At most law schools, you don’t get to choose any of your classes as a 1L. You get put into a section (Section 2 RAWKS!) and your section (mine was about 50ish people) takes all the same classes together for a whole year. I do think at some schools you may get an elective or some limited choice, but generally the decisions about classes are mostly out of your hands. The classes that you’ll take as a 1L vary from school to school, too. First semester we had Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, and Legal Practice; second semester was Property, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, and Legal Practice. Some schools make you do two semesters of some of those classes and then you take some of the others as an upperclassman. At my school we only had a semester of everything except Legal Practice, and for that I’m exceedingly thankful for the most part, though I did really like Civil Procedure and I wish it had been a year-long course.

So, 2L. That’s about to happen.

It’s abundantly clear to me now why they take all the schedule-making decisions away from you as a 1L, because making a schedule? and choosing classes? and actually getting into them? all while keeping your eventual exam schedule in mind? It’s freaking hard. Like insane, even.

First, in early April, they release the class schedules and the exam schedules for the upcoming summer session plus the next fall and spring semesters. We register for all of them at once. I have a general no-summer-school policy, so I ignored that part. I printed out all the schedules and then I made two spreadsheets. YES, I DID. I MADE SPREADSHEETS. What? You guys don’t do that? Weirdos. Everybody knows that only the smartest of the smartest people in the world are also spreadsheet makers. These are facts.

Oh, also, coincidentally enough, the scheduling information is released right about the time you might want to start thinking about cracking down and studying for exams. Of course, if you’re busy having an OCDgasm over spreadsheets and scheduling details, you can’t think about anything else, especially nothing as mundane as exams. So there’s that.

So I worked and worked on my magical scheduling spreadsheets (one for fall, one for spring) and I plugged in all sorts of different possible classes that I might want to take, then I entered in when all my exams would be, and I found some conflicts, and I adjusted, and I adjusted some more, and then I color coded the spreadsheets, and then I made the Most Perfect Schedule in all the history of the world, forever and ever, AMEN. I had all sorts of possible combinations of classes that could and could not be taken together because of the exam schedule. For example, I didn’t want to take two classes who had exams on the same day. Um, no thanks. But everything was color coded, people. It was a beautiful thing.

And then. Chaos.

The (then) 2Ls got a week to register for classes before we, the (then) 1Ls, got to. It works like this. After you finish your 1L year, you have 29 hours (15 first semester, 14 second semester). You need 90 hours to gradumuate. Of the 61 hours you need to take as a 2L and 3L, 26 of those hours are advanced required classes. And of those 26 advanced required hours, you have to take at least 15 of those hours as a 2L. So complimicated. We were advised not to take too many of those 26 required hours as a 2L and to save some of the 4-hour classes for our 3L year, or else we might be stuck taking like eight 2-hour classes one semester just to get all the necessary hours to gradumuate. But they let the 2Ls register first so they can be sure to get into all the classes they’ll need during their 3L year.

Still with me? Hey, wake up! I’m still talking. Rude.

So, needless to say, by the time the 2Ls had chosen all their classes, my Most Perfect Schedule lay shivering, naked and beaten, left for dead. I had to start completely over. By this time, I really REALLY should have been studying for finals, but ZOMG MY BABY SCHEDULE NEEDS ME. I worked and worked and color coded and worked some more, and finally I came up with a schedule that, while not ideal, was Tolerable.

And then. More chaos.

I sat at my computer with all the code numbers of the classes I wanted already typed in, just waiting for the clock to strike midnight so I could hit SUBMIT. I waited and waited. I drank some beer. I drank some more beer while I waited some more. Then, finally, midnight. I clicked on SUBMIT and waited for the next screen to pop up, which would tell me which classes I’d gotten into, then I’d consult my handy-dandy spreadsheet to see what alternatives to try instead of the ones I didn’t get into, and then in a matter of moments I’d have a Schedule. Not a Most Perfect Schedule, mind you, but a Tolerable Schedule nonetheless.

I waited and I waited. I drank some more beer while I waited some more. The little round circle timer/busy signal thingy just kept going around and around, like those chaser Christmas tree lights or the chaser lights on a Vegas marquee. I waited and I waited. More beer. More waiting. Still with the chasing strobe lights. Finally, I opened a new tab and checked Facebook out of sheer boredom. Every single person from law school that I’m friends with on Facebook was complaining about the same thing. Massive failure from the school’s server, apparently. Since I had an 8am class the next morning and it was already almost 2am and I was pretty buzzed after all that intoxicating waiting, I decided to just leave the chasing lights running and go to bed and hope for the best.

So when I got to class the next morning, I found out that a ton of people had stayed up like all night waiting for the chasing lights circle to go away. Of a class of over 100 people (two sections combined), maybe 20 of us showed up for Property at 8:00 the next morning. Rawr. That professor was hyper-vigilant about taking roll, too, but because there were so many people absent, he decided not to bother. So basically I showed up to class for NOTHING. AT 8:00. RAWRRR.

Anyway, all the people who stayed up all night also took all the classes I had lined out on my Tolerable Schedule. Not only that, but they submitted their names for the waiting lists for all the other good classes that had been taken by the 2Ls. Basically, I had to start mostly all the way over AGAIN. My Tolerable Schedule became my Schedule of Last Resort. I made changes here and there over the summer, getting into previously full classes when spots opened up. Then they released the list of classes that will be taught by adjunct/visiting professors, and those classes opened up for registration on Wednesday morning (yesterday) at 9am.

And guess what, you guys? After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I’m happy to state that while I don’t have the Original Most Perfect Schedule, I do have an Almost Perfect Schedule that I’m pretty happy about.

