Law School?!?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I belong to the school of thought that says know why you’re going to law school because, IMHO, to do well you need to be mentally and emotionally committed to it. I wasn’t and hated every minute of law school and well as the first 2-3 years of practice. Now that I feel I know what I’m doing (litigation), it’s much more enjoyable. I agree that if you’re serious about environmental law, look at the schools known for their environmental program (Franklin Pierce comes to mind). Likewise, with a science background, patent law is a great area to go into.

I think you should also give thought to how the economy is going to shake out. Like OxyMoron, I emerged in 1994 (not a top tier school, but one well-respected in my state) and MANY people (myself included) did not have jobs at graduation. I snagged a temporary clerkship that August and things have gone well ever since, but it is incredibly stressful to go through your third year of law school (with tens of thousands of dollars in debt waiting) without a job.

Good luck.

22

If you are already accepted into school:

  1. Don’t fall behind in your reading. There’s volumes and volumes to read each night. I only had 3 classes a week(part-time) but each class required 3 hours of reading to prepare.

  2. Grad school isn’t like high school where the teacher may not notice you trying to be inconspicous in the back row. You can’t go into class and try to wing it. Come to class prepared. And don’t skip.

  3. I started law school a few months after I got married. Mistake. I finally had to choose between him and school because I couldn’t do both. (He won.) If you aren’t in a relationship, now’s not a good time to enter into one.

  4. Join study groups. I found them to be very helpful and they also provided a social outlet.

Good luck inertia!

23

PunditLisa makes good points. You’ll see people skip class a lot in their second and third years - hell, it’s inevitable between job interviewing and journal commitments. But that’s second year, when you’ve already got the hang of things. Don’t do it first year. And do give study groups a chance - I ultimately didn’t find them helpful (it’s easy for them to become group bitch sessions) but some groups really clicked and helped their members a lot. Depends both on your study techniques and the group dynamics.

Another thing I’ve seen that’s most distressing is the person who can’t deal with becoming “average.” For those of us who aren’t Kennedys, getting into law school requires a certain degree of native intelligence, hard work, motivation and curiosity. So you may have been top of your class in high school and even college, but suddenly you’re average, and that’s okay. Not that you shouldn’t push yourself - you probably will anyway! - but don’t do what a friend of mine did. His undergraduate university was pretty undemanding, so he got used to being “X the Brilliant.” He starts law school, works his butt off, and his first semester pulls a “B” average - perfectly respectable, but not enough to be “the Brilliant” anymore. He took it hard. The following semester, he spent most of exam reading period stoned, justifying it by telling himself (and his friends) that it didn’t matter how hard he worked. Of course, his finals were awful (at most schools, your grades depend almost completely on your final exams) so his GPA tanked. So began a downward spiral.

If you’re so incredibly in groove with the law that you do get that spectacular class rank, bravo! But it isn’t a prerequisite to a satisfying career, whether in law itself or a related field. Law is definitely prestige-obsessed, but don’t let yourself get sucked in to thinking that life will be horrible unless you get hired by Skadden (or that life will be perfect if in fact you do!).

24

I loved law school. I learned a great deal and met the best friends of my life. A lot of your experience will depend on who you end up going through those 3 years with. I did a year of clinical work and 2 years of clerking so it is possible to get experience while in school. I worked in a domestic violence clinic (getting orders of protection, etc) and an elder clinic, clerked for the University by giving advice to undergrads (Student Legal Assistance offices) and clerked for the University’s in-house legal counsel, in their trial division. Lots of experience drafting memos, complaints, responses, etc.

I heard this before I went to law school and found it somewhat true:

The first year, they scare you to death.
The second year, they work you to death.
The third year, they bore you to death.

Tibs.

