given that law school takes three years. Granted, compared to the time it takes to become a doctor, this is just a drop in the bucket. But for a non-doctor, this is a substantial time commitment. You’re giving up on beginning in another career and putting most other aspects of your life on hold. At the heights of my pessimism, I can’t help but think that I’ve mortgaged my youth to some extent (how’s that for melodrama). Bottom line, if I wasn’t extremely confident that I’d get a job (given Columbia’s sterling track record of employment), I would have been beyond reluctant to spend the money and time it takes to get a law degree.

You’ll hear people try to mitigate the risks by saying a law school degree is portable and can only help you get another job. As Business Insider wrote a few years ago, “[l]aw degrees are not portable … legal education does not give you many (if any) practical skills that are marketable to employers.” You go to law school for one reason—to practice law. If that’s not your goal, or if your school won’t facilitate that goal, don’t go.

Beyond merely noting the published employment statistics for your potential school, you should dig a little deeper into the types of jobs that graduates land. If you’re interested in big law, but your school mostly places graduates in public interest, high employment statistics won’t tell you very much. You should also look into where your school places grads. I, for one, did not want to work in New York. I chose not to go to a school like Cornell because it caters only to one market—New York. Columbia opens doors nationally, but that isn’t always the case. Strong regional schools like Santa Clara University, University of Minneapolis, and the like, generally only place grads in one market. In choosing your school, you should make sure its employment outcomes align with your geographic preferences.

Beyond jobs, you should also be aware of your school’s loan program and loan repayment program. As Charlotte Law indicates, you should know whether your program is at risk of falling afoul of accreditation standards and losing funding (this is almost universally not going to be the case but, hey, it happened). Also, and particularly if you want to do public interest work, you should know if your school has a strong loan repayment assistance program (or “LRAP”) that can help you take care of any debt you accrue. Finally, if your offer comes with a scholarship or financial aid package, you should know the GPA your school expects you to maintain to keep receiving the aid. Some schools require a B+ average, which might not seem like a high bar to those humanities majors out there (I can say that because I’m an English major—can I get a “grade inflation!”), but it is extremely difficult to predict how you’ll perform once you get to law school. It is different ballgame, and you might not know the rules for a little while.

At the end of the day, your choice of school is an extremely important decision. To some extent, you will always be judged by your choice of institution (until you develop a strong record of success in practice). The best way to make your choice easier is to perform well on the LSAT. If you’re choosing between schools in the top-14, you’ve almost already made it. If you’re not, you have to think much longer and harder about your choice (and about whether you should go to law school at all). Your LSAT score is the single biggest component of your application, and you should do your utmost to succeed on it during the relatively brief period of time you have to spend studying. It will all pay off in the end.

The Best and Worst Law School Has to Offer

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I just took my last law school exam yesterday. So I’m officially done with law school. Here are some of my thoughts on the best and worst law school has to offer.

The Best: Loads of Free Time

Look, your first year of law school will be fairly busy. But if you somehow end up sleep deprived and antisocial, or if you lose all your gains bro, then it’s your own fault. If you’re doing anything more than 40 hours a week of actual studying—you have to subtract out social media time—you’re doing it wrong.

You should have plenty of time to socialize, have fun, work out, and be nice to people. The amount of work you need to do in law school, even during the first year, is greatly over-exaggerated. Your second and third years should be an absolute breeze, unless you are masochist and you join a law journal or, worse, the law review.

So pick a worthwhile project for during your last two years—I went with learning Japanese and working out—and enjoy all the freedom you won’t have when you start working.

The Worst: The Cost

Here’s what it’ll cost you in monthly payments to attend the most expensive schools in the country. Do I really have to say anything else?

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Source: https://www.lstreports.com/national/

You’ll be even more pissed about this when you realize that your employers have pretty much zero expectations about your ability to do the work of real lawyers based on any classes you took.

The Best: Experiential Learning

While traditional classes are mostly useless—you’ll end up teaching yourself the law from commercial supplements in the vast majority of cases—experiential learning, like internships and clinics, are awesome.

I did five internships during my time at law school and I wish I could have done a couple more. You don’t have to do that many, but make sure you ask around and figure out at least two you’d like to participate in before you graduate.

The Worst: No Interview Admissions

Some of the best people you’ll meet will be your law school classmates, but so will some of the absolutely worst. Law schools should try to screen out the worst offenders by using interviews during the admissions process. If you can’t keep it together during a 30-minute interview—and you will meet people who fit this mold—you probably don’t need to spend three years around other people who can.

The Best: Experience and Good Grades Not Necessary

Law school is great for late bloomers. If you didn’t do so hot in undergrad, or if it’s been a few years since you finished your degree in East Asian studies or anthropology and you’ve barely worked since, worry not. Law schools won’t care, as long as you can get it together to score well on the LSAT. From there, it’s up to you to keep it together enough to do well on your exams. But if you do, you can have a fruitful career as a professional, even though you made some missteps early in your life.

The Best: New Friends

My favorite thing about law school has been—without a doubt—all the new friends I’ve met.

So that’s my take on the best and worst of law school. I’m sure I’m forgetting some things, but I’m busy trying to put furniture together in my new apartment. So adult.

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