Fall 2010 (16 hours)
MW 8:00 Criminal Practice Skills (2 hours) (squeeeeeee!!)
MTWR 9:00 Commercial Law (4 hours, advanced required class)
MWF 12:00 Creditor’s Rights & Bankruptcy (3 hours)*
MTW 2:00 Criminal Procedure (3 hours, advanced required class)
MW 3:00 Business Torts (2 hours)
TR 3:00 Entertainment Law (2 hours)

*I’m on the waiting list for Texas Pretrial Procedure, and if I get in there, it will take the place of Bankruptcy in this time slot and on the exam schedule. I know you were wondering this.

Spring 2011 (16 hours)
MTWR 9:00 Income Tax (4 hours, advanced required class)
TR 10:30 Family Law (3 hours)
MTWR 2:00 Evidence (4 hours, advanced required class)
M 3:00 Texas Juvenile Law (2 hours)
TR 4:00 Legal Malpractice (3 hours)

So. It’s kindof a lot of hours, or at least a lot of classes because of the 2-hour ones, but I think I’d rather load up as a 2L and have an easier courseload as a 3L than the other way around. I’m 100% sure that by the time I’m a 3L my motivation for studying will be deep into the negative numbers. I mean, farther into the negative numbers than where my motivation already dwells, which is somewhere between -23,498,723,498 and -23,498,735,745, give or take 10,000 or so.

So, to summarize, there are four morals of this story:

1. Spreadsheets are for smart people. If you don’t like them and use them as a problem-solving tool for life’s problems, you should start. Or else you won’t ever experience an OCDgasm, which is quite an experience.
2. Don’t think you can drink enough to make the chasing lights timer/busy signal thingy go away. You can’t outlast it.
3. If you show up to an 8am class after a major server crash during the registration process, resulting in nobody being able to register until 5am at the earliest, where the professor normally takes roll every single morning without fail, you will be in the minority, and you will not be rewarded for your attendance. Rather, you will be reminded that sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be responsible/conscientious/neurotic.
4. There may be times when you will eat your words. For example, if you loudly proclaim to your friends and acquaintances multiple times that “never again after this will you ever EVAR see me at this law school for an 8:00 class,” you can be 100% sure that the one class you desperately want to take (Criminal Practice Skills) will be offered at 8am, thus presenting a horrible dilemma wherein you must choose between your future career and your current sanity and sleep cycle. Of course, I myself have never eaten any words, but you might have to.

I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are taking the barzam this week, and their angst-filled tweets have grown more and more angsty leading up to today. I have no doubt in my mind that I’ll be an intolerable BEAR when it’s my turn. I mean, more than usual. Whatever.

So that got me to thinking about how I could reward myself and Ninja Kid when it’s all over. Of course, I’ll be rewarding myself for having made it through law school and barzam prep and the barzam itself, although the results of the test aren’t known for several months afterward. Still. I deserve a reward. I’ll also be rewarding Ninja Kid for putting up with my bearyness for the three years of law school and the barzam prep and the stupid test.

You’ll remember that it’s a well-established fact that I like to travel. So, what better reward than a fantabulous trip to somewhere fantabulous?!

You’ll also remember that I have multiple quests underway all at once. There’s the quest for the perfect shampoo, the quest for my favorite beer, and the quest for the most wonderful facial moisturizer. All these questions (and more) are lacking answers; hence the quest. And now I have a new quest: the quest for the most fabulous trip of all time, ever and evar. Because that’s the trip I want to take with Ninja Kid after I finish the barzam.

This quest is complicated because I have to strike a delicate balance between too much activity and not enough. If it were just me, I’d be happy to plop myself down on a beach somewhere and stare at the water for about four or five days. Ninja Kid will not be entertained by this lack of activity for that long, however, so I want to go somewhere that has enough options to keep us satisfied. On the advice of Twitter, I don’t want to go someplace where I’ll feel like I need to do a bunch of sightseeing, like Washington DC or New York City. I definitely don’t want to go to an amusement park and stand in long lines in 453° heat with 148% humidity, which was Ninja Kid’s original suggestion. (She wants to visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and ZOMG so do I, but not after the barzam.) Also, I don’t want to go anywhere in the Caribbean because it will be August, which is prime hurricane season. Believe me, people: If a hurricane would ruin anyone’s barzam reward trip, it would be mine. Let there be no doubt.

So, we’ve narrowed it down to a few destinations, but we’re still open for new suggestions on where to go. This is where you guys come in. You can vote in my poll and pick one of the spots we’ve already considered, or, if you have another idea you can leave a comment and/or vote for “other.” I mean, I know we’re talking about a trip that’s right at two years away. I know. But humor me, okay? Vote. Don’t let the terrorists win (that’s what happens if you don’t vote).

I had you going for a second, didn’t I? DIDN’T I??? C’mon, admit it.

I fully intended to participate, I really did. I went to the first mandatory meeting in April, where all the journal people got up and spoke (and spoke, and spoke, and spoke, and spoke some more) about their respective journals and why we should list theirs first. We have law review, an estate planning journal, and an administrative law journal. I guess pretty much everybody lists law review as their first choice, but if law review doesn’t pick you then your packet goes to the next in line on your order of preference. I also went to the second meeting in April, where we learned about editing and all the symbols and hieroglyphics to use on the editing portion of the competition.

Incidentally, contrary to what you might think, the acronym MOUS does not stand for Midgets Of Unusual Size, like I initially feared thought, nor for Mimes Of Unusual Size (DEAR GOD THE HORROR), but rather for Manual Of Usage and Style or something like that. I learned that at the meeting, too.

I don’t know what in the world is going on with that red flashing text, but that was the only video I could find. Okay, I didn’t really look that hard. Whatever.

Oh! And did you guys know that inside that ROUS costume is a REAL LIVE MIDGET?!?!? Not even kidding. He scampers, and he scampers like a champ.

So, back to me. I went to the meetings and paid attention. After my last exam, I went up to the third floor of the library and picked up a packet for the competition. It was filled with lots of paper. I read all the instructions. I even took the packet with me out of town and I read cases in the car. No, not while I was driving, of course. Ninja Mimi was driving. Reading while driving is NOT safe.

