Choosing the right law school can be compared to buying a new car. To be satisfied, there are certain features you need, some that you want and some that you don’t necessarily care for. It can be a long, grueling process at times, but that’s why we’re here to help! Here are a few factors aside from rank and reputation, which tend to be objective, you should consider when choosing a law school:

LOCATION

Though going to law school in the jurisdiction in which you want to practice is not a hard and fast rule, it is something important to consider. Before you go scrambling, I myself was unsure of what bar I wanted to take when applying to law school, but was still very sure that I wanted to attend school in Michigan for other reasons such as the ones below. If you can foresee where you want to live after graduation, then it is commonly suggested that you aim to attend a law school in that same geographic area. The reason this is suggested is that there are larger alumni networks, networking opportunities and job opportunities via Career Services.

SPECIALIZED CURRICULUMS

Many people start law school unsure of what type of law they want to practice, but some people already have an idea of what avenue they’d like to pursue. If you already have an idea of the area you’d like to practice, finding a school that specializes in that type of law is important because it will be a better fit for you. This will help you to focus more on your overall goal and may impress future employers by showing your commitment to that field early on. If you are unsure of what type of law you’d like to practice, check out the schools’ websites to learn more about the specialized curriculums they offer to see whether they align with your interests and goals. If the law school has a variety of courses, that will give you the opportunity to get your feet wet in a variety of areas. Also, not all schools offer a joint degree program, such as a JD-MBA, this would be something to inquire about before committing to a school.

SCHOLARSHIP & COST

Law school is not cheap. Tuition, fees, room, board, books and other expenses come at a price that tends to be higher than undergrad. When deciding between choosing a school that is higher ranked compared to one that offered a scholarship, it is important to consider the actual differences between the schools. If you are interested in both and they are similar in programming and rank, I would suggest taking advantage of the scholarship offered. Also, inquire with the Admission’s Office to see if the law school offers a scholarship based upon first-year academic performance (GPA), as this is becoming more common rather than offering scholarship up front. Without a scholarship, public, in-state law schools tend to be the least expensive, but this can vary.

CAMPUS

Are you interested in attending a law school that is located on a large college campus, or something smaller and more intimate? Are you looking for a more social or focused student environment? You can only learn so much from websites and word of mouth. If possible, visit the school before committing and take a tour of not only the law school but the whole campus. This will give you the opportunity to explore housing options and help you to decide whether you want to live on-campus or off-campus as well as check out the extracurricular activities that are available.

ALUMNI NETWORK

Law schools provide data about where their graduates work on their website. Connecting with recent alumni can give you insight into a program you may be interested in, tell you about the school’s culture from a more objective standpoint and you may even meet someone who could help you out in the future when looking for employment.

CAREER RESOURCES

Does the school have a Career Services Office? What is there placement rate and do they place students in the geographical location that you are interested in working in? Does the school have an online job posting board exclusive to the students at that school? Does the school offer on-campus interviewing where law firms and corporations send representatives to the school to interview their students exclusively? If you plan to work in the same region as your law school, does the school have a method for connecting students with alumni who are working nearby in your area of interest? Though full-time employment may seem far off, your ‘3L self’ will thank you if you ask these questions before you commit to a school your 1L year.

FACULTY

In law school, attending office hours and getting to know the faculty is something I strongly suggest as those connections will become very useful to you in the future when applying for jobs or the bar exam. A faculty with assorted backgrounds will have diverse points of view and experiences. Connecting with a faculty member who has a specialty that you’re interested in may lead to a career, you never know. School websites and the Association of American Law Schools’ Directory of Law Teachers are great resources to find information about faculty. Also, be sure to consider the student-faculty ratio. It is not favorable to have a full-time faculty to full-time student ratio of 1 to 30, or greater according to the ABA Standards: Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools.

FAMILY & FRIENDS

Don’t forget to consider the people who helped you to get where you are today. Some people are great at spreading their wings and traveling across the country for school and others prefer to stay close to those whom they’re comfortable with. You need to decide what is best for you!

