Tips for Your First Year of Law School

You’ve taken the LSAT, registered with the LSDAS, applied to several law schools and you have just received your acceptance to one of them. Come this fall, you will be a first year law student. Celebrate! You have every right to be happy, excited, thrilled and beside yourself with joy. You’re also entitled to be scared to death, you should be anyway. Everything up to now has been preliminary, a cakewalk. Now that you’re in law school, the real fun begins.

If you’re like most people, you will have several months from the time you are accepted until classes start. In the meantime, there is much to do and no time to waste.

First you have to pay for law school. Start early with the financial end of the equation. Ideally, you will have been working on this issue from about the time you began the application process, maybe you even have a scholarship. People sometimes worry about not being able to pay for their legal education, but that rarely is an obstacle. Law school in any form is expensive and at some private schools, it can be extremely expensive. It is not unusual for the tuition alone to approach $40,000.00 per year at the most the most expensive of schools. Add to that rent, supplies, living expenses, etc., and you will quickly see that you could be $200,000 in debt for three years of study. Not many people have that kind of money lying around. If you do, good for you, if you don’t, don’t worry too much. There are scholarships, grants, and other forms of financial aid to cover the costs. All you have to do is ask for it. Realize up front in this process that the majority of people graduate from law school with a tremendous amount of debt, frequently translating into the equivalent of a monthly mortgage on a modest home. However, don’t worry with this. Most people would feel lucky to have the problem of sorting out how to pay for a legal education. Apply for financial aid and borrow the money for your education.

Ideally, you should have your finances worked out well prior to the start of classes. Once you get the finances worked through, do a budget for yourself. If you end up paying for your legal education via financial aid, as many do, you will generally receive your money in a lump sum at the beginning of the year or the beginning of each semester. That will be a big check, so budgeting and planning are crucial. You don’t want the end of the semester to roll around and then find yourself worrying about how you are going to pay for rent, food or utilities. A lot of law students incorrectly assume that they will just work while they go to school. Not to say it can’t be done, but it is certainly not advisable to attempt to work your first year. Some schools even prohibit it. You will need all of your attention, and time, to devote to your studies, so do a budget and stick to it.

When the financial aspect is done, visit the school if you haven’t done so yet and get a feel for the place. Familiarize yourself with the lay of the land. The more you know in advance, the better it will be when classes start, particularly if you already know your away around. Most law school admissions offices have a peer program that will put you in touch with upperclassmen to help you acclimate yourself to your new surroundings. Take advantage of this! You will also want to take some time and locate a convenient place to live so you can plan to move in in advance of the start of classes. Look for a place close enough to the school to allow you to get their easily, but not so close as to be tempted to spend all your time at the school. You will soon find that law school can be a black hole into which there is no escape. You will need some down time from your studies, having a place that balances proximity for ease of travel to school and separation for your peace of mind will be ideal. Some places don’t allow it, but you will want a place where you can study without distraction, or with limited distractions. Shop carefully as you don’t want to have worries over your residence distract you from you studies when classes kick in.

The curriculum for first year law students is near identical at most schools in the . Well prior to the start of classes you can purchase you text books and you should do so as soon as you can. Don’t worry about reading them all, but familiarize yourself with them. Buy new books. Law students are notorious for marking up their text books and you want to avoid the temptation to take their notations as the gospel and learn the material incorrectly. At your law school, or on a computer bulletin board to which you will obtain access, in advance of your first day of class, you will be given assignments for the first day. Law school is not like undergraduate school. You hit the ground running.

As I said, the curriculum for all first year programs is strikingly similar from school to school. Core courses are taught to first year students. These classes are Contracts, Torts, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law and Criminal Law. While some schools break up the course load and require more, teaching them over as many as 4 semesters, the first year curriculum will include largely, if not all, of these courses. As well, count on a legal writing and research course and perhaps a course on jurisprudence, basic lawyering skills, or a professionalism course. The course load will be substantial, the reading requirements large, preparation mandatory and the stress high. Free time will be a commodity.