The task was this:

Here’s a packet of a bunch of cases. The first case (Snyder v. Phelps, 4th Circuit) is the one you’re going to write a comment on. For your 10-page comment with footnotes, you can only use the cases we’ve given you in this packet. You may not do ANY outside research. None at all. In fact, we’ll be monitoring your Westlaw and Lexis Nexis accounts to see if you’re logging on during the two weeks you’ll have to prepare your comment. You may not need to use all of the cases we’ve provided you, and that’s okay, too. You just can’t use any others. The comment is worth 60%-70% of your score, depending on each journal’s standards.

For the remaining 30%-40%, you have to complete an editing exercise. We’ve provided you with a pretty darn crappy writing sample that’s chock-a-block full of errors of all sorts: spelling errors, citation errors, grammar errors, word choice errors, etc. You must go through this sample and correctly mark each and every error you find and provide a notation citing which rule in which book is being violated. So, for example, if you come across a citation error, you’ll mark it appropriately and note that it violates rule 10.2 of the Bluebook or whatever. All this editing business must be done in red pen. No exceptions.

Both parts of the packet are due two weeks from today. You just thought you were done with school for a little while.

So! I took my packet of cases in the car and I read Snyder v. Phelps (which is really a very interesting case, by the way) and some of the other cases, and then I fell asleep in the car and didn’t wake up until we’d reached our destination. And I don’t know, y’all, but something weird happened to me while I was asleep in the car. When I woke up, I was all of a sudden around 97% sure I did NOT want to do the write-on competition. No particular reason. I just knew I wasn’t going to do it.

Does this happen to any of you? Your brain makes a decision for you and you didn’t even ask it to, and you don’t know why it did? . . . No? Just me? Hm.

Well, naturally I set out to try to figure out exactly why I wouldn’t be participating in the write-on competition, since my brain had apparently come to this conclusion completely on its own initiative–sua sponte, if you will. Bwahaha. Look at me, so fancy.

I called my brother and asked him to rate his level of regret for not being on a journal, with 1 being the least amount of regret possible and 10 being maximum regret. He rated it a 2. Then he asked his wife, my most fabulous sister-in-law, and she gave it a 2. My brother is doing exactly what (I think) I want to do when I get out of law school: solo criminal defense. My sister-in-law is doing what I hope to be doing if I change my mind or the solo thing doesn’t work out: working at a firm. Neither of them was on a journal, and neither of them regrets it. Hm.

I did an informal Twitter survey and asked what people thought about the importance of law review. The replies I got were overwhelmingly in favor of not submitting a packet. Hm. A few did encourage me to finish it, though, and they made a good point: why not? Law review looks great on your resume, and you get good writing and editing experience. In some schools (including mine), you can get an hour or two of credit for being on a journal. And anyway, it probably opens some doors that might be closed to people who weren’t on law review or another journal. These are all really good points.

However, I had already succumbed to The Meh, so these good arguments in favor of law review fell upon deaf ears and a heart of stone. The Meh is an insidious entity that creeps in, rather ninja-like, actually, and takes over your soul and makes you feel pretty much just like this:

In short, The Meh is 100% incompatible with law review. They’re diametrically opposed. Polar opposites. Night and day. Chocolate and broccoli. Choccoli? Gross.

I mean, I don’t aspire to work at a big firm. It just doesn’t even appeal to me, really. I’ve been my own boss, more or less, for the past 12 years. I like being my own boss. I like it a lot. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine myself not bossing myself around. So, my bossy self told my angsty self to throw away the write-on packet and fuhgedduhboutit. For me, the potential payoff was not proportional to the amount of work that would go into it, and I don’t mean only the write-on competition. That’s just two weeks. I also mean the shit work that the 2Ls on journals do, cite checking and the like, plus you have to write a comment for potential publication, etc.

Plus, at the time I had to make this decision, I still didn’t know whether I’d been selected as a brief writer for one of the national moot court teams, and I was completely and totally sure I didn’t want to do both a journal and a moot court brief. I like legal writing a whole lot, like probably more than most normal people, who probably actually hate it. But even I have my limits, people. So I hedged my bets, dropped out of the write-on competition, and waited to hear back from the professor who selects people for the moot court teams. As you know, because you read the post, I did get selected, so in the end it worked out just peachy.

Congratulations to all my friends who made journals. You are teh awesum. And, don’t tell anybody, but I may have possibly experienced a wee bit of dropper-outer’s remorse when the announcements were made. Just a little. But I’m over it now, and I’m sure whatever residual remorse remains will be obliterated by the process of writing my moot court brief in the fall. Thanks, brain, for your sua sponte-ness.

Before I started law school, I got a lot of advice. I’m sure you have, too, by this stage, if you’re starting law school in the fall. Of all the advice I received, two things still stick out in my mind as being particularly useful.

1. Your classmates today will be your colleagues in three years.

It’s said so frequently in law school orientation that it becomes a cliché: “Your reputation as a lawyer begins today.” I suppose the reason it’s emphasized over and over is because it’s true. When the hellacious ride known as law school is over, you will be an attorney. And so will the out-of-control guy who showed up to class hung over more often than not, and so will the out-of-control girl who slept with 20 different guys (that you know of). You get the picture. Later, when a client brings you a problem that you can’t handle for him because he’s in a different city or the problem is beyond your realm of expertise, you’re going to want to make a referral. If you know two attorneys in Pleasanton that you went to school with, and one of them threw up on your shoes at a party every semester and regularly turned assignments in late and demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to follow simple rules, you’re probably going to refer your client to the other person, all else being equal. Just keep this little piece of advice tucked away in the recesses of your brain somewhere and it’ll serve you well.