25

  1. It’s obvious that some people enjoy law school – several have posted as much here – but I’d bet dollars to donuts that the vast majority of law school grads would tell you that they didn’t think it was much fun. It is a LOT of work – easily twice, perhaps three times or more, as much work as getting an undergrad degree. I’m glad I got my law degree and I like working as a lawyer, but I found law school to be stressful, overly competitive, and large parts of it to be massively boring (Federal Tax, anyone?). But different strokes for different folks – you may love it.

  2. Environmental law is not saving panda bears, it’s understanding and applying massive and hugely complicated Federal regulations (at least in the U.S.). If they more honestly called it regulatory law – which is really what most of it is – it would suck most of the false romance right out of it. Forget bobbing around on a Greenpeace ship – anticipate plowing through pages of administrative regulations, reproduced in tiny print, to figure out if your client needs to remidiate after a given chemical leaks from his underground storage tanks. I too thought environmental law was the way to go until I had a taste of it – I found it to be hugely boring and very frustrating, though, again, you might love it. Some people do.

  3. I used to work in the public sector (as a state’s attorney) but have recently been sucked into private practice in the Big City by the promise of filthy lucre – although truthfully the lucre isn’t very filthy, it’s just a hell of a lot better than what I was being paid as an assistant AG of a rural state. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a decent living after investing so much time and money in an education, but the salaries for most lawyers are not as fabulous as you might imagine. I would not invest three years of my life in law school just for the money, or just to get a generalized higher degree. Go if you think you want to be a lawyer. If you don’t, then don’t go – go do something else instead.

The bottom line for me is that I went to law school because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and, fortunately for me, I was right – though I could just as easily have been wrong, as little as I really knew about the practice of law when I started. I had to work damn hard to do as well in school as I did – far harder than I’d ever had to work before – and it was initially a rude adjustment to realize that (a) I knew jack-shit about the legal system, legal reasearch, or the pracice of law and (b) I was no longer one of the smartest people in class – everyone there is smart, probably very smart, and if you’re only semi-smart (as I am) you have to make up in hard work what you lack in genius.

My $.02.

26

You’re fishing, Jodi ;)! Semi-smart my Crisco-white ass. Puh-leeeeeze. :slight_smile:

27

As far as law school being hard work, it is extremely hard work to do well. Moreover, as hard as you work and as smart as you may be, you just might not get the hang of how to do well on the type of tests many law profs give. So your hard work will not bear results.

OTOH, it is extremely difficult to flunk out of many if not most law schools. Therefore, it requires no great effort for a reasonably intelligent student to graduate with a C average. You can raise that in your 2d and 3d years by taking seminar courses that are graded on essays or takehome tests, instead of the 3-hour in-class issue-spotting marathons. Then all you have to do is apply yourself reasonably towards a bar review class to pass the bar and - presto - you are a lawyer. No requirement that you know jcakshit about any specific area of the law.

Granted, graduating in the bottom quarter of your class will affect your ability to compete for certain jobs, especially depending on the market when you get out. But should you get any job, the relative significance of you GPA/class rank will decrease rather quickly as you gain experience. Plus, you can always hang out your own shingle, and the boss won’t give a rat’s ass about your GPA. Also, if you are getting your law degree merely as a step towards some other goal, GPA may not be all that important as having the degree.

Personally, I found most of law school extremely boring. Most of the classes I found most interesting - international law, law and economics, for example - have nothing to do with my daily practice.

What I do all day every day (when I’m not posting to the SDMB) is essentialy federal civil procedure. And that class, as taught at the decent state school I attended, was absolutely incomprehensible. Something about hitting tennis balls back across the net? WTF?!

Depending on what line of work you go into, classes such as Con and crim law may have little to do with your practice. But they will help you better enjoy TV lawyer shows and newspaper articles - adds a different level to your understanding of many issues. And you will wish you paid more attention in property law and contracts when you buy a house, and buy appliances or hire contractors.

Just wanted to point out that if you just want a law degree for whatever reason, “hook and go” can be an appropriate approach.

