Finally, some advice from Sua Sponte

I may be so late to this party that everyone else has already left (wouldn't be the first time in my life), but even if that's so, I'm happy to play cleanup crew (ditto).

There has been much giving of law-school-related advice among the blawgs, both recent and older. On one hand, I'm tempted to join in; ever since my grades this semester didn't suck, I get the sense that I should puff up like a bull pigeon and share the magical secrets of my success with the craving eyes of the next generation of 1Ls. But on the other hand, everyone remembers the first rule of LSAT short-answer problems: correlation != causality. The magical secrets of my success, if I could think of any, might be entirely coincidental. I wouldn't know. Don't trust me if I say otherwise.

That said, I can at least provide some service to ye little grasshoppers: having gone through the psychological equivalent of the Ironman Triathlon followed by the 24 Heures du Mans and then the Iditarod for good measure, I can at least compare the advice other people give to the experience I actually had. Much good may it do you.

1. Doing What Other People Tell You

Garrett says: "Really, it's all a load of manure (my advice included)...even if you ask the ten top students in the class, you'll probably get about ten different answers. Reject slavish conformity to other people's lives, whether they are successes or failures."

Waddling Thunder says: "Jeremy has one method. I have a different one. I’m sure we both were equally prepared for exams at the end. And you, prospective 1L, are going to need to develop your own system as well, picking and choosing from what people before you have done."

JCA responds: Quite true. I tried to do the things you're Supposed To Do in order to get Those Grades, and wound up doing miserably. Correlation or causality? I changed this behavior second semester, and things got better. A one-point trend? Maybe. But I'll stick by my second-semester methods. It may feel grossly foreign to you, trying to fly blind when this is so different from what you've done before. But even though it might hurt like hell to break your own mold, doing so might be the only thing that works for you.

2. Talking in Class

Alice says: "Don't be the pompous windbag who speaks just to hear himself talk. Nobody likes that guy. Many law students operate under the conceit that they will be the one the professor bestows the slight nudge for class participation come grade time. Doesn't happen."

Garrett says: "Shut Yo' Trap. [F]or some reason all the people who are huge gunners early all end up doing badly. (You won't hear them talking much second semester)."

JCA responds: If you go to a school like mine, this won't be an issue. We had no gunners -- they were eviscerated within the first week. Professors had no truck with the long-winded; if your point wasn't made after fifteen seconds, you were coldly interrupted midsentence by the prof either cutting you down or calling on someone else. And those were the nice professors. The stricter ones maintained an obedient silence in their classrooms that bordered on monastic. "Browbeaten" is almost too charitable an adjective for my section, round about last October.

There were a few people who routinely said something in discussion, myself included, but none of us was ever permitted to indulge in the diarrhea-of-the-mouth that apparently goes unpunished elsewhere. If you had more than one thing to say, you took your little self to office hours and waited in line for your fifteen minutes' facetime with the professor. This, incidentally, was far more valuable to me than any in-class talking: you avoided all risk of public embarrassment at the hands of a professor who might mock your misunderstanding, and the professor would be approachable, personable, and actually interested in answering your question. Even if you feel you completely understand everything that's going on in the class (warning: when I felt this way, I was only ever mistaken), office hours bonding is essential if you're ever going need a letter of recommendation; it's tasteless to attempt to bond with your professor by talking in class, and ineffective to crowd up around the podium at the end of the hour. Go to office hours, talk there, and all will be well.

3. Balancing School and Life

Dodd says: "Make sure you always have a completely non-law-related book to read. [...] Schedule time to read said books (I read myself to sleep every night, so it was easy to maintain my reading in law school)."

Alice says: "Don't be the recluse. If the only place people ever see you is in the library, you're not doing too well on the social front."

JCA responds: First a bit of background. In the fall and early winter of 1998, I fancied myself a multitasker: I was taking four classes in graduate school, writing a weekly newspaper column, and planning my wedding in New York while working a full-time job that had me spending four days a week in Atlanta and Fridays in Milwaukee.

Turns out, I knew nothing from time management. Nothing. I learned the meaning of time management this year.