2. Don’t take it too seriously.

At first, you might think this contradicts our first little nugget of wisdom, but in fact it’s a nice complement. You want to strike a balance between being sociable and serious, and it’s not always easy. If it’s possible to develop a negative reputation by being too sociable, so to speak, it’s also possible to develop a negative reputation by not being social enough. This is particularly true if you’re a nontraditional student (married, parent, older/career change, etc.). Don’t look down your bifocals at the “kids” and decide that you’re too mature to go out to the bar and knock back a few. If alcohol is just not your thing, what the hell are you doing in law school you can still be sociable without having to drink. Just get out of the house/library/carrel once in a while with some fellow law students and laugh and have a good time. Referring back to our hypothetical situation above, if you need to make a referral and you know two attorneys in Pleasanton who were your classmates, and one of them camped out in the library every day until 9:00 at night and never attended any social functions and was your sectionmate for your entire 1L year although you didn’t know it until the 12th week of your second-semester classes, you’re probably going to refer your client to the other person, all else being equal. Just as you wouldn’t refer someone to an attorney who was completely out of control in law school, you probably wouldn’t refer someone to an attorney with whom you had absolutely no social relationship with at all. If you discover at some point that your conversations at school are largely dominated by school-related topics, I’m talking to you. Get. A. Life.

Plus, law school sucks. Not so much because it’s hard, although that’s part of it. The main thing is that it’s just so different from undergraduate work, and the only people who can really relate to you are people who’ve either already been through it or who are going through it with you. You’re going to want to have friends in law school who will understand your silly adverse possession jokes and who will commiserate with you about your constitutional law class. When you develop ASS Syndrome, you’re going to want friends who sympathize and probably suffer from it, too, so you can sit around and collectively wonder how you’re going to get motivated to study for exams. Beyond that, though, some of the friends you make in law school can be lifelong friends, and everybody needs more of those.

So take the time to build and cultivate friendships with some of your classmates. Go out, have some drinks, socialize. Have a lot of laughs. Our section had a little dinner party rotation on Thursday nights and people would take turns hosting throughout both semesters. Form study groups. Join some law school organizations that you find interesting. Get on an intramural softball team if that’s an option. Just don’t be a study hermit.

**********

I may have one more of these free advice posts in me, but I’m not sure. Are there any topics you’d like to see covered or questions that remain unanswered for you? If so, leave me a comment on this post and I’ll do my best to address it.

So the other day I started writing this post, the third in my series, and then this thing happened, and then I had to rename part 3 into part 4 because now part 3 has to be about this thing that happened.

Here’s what happened. I was doing a whole bunch of things at once, a practice we innovators call multitasking, and one of those tasks I was multi-ing was watching my Twitter stream. I follow between 450-500 people on Twitter at any given time. I follow all sorts of people: reporters, people who blog about politics from the left and the right, people whom I just find to be entertaining for some reason, and even a few celebrities. But mostly I follow law students and lawyers. I mean, it’s what I am and what I aim to be. This isn’t rocket science. If it was, I’d follow rocket scientists.

Anyway, there I was, multitasking like a champ, and this comes across my Twitter stream:

Anyone who tells you to take the summer off before law school instead of preparing, either made “B”s or has a very short memory.

Now y’all. There is so much wrong with this statement I hardly know where to begin.

For starters, since when is a B such a bad thing? You’ll recall (because I know you read part 2 of this series, in which I explained in so many words that B is the first letter in BFF) that the orientation gurus will tell you over and over that a C is a good grade in law school. To hear this guy talk, though, a B is the Mark of the Law School Flunkie. Wrong. There is nothing in the world wrong with a B, especially if you go to a school that curves to a C+ or even lower. And considering how many law schools are starting to either inflate their students’ grades or drop the grading system altogether in favor of a modified pass/fail system, grades are becoming more and more meaningless anyway.

Also, WTF Captain Generalization? This guy makes all kinds of assumptions about people’s grades and their memories based on the advice they give regarding what to do the summer before you start law school. Does that make any sense? Does that seem responsible? Of course it doesn’t. I mean, this guy wasn’t directing his comment at me specifically, but as someone who has most certainly advised you to take the summer off before law school, it ruffled my feathers a bit.

But really, the thing that just made my outrage-ometer soar off the charts is this: the guy who tweeted the above statement? He’s an author. Oh hey and guess what kind of book he’s selling? Oh wow, that’s weird. This guy sells a book that’s all about how to spend the summer before you start law school PREPARING FOR LAW SCHOOL.

Huh.

So wait. You’re saying there’s this guy who sells a book (and presumably makes a profit of some sort) that professes to tell you how to prepare for law school, and that same guy also says that anyone who disagrees with him either must have gotten B’s or has a short memory?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

So, being the snarky bitch that I am, I tweeted this in response:

Anyone who sells books about preparing for law school either couldn’t hack it as a lawyer or has a very short memory.

I mean, two can play at this game.

But really, this whole episode got me to thinking. Who are the people who advise you to do all this preparatory work the summer before you start law school?

Almost invariably, they are people selling you the (best) means by which you are to prepare.  (I say “almost invariably” because I do know anecdotally of one current law student who recommended a specific pre-law-school prep program to an incoming 1L.) If you search for “law school” on amazon.com, you get 28,972 results (at the time of this writing). The book written by Captain Generalization above is somewhere on the first page of the search results, along with however many other bazillion books that claim to have the secret to law school success. But did you ever wonder whether all those books have the same secret? I mean, there can’t be that many different secrets to law school success, right? Weird.

No matter how you slice it, there are a bunch of people out there making a shit-ton of money preying upon the insecurities of future 1Ls. An entire industry has grown up around the concept that law school is this dark, scary, mysterious place where gunners stealthily deploy biological weapons against unsuspecting classmates and professors randomly behead students who can’t withstand the Socratic scrutiny. Now, all I can speak about with any authority is my own law school experience. And in my experience, this is simply not the case.