Cross-posted from: https://lawpreview.barbri.com/how-to-choose-the-right-law-school/

Three pitches in one day! In what may be an unusual day at law school for most, I was challenged three times to construct a business pitch in under thirty minutes. Twice, myself and two other law students were tasked with coming up with a solution to a real problem, under time pressure, that we pitched to our class peers in sixty seconds.

First, in my professional responsibility course, Lawyer Ethics and Regulation in a Technology-Driven World, while discussing substance abuse in the legal profession, Professor Dan Linna challenged the class to create a solution to curb addition in the legal profession, starting in law school.

 

Starting with five minutes of silent brainstorming, followed by a discussion using the start-stop continuum method, my group crafted a pitch for how to demystify the stress of law school to applicants before they apply to law schools. Our solution centered around collecting data on students after their first semester experience to give incoming students a more realistic expectation about what it is like to be a law student. Other solutions included themes of independent counselor resources for law students and an emphasis on communal exercise.

 

Second, in a lunchtime event sponsored by LegalRnD, Jay Mandal, VP Product & Operations at SAP, Stanford CodeX Fellow, CEO & co-founder of Law Pivot and former lead M&A attorney for Apple lead a Startup & Entrepreneurship Workshop for Lawyers. “The number one thing to take away today is not to be afraid of failure.” Law school teaches law students to be risk adverse, but in business this won’t get us very far. After sharing his journey from a law firm, to Apple, to CEO of his own company, Jay challenged a room full of law students to prepare a business pitch for one of five prompts as if we were pitching to venture capitalists. “Be creative. Judge later.” An entrepreneurial mindset means embracing new ideas, rather than shooting them down at the outset by “restraints” we may be quick to point as lawyers.

This time my group was tasked with using technology to create a health/fitness solution for the adult population that creates more sustainable exercise and monitoring regimens. With a new team and a stack of sticky notes after thirty minutes we created Grandma Go!

@jmandal99

 

@Etferg @MarkJ_Babcock @HussBerri

#startups @DanLinna and the @LegalRnD program are teaching law students an entrepre-neurial mindset.

 

 

 

 

The workshop left the room full of energy, as students praised the opportunity to learn how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.

Third, Jay visited our Litigation, Data, Theory, and Practice course during which he challenged us to use Amazon’s approach to product development using press releases to pitch the projects we have been working on through-out the semester. Our class is creating innovation projects on Neota Logic and Think Smart platforms with our outside partners Perkins Coie, Davis Wright Tremaine, Akerman, and Michigan Legal Help.

Understanding a business’s perspective and being able to distill an idea down to one sentence, or a sixty second pitch, are not normal skills taught in law schools today, but they are critical to a student’s success as a lawyer.

As I prepare to pitch live for 2018 LWOWX (LawWithOutWalls) symposium next week, I will incorporate my experience from today!

Below is an abstract/summary of my paper with the Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship and the Law at Pepperdine Law School.

Motivated by the recent explosion of interest in artificial intelligence(AI), I examined whether it makes sense to implement AI in smart contracts, to make them more effective. The current state of smart contracts leaves one to wonder if these are true contracts themselves. Traditional contracts have an offer for acceptance, highlighting the fact that smart contracts are mere codes incapable of satisfying the required elements of a legal contract. Could smarter contracts, assisted by AI, satisfy the elements of a contract by offering a web-based platform that allows for parties to make offers and accept them, copying them into a smarter contract? Could the use of AI in contracting, reduce risk by comparing the current smarter contract with existing smarter contracts on the blockchain? Could AI help retain business relationships by allowing user inputs that track performance, fluctuations, and extending the time for performance?

