Law School Advice Thread

Unfortunately I sometimes have trouble with motivation specially for study. The classes gave me that motivation. Different people learn differently, it's all about knowing the way you learn more effectively.

But spending 3+ hours every Sunday in a class for a few months sucks ass.

Wait till law school when everyday can become an 8 hour day (minimum) and you don't have weekends really. Just days when you don't have to go to class (which some weeks is the highlight of the day.)

I've heard the horror stories and I'm already slowly saying goodbye to my friends and hobbies for the next year or two.

Luckily I like reading and analyzing stuff so I'm not nervous about it.

Whatever you do, don't do that.

There's actually plenty of time for those things in law school once you learn a few things:

1) 90% of anything you read in your casebooks is filler that can be skimmed over without missing anything, no matter how edited the cases are.

2) Compiling or studying 100+ page outlines for your classes is completely useless; any class outline can and should be done in about 15-25 pages for most classes, with an upper bound of about 40 pages for a really dense class.

3) Anyone using more than 2 colors of highlighter is either insane or sure to burn out. Don't pay any attention to them.

4) No professor cares that you spent 200 hours researching and writing a paper, compiling a 4 page long case list and cheating with your font to keep in the page limit. Keep your writing to the point and your logic clear, and only cite the law that really matters.

5) Don't forget statutes and regulations. Law students forget these all the time because of the emphasis on cases in the books, and the easiest way to positively differentiate yourself from the crowd is not to fall into that trap. If there's a statute directly on point, cite it, cite it first, and give it a lot more weight than any cases that don't directly interpret the statute.

Basically, people find law school to be so much work because they fail to distinguish between what's actually important to learn and say and what's just background and other filler. Unless you do a clinic, moot court, or law review, getting your work done in law school shouldn't take much more time than getting it done as an undergrad once you get into the swing of things. There is a learning curve, in that it takes a month or two to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff in your casebooks and writing, especially if you haven't taken any legal classes as an undergrad, but after that really heavy workloads are the result of self-induced stress more than actual difficulty and volume of work.

Probably true but still read the things just so you now how to in the working world. Though, in the working world, headnotes and such help me a lot. Lexis.

Yeah I have a friend who had like 100 pagers for the first semester of classes two years ago (mind you all the classes are year long first year for us.) You can't fucking learn off those. I have a maximum 30 page limit per semester of class for my outlines. I outline as I go...literally daily...I don't take notes, brief, or any other method. I stick to what is needed. The trade off is you don't have as much detail as you might need for a Socratic grilling. Eventually after first year or earlier you begin to realize that getting embarrassed in class...well isn't embarrassing. It doesn't matter and you ignore the possibility.

I use three. But only because I have three in my backpack and whatever one I reach for is the one I use that day. I never understood those 5 highlighter methods with codes. If it's really that important to have the facts in Blue, the holding in Yellow, the issue in Pink, the procedural posture in Orange...just write, next to the paragraph, with an ink pen, F, H, I, or PH. OMG so hard!

I disagree with this one. Although it may be true be cognizant of the writing class culture of your law school. Mine is ridiculously anal. No one gets good grades. Your never good enough. Its inconsistent. (85, 80, 70, 85!) Stick to the font. Stick to the page limit. Stick to the margins and spacing. Or fucking pay with your grade.

Ironically I wrote two traverses this week (didn't know what one was until last Wednesday) and submitted them to my supervising attorney nervously expecting to get raped in return. Instead he came back with the first one and said "This is really good!" Confused! I could never get above a B in 1st or 2nd year legal writing. Waste of my fucking time.

Also, there's a high chance that they'll teach you a citation manual called ALWD. Don't get too attached if they do. It's used in 4 places in the world one of which is the JAG office in the Marshall Islands.

Good advice until the statute is the issue.

Agreed. I'm generally done w/ my day by dinner. Often earlier because I do reading for the week the weekend before much of the time. Makes my weekdays a lot less stressful and allows me to work or otherwise goof off...here for instance.

Yeah, the first two months are the hardest. I made up for it by getting laid so it worked out in the end.

Thank you for the suggestions guys. I need all the advice I can get and I appreciate it.

I don't know anything about law school, but if you eventually become a trial lawyer you should totally get a monkey. Everyone likes monkeys, so when the jury decides the case they'll side with the guy with the monkey.

I gotta say, the LSAT sounds fun.

Of course, I thought the SATs and ACT were fun too, so...

I thought the LSAT was fun.



Then I got my score...

Zombie thread resurrection.

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