Now I know you guys already know this because you read part 2 of my series, in which I told you in so many words the dirty little secret: law school just isn’t as hard as some would have you believe. I’m not being glib here. It’s new, and different, and challenging for sure. And it definitely is difficult. It may even be the most difficult challenge you’ve encountered to this point in your life. But y’all. It’s not like climbing Mount Everest. You don’t have to train for months and months just to make your first attempt at it, only to reach the third base camp and get frostbite and get sent back down the mountain to try again in another year or two. Thousands of people graduate from law school every year. Most of those people do so without having spent a fortune preparing for law school before they started. Some of the people who graduate from law school will do so still not knowing that it’s “would have been” and not “would of been.” This makes my toenails curl up, but it’s the truth.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less whether you take my advice or leave it. That’s why it’s free. I have no personal stake in your success or lack thereof in law school. Odds are, you don’t go to my school, you don’t live in my city or even my state, and we’ll never even meet, so whether you do well or not has no effect on me personally. Unlike Captain Generalization, I do not profit based on whether I can scare you into taking my advice.

But for god’s sake, you’re going to law school. Use your brain. It’s time to employ your critical thinking skills. Think about what motivates people, especially people who are trying to convince you that you can’t fully succeed without buying their snake oil. If you really and truly believe in your heart of hearts that you need to spend over a thousand dollars on a law prep class and/or hundreds of dollars on law prep books, do that. But if it gives you pause to think of spending a thousand dollars preparing for the education that’s going to cost you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, don’t worry that you’ll be behind in some way or at a disadvantage. You won’t.

Now what?

First of all, don’t panic. You have about nine days to write this brief. Nine days is plenty of time.

The first three days are generally spent just getting used to the idea that you’re going to be writing a brief. It’s possible that you won’t even fully realize you’re writing the brief until the first three days are almost over. You may experience some nausea and fatigue during this time. If you feel like sleeping, go ahead and take a nap! Your brain will thank you later. You may also have some strong cravings for things like peanut butter cookies, pickles and ice cream, and beer. You are likely to find yourself doing some window shopping in the office supply store, gazing longingly at the different colors of cardstock from which to choose the cover of your brief. By the end of the first three days, your brief will be about the size of an index card.

The second three days are marked by rapid growth in the size of your brief to approximately 7-10 sheets of paper. Because of your food cravings, you may have some trouble getting your pre-brief pants buttoned. If that’s the case, rest assured that this is completely normal. You just have to change into the brief-writing pants with the elastic waist. By now, your nausea should be starting to get a little better, although your fatigue may be getting worse. Go ahead and continue to indulge when you feel like sleeping. At this point you’re going to need to start thinking about how to arrange your brief’s words so it will have a comfortable place to rest when it arrives. You’ll probably want to start shopping for and stocking up on supplies such as energy drinks, ink cartridges for your printer, and paper. Take advantage of your energy during this three-day period, because the next three days are going to be much less comfortable.

In the final three days of your brief-hatching, your brief will grow to its final size of about 15-20 sheets of paper. If you feel like your brief is extra large or extra small, don’t be concerned. Brief size is dependent on many variables, including your nutritional intake, genetics, and page limit restrictions. As long as your briefcare professional isn’t concerned, you’re probably fine. The last three days are increasingly less comfortable physically, as well. You may feel as though this brief growing inside your brain is completely taking over. You feel this way because that’s exactly what’s happening. Your brief is consuming a LOT of your time and energy at this point. You should also know that at this stage the other people in your life are going to want to be around you less and less. You’re going to be pretty miserable with this huge brief kicking you and moving around all the time and generally just BEING THERE, and the tendency will be for you to do some heavy-duty whining. It’s okay to whine. You’re writing a brief. Just don’t be surprised if others are less sympathetic. Especially those who’ve never written a brief before. They just don’t understand.

Finally, after nine long days of preparation, the big day has arrived. Today is your due date! You’re birthing a brief! Can you believe it’s finally come to this?!

Make sure you’ve packed your bag with all your supplies in it, and then head off to the brief-writing facility. Your briefcare professional will meet you there and get you settled in and comfortable. If you’re lucky, maybe some people will come see you in your room and bring you flowers and candy. And gifts! Soft blankies and cute clothes and sweet-smelling shampoo and bubble bath.

At some point your briefcare professional may ask you whether you’d like a sedative. Listen carefully here. THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS ALWAYS A RESOUNDING “YES.” Do not–I repeat, do not–attempt to write your brief au naturel. You will be SO sorry if you do, and by the time you realize that you actually do want the sedative it’ll be too late. There’s a narrow window of time during which you can safely receive the sedative without harming your brief. Take advantage of it, for god’s sake. This point simply cannot be overemphasized.

So you labor along in your little room with your soft blankie and your sedative and your papers and your laptop, and your briefcare professional comes into the room, takes a look at you, and says these words: “IT’S TIME.”

“But wait,”  you plead, “wait just a minute! I’m not ready! Can’t I just have one more day? I just need ONE MORE DAY PLEASE GIVE ME ONE MORE DAY I’M NOT READY!”

“Nope, this is it. There’s no turning back now. You’re writing a brief today. Right now, actually.”

And then the horror fun starts. You work and you labor and you toil and you push and you struggle and you gripe and you complain. At any point it is perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to look over at the person who assigned you the brief and scream, at the top of your lungs, in your most menacing screech:

“YOU!! YOU DID THIS TO ME!! I HATE YOU!! DON’T YOU EVER COME NEAR ME AGAIN, YOU BASTARD!!”

Finally, after hours and hours of hard labor (but aren’t you glad you got the sedative now? huh? can you imagine writing a brief without it??), you muster up all your strength one last time and push… PRINT.

The next thing you know, your briefcare professional is handing you a brand new brief (a brief!!), all wrapped up in a cardstock blankie, looking perfect in every way. And you unwrap the brief and you count all its pages to make sure they’re all present and numbered correctly. They say that briefs have horrible eyesight when they’re born, but at that moment your brief looks at you with those big eyes, and you know it recognizes you as its writer. There’s a connection. And then you reluctantly hand your brief over to be examined by other briefcare professionals, who all tell you that yours is the best looking brief they’ve ever seen.