These analyses will be the focus of this paper. Part I examines the issues with the current state of contracting and will elucidate potential sectors of the legal industry where the implementation of smart contracts would be of best use for attorneys and our clients. Part II examines the implementation of smart contracts, and how it would help attorneys add value to clients by making attorneys work more effectively and efficiently. Part III of this paper will also explain why the use of smart contracts should be augmented with artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with the validity of the contracts. Part IV of this paper will examine the creation of a new type of lawyer that technologists and corporate clients will need to assist with the understanding of the risk associated with the technology and the laws that govern them. Finally, in Part V this paper will examine potential client areas that could benefit from the use of smart contracts to save money and move more efficiently.

 

On March 30th, Houman B. Shadab, a founder of the Accord Project and professor of law at New York Law School, will lead a workshop at the University of Michigan Law School about blockchains, smart contracts, and the Accord Project. Professor Shadab is a prolific and influential expert at the intersection of law, business, and technology. His research focuses on financial technology, smart contracts, hedge funds, derivatives, commercial transactions, and blockchains. The workshop is a supplement to the “Legal Technology & Innovation” course taught at Michigan Law School by Professor Dan Linna. Students and members of the public may attend if they RSVP through the Detroit Legal Innovation Meetup.

Blockchain has recently emerged as a disruptive technology that may revolutionize the way that attorneys will advise their clients. Applications for blockchain are currently being developed for key industries including finance, insurance, energy, healthcare and legal. A blockchain is a decentralized, trustless and continuously growing ledger that records and keeps track of every transaction across a peer-to-peer network of participants.

Recently, PWC made the news not only for launching a law firm in Washington D.C., but also for the release of its blockchain platform. The platform will help with managing business disputes and auditing of current implementations of blockchain applications by various corporations like Walmart, which is introducing a blockchain

application for improving food tracking. Blockchain appeals to corporate clients because the technology promises to provide security by design. Blockchain security comes from leveraging cryptographic protocols and distributed consensus algorithms, which provide anonymity, auditability and transaction immutability.

These same characteristics have also made blockchain appealing to lawyers and corporate clients for its potential use in “smart contracts”. The term “smart contracts” was originally coined by Nick Szabo, a cryptographer, who first saw the potential of 

automating contracts on blockchains. Szabo described contracts as a set of promises agreed to by a meeting of the minds, precisely as taught in my first-year contracts class by Professor Barnhizer. Szabo envisioned an automated contract that could be triggered by performance of either party to the agreement. The parties are not required to have a prior business relationship, and this structure allows for automated remedies if either side does not perform according to the terms of the agreement.

The original contract would be translated into code by blockchain trained attorneys representing either side. The code would contain a series of if-then statements that would carry out the completion of the contract once a condition is met. In summary, the term “smart contracts” refers to computer transaction protocols that execute the terms of a contract automatically based on a set of conditions. The use of smart contracts by corporate clients raises a number legal issues that will require advising by future and current attorneys.

The Accord project is a working group, made up of lawyers and organizations, that is focused on developing best practices and legal standards for smart contracts. The Accord project is led by the internet of things-enabled contract startup Clause, which was co-founded by Mr. Shadab. Mr. Shadab believes that having the Accord Project set standards for smart contracts will increase the chances that smart contracts will be implemented properly.

 

Come learn about blockchain and smart contracts with us.

All Students and Practitioners are Welcome! Please RSVP via the Detroit Legal Innovation Meetup.

 

Location:
University of Michigan Law School
Hutchins Hall Room 116

March 30th’s Agenda:
9-9:05 – Introductions
9:05-9:15 – Introduction to Clause and the Accord Project
9:15-10:00 – Introduction to Blockchain & Bitcoin
10:00-10:30 – Interactive Exercise
10:30-11:00 – Introduction to Smart contracts
11:00-12:30 – Smart legal contracts workshop
12:30-1pm – Roundtable discussion and wrap up
1pm – Closing and Networking

 

Yesterday  I attended the joint Process Improvement workshop for Lean Lawyering, which was hosted by several Florida public-interest lawyers and LegalRnD at the State Bar of Michigan. Here’s a link to the workshop’s website:

There were about 40 participants at the meeting, and I had the opportunity to meet and share ideas with practicing practitioners from law firms, legal aid entities, courts, and corporations from around Michigan.