If you have come this far, it will come as no surprise to the prospective law student that the instructors and professors do not spoon feed the material to the students. Law school classes are taught using the Socratic Method, an archaic, yet traditional reality of law school where the professors don’t lecture, but ask questions of the students concerning the material. The professors are also notorious for not telling the class if the answers elicited are correct or not. A typical class session goes much like this. Seventy five to 100 students await the arrival of the professor who walks to the lecture, lays out a class seating assignment and begins. The professor will expect that everyone in the class is prepared and with that, he will call on an individual to stand and answer questions concerning the assigned reading. There will be a moment of uncomfortable silence when the professor consults his seating assignment to select the person. As he decides, most in the class will be saying a prayer hoping not to hear their name. Law school makes one fear the sound of their own name. When he finally decides, he will call on that person and ask them to stand. The professor will then ask the student to give the facts of the case at hand. Then, the professor, an expert in his field of instruction, will ask esoteric questions concerning the case, the philosophy of law behind the case, the thought process of the justices that decided the case and what impact the case had on the body of law to which it relates. These questions will be asked of a first year law student who likely was first exposed to the case only hours before. The professor will give no quarter, demanding answers to questions that seem to have no answer. The professor will likely even shun calling on other students in the class who will raise their hands hoping to help the student who was selected by the professor. If the student the professor called upon knows the case cold and is able to give coherent answers to the professor’s questions, they may likely only be on their feet for one class period, perhaps less. In the event that the professor was lucky enough to find a person who was not prepared for class, it is not unheard of for that person to be called on for weeks afterwards to make up for their being unprepared. The professor will address the important aspects of the case, but the professor will likely not tell you exactly what you need to know from the case. You will have to decide that for yourself from your studies or with the help of a group of students with whom you regularly meet to study.

Each class will be conducted in this fashion as you move from case to case through the semester. As you do this, there will be no tests to gauge your progress, no pop quizzes, no regular grading, and no projects. On the final day of class, every student will be in the same boat. Your grade in the class will be determined entirely from a single final exam that will be administered at the end of the semester. There will be no extra credit, nothing that can be done to increase your grade aside from your performance on this single exam.

Part of the problem of surviving and excelling in your first year of law school is being able to navigate the stress created by the other students around you. There will be a number of students that are quite vocal, thinking themselves to be the teacher’s pet, or the rare student that just “gets” what the professor is talking about. Some of these students will even announce their mastery of the subject matter to the rest of the student body. As well, it is quite common for groups of students, cliques if you will, to develop rather quickly. Each clique will generally wonder what the others are doing, rumors will start and spread and a general panic will set in over the progress that is being made by one group or even as to rumors unrelated to the law. There will be the occasional loner that shuns everyone that everyone else starts to worry about, thinking that this person actually does “get” it and this will do nothing but further feed into everyone’s stress. Expect all of this as it will happen. The sooner you know that this is coming, the better you will be able to handle it.

At the end of the semester when the stress has reached a break point and the exams have been administered, you will go home to enjoy your Christmas holiday, all the time worrying that you just took several exams that effectively ended your law school career and ruined your future. But this will pass and you will return for spring semester classes and the results of your first semester exams. The exams will have been graded and the results ranked. Someone will be ranked number one in the class all the way down to the final person in the class. Your class rank will be used to determine admission to the school’s law review, hiring for summer jobs and, at the end of your law school career, to determine where you will be going to work. However, you still shouldn’t worry; they still call the person who was last in their graduating class an attorney.

The recipe for success in law school is time management and proper preparation. Look at law school as you would a job. Devote adequate time to study and preparation, but don’t make law school your life. Reward yourself every week for the time spent in class and the work you do outside of class. If you have questions or are not understanding a point of law, discuss it with your study group or approach your professor. Do additional research. Though it will be difficult, do not fall victim to the rumor mill. Focus on your performance and your performance alone. The better you do, the better your class rank will be. When the results from the first year exams are released, you will see that those that spent their time banging their own gong didn’t do that well.

In the end, success at law school is about time management, stress management and understanding that to succeed it doesn’t matter what the other person is doing, only how well you do. Start early and don’t let up!