And you think, I can’t possibly ever do this again. I can’t ever write another brief like I wrote this one. This is too much. I’m getting my fingers tied. But after a while, you start to forget the bad parts of writing a brief. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Next time I write a brief, though, I’m going to do things differently. Like ask for more sedatives. And before you know it, you’ll be back in your elastic-waist pants again, eating peanut butter cookies and staring at your rapidly growing brief.

Wait. What?

As everybody knows, I love to travel. These are facts. So I perked up and asked for clarification.

ME: “You mean you get to go out of town but once you’re there you don’t have to really DO anything??”
TUTOR: “Yep. It’s pretty nice.”

This set my brain into motion. My brain, by the way, is fuchsia. Albert Einstein also had a fuchsia brain. These are facts.

So then this professor sent around this email to everybody and he said, “Hey you losers, if you think you have the chops to audition as a brief writer for a national moot court competition, get me a persuasive writing sample by May 1st.” Actually that’s not exactly what he said. He didn’t use the word “chops.”

Anyhoo.

As it turns out, by some sort of freakish coincidence, our last major writing assignment in Legal Practice was an appellate brief. Guess what kind of writing you do on an appellate brief? Appealing. But also persuasive. Handy!

So I carried around an extra copy of my appellate brief with me for several days, trying to decide whether I wanted to submit it for consideration. It was grueling.

And then, one day, I was walking around the law school with my appellate brief in hand. I had almost succeeded in talking myself out of submitting a copy for the competition. I was SO CLOSE, you guys. Now comes Law School BFF, right toward me, and the following ensues:

LSBFF: What are you doing?
ME: [shuffling feet] Oh, ya know, just getting in a few laps around the school before class starts.
LSBFF: What’s that in your hand?
ME: My appellate brief.
LSBFF: Your appellate brief?!? That was due like four days ago!
ME: [searching frantically for an escape route] This isn’t the original. I turned that in on time.
LSBFF: Then why in the world are you carrying a copy of it around?
ME: blank stare
LSBFF: What the…
ME: Okay, okay! Fine. I’m thinking about submitting a copy for the national moot court team try-outs.
LSBFF: Really?
ME: Well, I mean, I probably won’t. I mean, I just…

And then, you guys, I’m totally not making this up either. Then, law school BFF grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the professor’s office and MADE ME slide a copy of my appellate brief under the door. Which was locked. So I couldn’t get it back in case I developed submitter’s remorse. And I’m pretty sure he left a bruise on my delicate arm. Rude.

But, you guys, guess what? This story has a happy ending. Yesterday I was notified that I had been selected as the brief writer for the moot court team participating in the Illinois Appellate Lawyers National Moot Court Competition in Chicago in November.

No, I’m not making that part up either, Doubty McDoubterson.

Chicago: gird your loins!

Welcome back, grasshoppers. Today I’m going to tell you about law school orientation. Specifically, I’m going to tell you some of the things we were told at orientation and whether or not we were given good advice. I’m assuming that our orientation wasn’t too terribly different from most orientations as far as the topics covered and the nuggets of wisdom shared. Of course, you know what happens when I assume: you make an ass of yourself.

So I’ve actually given this a fair amount of thought, and I simply cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation for what I’m about to say. When you read it, you’ll think oh please, why the hell would they do that? And I’m here to tell ya, dude, I just don’t know. The only reasons I can ever come up with are so cynical that I don’t even want to repeat them here for fear that you all will think I have a black heart and an empty place where my soul is supposed to go.

But enough about me and my disgusting lack of empathy. Here’s the deal. For whatever reason, not all of the advice you’ll be given at orientation is good advice.

:::collective gasp:::

Right?! I don’t understand why, either, but I’m here to tell you it’s the god’s honest truth. So here goes, tidbit by tidbit.

In law school, a C is a good grade. This is actually true. Well, sortof. At my school, the curve for 1Ls is a C+, which I understand is lower than the curve at a lot of other schools. I can’t get into a detailed discussion about how the curve works (mostly because I don’t have a super firm grip on it myself), but basically that means that a C+ is about average. The main thing to remember about the curve is that you are always graded relative to your section mates. For example, let’s say there’s a quiz in one of your classes. You get yours back, graded, and your numerical grade is a 92. You think, yay! I got an A! But if the range of grades in your section is 91 to 100, and you got a 92, I promise you don’t have an A. You have more like a D, at best. Anyway. All that is to say, a C is in most instances going to be below the curve. But hear this, and hear it loud and clear: after you get through your first set of exams, I can almost guarantee you that you’ll be praying on your knees for a C in at least one class in which the professor handed you questions written in Cyrillic with words you’ve never seen before in your life. It could happen, people. So, is a C a “good” grade? I mean, technically, I don’t think I could call a C a “good” grade. But have I promised the soul of my second-born child to the devil in exchange for a C in Property after taking that exam and wanting to vomit up all my guts? You betchya I did. And will a transcript full of C’s get you the exact same diploma as somebody with a transcript full of A’s? You betchya. So embrace the C. Cuddle with the C. Send the C some flowers and a box of chocolates. A C can be your friend.

Also related is the constant repetition of this message: You are used to being one of the smartest people in your undergrad classes. You may have never gotten anything below an A before in your whole entire life. You probably graduated in the top 10% of your class. Well, get ready, because 90% of you aren’t going to be in the top 10% of your class here. It’s not mathematically possible!

I’m not kidding, you guys. They said that over and over and over and over again. And guess what? That part’s true. I checked it on my calculator. Prepare yourself now to make grades that you would never in your life have accepted until now. And you’ll be so damn happy with those grades you’ll jump around your whole house for ten solid minutes screaming “I GOT A B!! I GOT A FREAKIN’ B!!! HEAR ME RAWR!!!”

Ahem. Or at least that’s what I’ve heard.