I guarantee that you will have an easier time of things if you (a) are single, (b) live within forty miles of your school, or (c) both. But according to the aforecited worthies (who, I assume, are unmarried and live(d) on or near campus), it's a challenge even so to make sure that you're spending enough time on your own needs when school seems to suck up every waking moment of your life. Time management is key. My solution was to reserve a day (and then an afternoon...and then a few hours...but always some time) for Personal Stuff. Force yourself to take time away from schoolwork, even if you feel you can ill afford it. Even if you only use the personal time to vent, eat bonbons, get drunk and feel sorry for yourself, at least that's therapeutic. School is quicksand. If you sink into it completely, you will suffocate. You will.

4. Urban Legends about Law School

Garrett says to read The Bramble Bush.

Dodd says to watch The Paper Chase.

JCA responds: I know nothing of any of this. I never read any books about law school, nor saw any such movies (not even Legally Blonde, unless you count it being the inflight movie once on a flight where I didn't have headphones). I came into law school with no expectations. I imagine it would have hurt even worse if I had.

Don't buy into the urban legends. You will have your own experience in school, and no one else's. See #1 above.

5. Metamorphosis

Alice says: "Don't be "the law student". [...] Don't pick arguments with your friends just because you're in law school or become a law zombie."

Dodd says: "Try and remember that people who aren't law students will find you intensely boring for at least the duration of your first year. Please resist the urge to tell them about all the "terribly interesting cases" you read this week."

JCA responds: And don't be surprised if you find yourself at an utter loss for anything else to talk about. It's hard to invest so much of your time and energy into an experience designed to change you as a person without it having some effect on your identity. There are people, it seems, who can manage this, people who can cleanly maintain their law-school self and their external self in parallel. This skill is as mythical to me as shyness, or mathematical brilliance, or the ability not to take oneself seriously: all features that other people have, or claim to, with which I have no firsthand experience.

If you're lucky, you'll have lots of lawyer friends who find it cute that you're pupating. If you're extremely lucky, you'll have a significant other who's perfectly agreeable about sharing the experience with you, or at least tolerating the fact that you're growing antennae. Even if you're basically going it alone among a crowd of mostly nonlawyers, keep a journal or blog and do all your law-school talking there. You will need to get it out of your system somehow, and there will be things that you will have no desire to share with your schoolmates.

6. How to Study for Exams

Jeremy says not to bother outlining the way you're told to, but rather, collect an array of study materials that roughly maps to your professor's syllabus and make your study aids from those. (He says a lot of things about this, actually; it's a long post.)

Waddling Thunder says to limit yourself to one commercial supplement, do a quickie outline, then blitz on practice exams: first from other schools, then from yours.

Alice says: "Don't join a study group. They are usually time-wasters. There is always at least one person who expects a free ride (i.e., a copy of your outlines)."

JCA responds: More or less everyone agrees that exam prep is very much a personal thing. I swear by my Gilberts; I had little patience for any other supplements. My grades went up when I joined a study group. I also noticed a strict correlation between my highest grades and the outlines that I'd finished before the semester ended. I make big honking outlines, then cook them down to issue-spotting checklists and recurring-problem-resolution flowcharts. I also had to make sure that every single case mentioned in class, even the note cases, was duly integrated into the master outline; not doing this killed me in Torts, but there's no reason that it should have this effect on you.

I recommend using old outlines and old exams from your particular professor, if you can. I found that much of first year was a people exercise, learning how to track a professor's expectations. It's a game; sometimes it's a game like Mao where you're unearthing the rules as you go, but other times the rules are right there, clear in front of you. For me, this was doubly true in the classes where the professors were heavily policy-oriented. They made no secret of their views, frequently discoursing at length on something with which I couldn't disagree more. This might feel hostile during discussion, but not once you see it for what it is: they're giving you the rules. WRITE THEM DOWN. If you can talk through an exam answer with suitable eloquence, solid logic and sufficient citations, and reach the professor's conclusion of choice, you will make a friend right when you most need one. (It's not intellectually dishonest, it's not selling out, it's lawyering -- making your client's argument rather than your own.)

But that's my experience; your professors will not necessarily be anything like mine. Experiment. Play with outlines, play with supplements, play with study aids. If something is a waste of time (i.e. briefing cases once you've gotten the hang of it), quit doing it. You don't have time to waste, but you do have time enough to get things right.

And you can. You can. The one piece of actual advice that I feel I can give with certainty is this: you will learn to know yourself, learn to know your limits, and, if you can keep from shattering altogether, discover an elasticity of soul that you didn't know you had. And don't worry: the psychological stretch marks will fade. You, however, will endure.

thus spake /jca @ June 26, 2003 12:01 AM