28

A couple of additional $0.02:

  1. Do not go to law school for the “intellectual rigors” aspect so lauded by some in their posts. My undergraduate philospohy courses were infinitely better at teaching the value and practice of critical thinking than any class I had in law school. Law school was hugely beneficial practical training for research and learning basic concepts.

  2. I did environmental law for 4 years at a large law firm. You need a couple of personality traits in order to accept this type of work. First, Jodi hit the nail on the head in point number 2 of her post. Second, you have to be able to deal with projects that go on for decades. (This is not the area for some one who likes a project to be finished within a year or less.)

And don’t let people like Max scare you away from environmental law with that crap about “representing big corporations that don’t care.” That is just poppycock. I worked with some of the biggest companies in this country and NOT ONE of them ever gave us a directive to do anything that made me feel uncomfortable. (And I have spent quite a bit of time working for a regional nonprofit environmental group.)

29

Speaking as someone who actually practices it (which I don’t think Dinsdale does), I don’t think patent law is all that tedious. A rule of thumb - if you read Scientific American for fun, you like to write, and you work well under deadline pressure, you’ll probably enjoy patent law.

There is huge demand for patent lawyers, especially in the chemical and biological areas and in software (although the latter is not as big as it was before the crash in March). Further, you may well be able to get law school paid for (my firm is putting me through Harvard). Check out firms in your area with patent practices, and ask if they are hiring “technology specialists.” If they are, you have a great opportunity to find out whether this is something you want to do without sinking in lots of time and money first.

30

Oh, I forgot one more thing. Getting to Maybe is the best book you can get on how to do well in law school. It’s probably worth reading now, to give yourself an idea of what you might be getting into.

31

ENugent, I wasn’t trying to slam patent law any more or less than any other branch of law. Just that so many folk seem to have a basic misunderstanding of what the day-to-day practice of law is actually like. And you recall my prior post was to compliment the usefulness of inertia’s major. Someone said patent law was tedious. As opposed to what thrilling branch of law?

No, I don’t practice patent law. Appellate litigation of federal administrative law. In fact, I did not take a single hard science class as an undergrad. Somehow or another CLEPed out of having to take any. Which I really regret today. Now I subscribe to Discover and SA (tho the articles in the latter tend to make my brain hurt). And I find scientific concerns so much more interesting than most of the social science BS I spent so much time studying. Anyone want to get into a discussion about SALT II? I didn’t think so.

I am often surprised at the number of young folk I hear saying they will major in some “soft” area. And when asked what they intend to do with that, they say, “Oh, I’ll go to law school.”

32

Oh, I agree with most of your comments, Dinsdale. I accidentally named you when I meant Max Torque. Mea culpa.

Patent lawyers have a reputation for being the most boring kind of lawyer there is, and I think just the opposite is true. At least in my firm, we’re the ones who break the stuffed-shirt, white-shoe mold and actually have fun doing our jobs.

I’m in Admin Law right now, and that makes my brain hurt, so I sympathize.

33

With respect to Dinsdale’s first point, I didn’t find law school to be hard work, and did reasonably well. There was a lot of reading, sure, but I found lots of time to goof off and explore the pubs of Kingston and upper New York. I found the classes interesting, with a couple of exceptions. (Commercial Law/Secured Transactions/Sale of Property - great big YUCK!)

Dinsdale - your description sounds to me more like trying to figure out the concept of renvoi in Conflict of Laws, than Civil Procedure?

(Oh, wait, you’re talking about the domestic conflict of laws inherent in your court system - [emily latella voice] Never mind. [/emily latella voice].)

34

Re: tennis balls - as best I can remember, the idiot was trying to make some analogy about basic pleading. Complaint, answer, affirmative defenses, etc. Don’t ask me to explain it.

35

My Conflict of Law prof tried to use a similar table-tennis analogy for the concept of renvoi, to explain choice substantive law, procedural law, and choice of forum.

It didn’t take.