Briefing cases is essential to succeed in law school; nay, briefing cases is essential for life! Okay, again, this is only partially true. For the first few weeks or maybe months of law school, you definitely should brief your cases. This is something they’ll teach you how to do in orientation, most likely, or you can learn  how to do it in one of those 5648 law school prep books on your to-read list. There are a lot of different ways to do it, and ultimately you’ll come up with your own method that works best for you. At first, it will take you FOREVER to read and then brief one case. But the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, and then you’ll realize that you can spot the issue, the holding, and the reasoning in the case pretty easily without having to type up a formal brief. At that point, grasshopper, you will find that your schedule opens up quite a bit because you’re not spending so much time preparing for class. Now, the orientation people will tell you that it’s essential that you brief cases. You may leave orientation thinking that if you don’t fully brief every case in every class, you’ll never ever ever be able to get that coveted C on any of your exams. YOU’RE DOOOOOMED. I’m here to tell you, this is simply not the case.

You need to learn how to brief a case, that’s true. But the reason you need to learn how to brief a case is not so you can have this giant collection of case briefs at the end of the semester. Because guess what? In most classes, the cases you read will not be tested. Yes, you read that correctly. This is a subject I’m going to address further in another post, but for now it’s enough to say that in most classes (at least this was my experience, both 1L semesters) you could actually get a good grade (and by good I don’t mean a C) on an exam without having read one single case for the whole semester. (In fact, in a future post, I’m going to argue that this obsession with briefing cases is actually detrimental, come exam time.) (I’m also going to try to cut down on my use of parentheses.) (Okay not really.) This is because law school is not a memorization game, for the most part, or at least not like you might think. It’s all about the application. Each case is in your casebook to demonstrate a way in which the law was applied and/or developed. All you really need to know is what the legal concept is that you were supposed to have gleaned from each case. Then, on an exam, your professor will literally make up a long and detailed story (called a fact pattern) and your task is to figure out which legal issues are raised in the fact pattern and then apply the law to those facts.

Okay, so again: Yes, you need to learn how to brief a case. Once you figure out how to get the proper things out of a case, formal briefing simply is not necessary in order to get a good grade. Will it hurt you to brief every case? Of course not. I have several friends who still brief every case, and there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. If it works for you, by all means, do that shit and tell everybody else to go jump in the lake. But it’s simply not as important as they wanted us to think it would be in orientation.

Your allotted study time each week should equal three to four times the amount of time spent in class. Okay, you guys. I’m not even kidding. This is what they told us. So for a four-hour class, you should schedule an additional 12 to 16 hours a week of study time. Just for that one effing class. You’ll be taking around 15 hours a semester. By that logic, you’d spend 45 to 60 ADDITIONAL hours a WEEK studying.

I’ll let you have a moment for that to sink in.

Yes. That was my reaction, too. I mean, you guys. YOU GUYS. Gimme a fucking break here. In no universe, real or imagined, is this necessary or even recommended by anyone except those orientation people. That’s not to say that there’s not enough material to support that much studying; there might be. But my god. They can’t possibly test you over that much detail. They don’t want to grade that much material. They have deadlines for turning in grades. Use your brains, people! If you studied for that many hours per week, every week, I guess you’d end up… well, in the crazy house, I guess. This is just THE most outrageous thing we were told in all of orientation. The key to success in law school is doing well on exams. The way to do well on exams is to study smart. Again, this is material for a future post, but studying smart does NOT–not in any universe, real or imagined–entail any 60 hours a week, at least not on a regular basis. At exam time, you may put in that many hours. But you certainly don’t need to worry about doing that all through the semester. For the first 2 or 3 months of your first semester, you’re not going to know what the hell is going on enough to study any 60 hours a week. You’ll just confuse yourself, waste a ton of precious time, and burn out way too early. Trust me on this, grasshoppers. Just remember the dirty little secret.

Oh, didn’t I tell you the dirty little secret yet?

Okay, here it is, in all its glory: Law school just isn’t as hard as a lot of law students and books and orientation people make it sound. It’s different. It’s challenging. And it’s harder than undergrad, unless you had a really difficult major, unlike my political science/history vacation… I mean degree. But it’s not as hard as they say. Just remember this, and you’ll be okay.

You’re welcome.

But first things first. I’m gonna give you this free advice, and most likely you’re not going to follow it, at least not at first. It’s okay. This is pretty normal. What would be great, though, is if at the end of your 1L year, one year from now, you could come back to this blog and comment and tell me how you thought I was totally full of shit a year ago, but it turns out I was right after all. Now that would make me really happy. Or, if after a full year of law school you still think I’m full of shit, you can come back and post that, too. But if you do that, be sure to use that special white font that shows up really well against the background so evvvvverybody can read it.

Also, a disclaimer is probably in order here: I’m not like the best, most successful law student ever. Not even close. I’m not claiming that I made the best grades in my section or in my class. Again, not even close. I didn’t have some grand strategy going in that I’m going to impart here. I only read part of one preparatory book before school started. But somehow–mostly luck, I think–I did make decent grades in my first year, and I’ll tell you the things I think I did right and the things I would do differently if I could go back. Not that I would want to go back. Good lord, no.

I’m going to do a series of these posts because I have too much to say to fit into one. So today’s post, grasshoppers, is actually more of a confidence-building exercise than anything else. You’re feeling apprehensive and nervous about starting law school in the fall, and today I’m going to try to make you feel a little less antsy. Which is a weird role for me, now that I think about it. But anyway. Don’t expect this trend to continue for very long.

So. I know how it is. For the next couple of months, you really want to read all sorts of books to prepare for law school. You may have already started reading some of them. You may have filled up your to-read list with twenty different law school prep books. You need to know the answers to burning questions like these: how do you brief a case? should I type up the briefs or book brief? what the hell is book briefing, anyway? what is the Socratic method? how does the curve work? what should I expect to see on exams? why does everybody say that law school is just like high school???

Here’s the deal. You can read all the preparatory books and blog posts that are out there–and there are a ton of them–and you still won’t be prepared for law school. Law school is such a unique experience, and reading about it just won’t cut the mustard. You have to just get in there and figure out how it works as you go. Now, will it hurt you to read all 54,786 books on how to prepare for law school? Probably not. But will you still be just as lost as everybody else is for the first six or eight or ten weeks or even longer? You’d better believe it.

The thing is, it’s okay to be lost for a while. It’s normal. In fact, it’s unavoidable. Everybody is lost for a while. I don’t care who it is or how much they appear not to be lost–they are L-O-S-T LOST. Trust me when I say this, grasshopper. There will be people about whom you think oh my god, he knows all the answers when he gets called on in class; he’s probably going to be number 1 when rankings come out. Or, there will be some person who sits somewhere in front of you, and on his computer during class he has all these really neat-looking charts and tables and graphs and colorful study aids with stick figures and thought bubbles, along with a rainbow of highlighters out on the desk for every class (I’m not making this up, you guys) and you’ll think oh my god, this guy is gonna clean house on exams and ruin the curve for all the rest of us. Or, there will be some girl who ends up dating an upperclassman and who talks constantly about getting outlines and exam-taking tips from her beau and his friends, and you’ll think oh my god, this chick has hit the relationship lottery and I’m just out of luck. Or, there will be some girl who literally sits in the lawbrary with her books open for 15 hours a day, not counting class time, and you’ll think oh my god, this girl is so devoted to studying, she must have no social life, and she’s gonna kick ass on exams. And people will whisper about who’s really smart and who’s not, and people will assume that their study techniques and materials are so horribly inferior that they’re destined for failure.

And then you’ll take exams and grades will come out. And guess what? Not one of those people even lands in the top quarter of your class. Okay, maybe the chick who lived in the lawbrary does, but not one of the others does. You know why? Of course you don’t, grasshopper, but I’m going to tell you. It’s because on an exam, the following things don’t amount to a hill of beans: whether you were a Socratic method ace or you got humiliated by the professor in class; whether you had the most up-to-date technology for studying with flashy graphics or the best highlighters in all the universe; whether you had a boyfriend, girlfriend, or friend who had that particular professor before and gave you ten outlines for that class (although that can help, but that’s for another post); or whether you spent 15,647 hours in the lawbrary. The ONLY thing that matters at exam time is whether you can properly apply the law to the facts that your professor has plopped in front of you, and whether you can do so within time constraints and in a coherent, logical way that demonstrates your literacy mastery of the English language. That’s it. The rest is completely, totally, wholly irrelevant.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you can’t possibly adequately prepare for law school before law school starts. It’s just not possible. I don’t care what anybody says, or what any book claims–everybody goes in to law school confused as hell, and a lot of people stay that way for the better part of their first year. If you’re serious about doing well in law school, just accept the fact that you’re going to be lost and confused, and instead spend at least part of your summer honing your writing skills. If you had someone look over your personal statement and you got it back with more than two corrections, I’m talking to you. Learn how to use punctuation properly. Learn the difference between your and you’re; their, there, and they’re; it’s and its. Learn how to freaking SPELL, for god’s sake. If you find yourself using text language a lot (wat r u doing, ok cya l8ter, dont b a h8ter), break that habit NOW. When your professor is trying to decide who gets the A and who gets the B on exams that are equally well reasoned, the winner will always be the better writer.

Next time, I will shed some light on things you’ll be told at orientation, some of which is good advice, most of which is bogus crap. Stay tuned!

It’s like this. The 1L fall semester can be pretty terrifying and overwhelming and exciting and inspiring and lots of other things–did I mention overwhelming?–all at once. You don’t really know what to expect as far as how to study, what to study, when to study, what will be tested, and so forth. You may get involved in student organizations, you learn how to do legal research and writing, you have happy hours, and everything is just new and shiny. The whole semester kind of just whizzes by in a blur of panic and adrenaline. Then you have exams. After grades come out, you get to see whether your study techniques were on target or not. Then you open Christmas presents or celebrate the winter holiday however you do, and all is right with the world. Yay law school.

In contrast, at least for me, the spring semester was, well, just the opposite. With the spring semester came this weird sickness that will henceforth be named Apathy of Spring Semester (ASS). Whereas the fall semester was just 16 weeks long, the spring semester was more like 457 weeks long, give or take a couple. I started out enjoying my classes, and then I just lost interest somewhere around the 32nd week of the semester. For one thing, having an 8:00 class (Property) four days a week is just simply not conducive to learning. I felt like a zombie every single day in there. The professor was engaging and easy to listen to, so it wasn’t his fault at all. For me, it’s just physiologically impossible to drink enough coffee to be fully awake for Property at 8 a.m. Four. Days. A. Week. So there’s that.

But it wasn’t just me. Most of my classmates seemed to be having the same problem with ASS syndrome. In Legal Practice (the research and writing class), we had a pretrial brief as our first assignment, and I don’t think anybody even started working on the draft more than a couple of days before it was due. Definitely not my best effort. And then there was Moot Court. Lots of people participated and lots of them us didn’t prepare as well as they we could’ve because of this horrible affliction with ASS syndrome. We also had a Mock Trial competition but I didn’t even attempt to participate in it. The last major hurdle before exams was the appellate brief, but thankfully by that time I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and I did put a decent amount of effort into writing that.

As it turns out, the only known cure for ASS syndrome is removing the afflicted person from the source of the infection, which, of course, is law school itself. So a steady diet of sleeping late, watching TV (Netflix instant watch is my BFF for life), reading fiction, and eating ice cream is just what the doctor ordered, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I know, I know. It’s a hard life.

All of this is to say that really you should be glad I didn’t post at all during last semester because I have a feeling those posts would’ve all been whiny emo whiner posts and nobody wants to read that kind of crap all the time. So really I was doing you guys a favor. Yes, that’s it. You’re welcome.