The conference was very thoughtfully organized and included experiences from the implementation 

of process improvement techniques by Amy Burns, Deputy Director of Florida Rural Legal Services; Ilenia Sanchez-Bryson, Chief Information Officer at Legal Services of Greater Miami; Kristen Lentz, Managing Attorney for Disability Rights Florida; and Melissa Moss, Principal/owner of CatalystZone, LLC. Though I’ve attended a number of lean thinking and process improvement conferences, this was the first time that I’ve heard from actual attorneys who’ve implemented the process.

 

Discussion topics at the conference all centered around implementation of lean thinking (Toyota Way) for Law to improve efficiency and quality of services rendered. After learning of the speakers’ experiences incorporating process improvement into differing aspects of their practice and operations, attendees were given the opportunity to learn by doing.

To teach process improvement through the use of a real-world example, attendees were

broken into small groups to help streamline a legal aid’s walk-in service. The current conditions, as pictured, of the legal aid’s walk-in service results in an average of 58.2 minutes for clients to be serviced. Groups were asked to map the process, pictured to the right. The groups were asked to implement process improvement techniques to decrease the average time of service to 30 minutes. My group started off by mapping the current process and identifying areas for potential improvement. We next asked ourselves why the system took 58.2 minutes for clients to be serviced. Once we determined that it was a result of the process, we next asked ourselves why again. Once we were five levels deep into the why process, we finally had our answer!

 

Did you see this study? If you follow #legaltech in any online sphere, it was ubiquitous.

AI vs. Lawyers

[pretty infographic here, 40-page PDF – you have to submit your name and email to download it directly from Lawgeex]

Which led to such headlines as:

Being an optimistic contrarian (no, it’s not a thing, I just made it up), I like reading and hearing reasonable, skeptical takes on new technology. Ken Adams, author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, has given some thought to the study and what it purportedly shows. Do note that he’s not against AI software for contract review or drafting.

And fifth, my biggest question about the new crop of “AI” technologies isn’t the technology per se, it’s the humanoid expertise it incorporates. That concern applies to all services that address contract content. I’m toying with the slogan “Editorial expertise is the new black box.” In the case of services that offer contract templates, if I don’t know who prepared a template, I’m not going to trust it. Even if I do know, I’ll be skeptical unless given good reason not to be. Relying on someone’s contract language requires a leap of faith, so I know that I have to not only be an expert but also appear to be an expert. The same goes for services that assist with review.

So, not to take away from LawGeex’s achievement, but thoughtful, non-reflexive discussion and expertise is valuable in discussions of innovation … right?

 

In July 2017, LegalRnD Director Dan Linna wrote a blog post detailing the various ways the LegalRnD program has furthered one of its core tenants: law schools serving as labs for legal-services delivery innovation. In that post, he promised that we would do even more in the 2017-2018 academic year to advance that goal. One of the really exciting ways in which we have delivered on this promise is through innovation projects we are conducting in the LegalRnD Capstone course, Litigation:{Data, Theory, Practice, and Process}.

Litigation:{Data, Theory, Practice, and Process}

To further the idea of law schools serving as labs for innovation, since LegalRnD’s launch we have paired student teams with outside partners on a wide variety of projects. This semester, we’ve assembled 23 students in the LegalRnD capstone course (Litigation:{Data, Theory, Practice, and Process}) into teams to work on innovation projects with Perkins Coie, Davis Wright Tremaine, Akerman, and Michigan Legal Help. Each student team is working closely with the project partners to better understand a specific problem and the current condition and build an expert system or automate a process to help improve the legal-services delivery related to

 the problem. Neota Logic and ThinkSmart have provided the technology for these projects as well as student training.

Each student team began by working closely with a project manager and subject matter expert at the project partner organization and undertaking a discovery process that would allow them to deeply understand the articulated challenge. We were careful to not solicit projects where the project partners already had a solution in mind and were simply looking for a student development team. Rather, we wanted the students to work with the partners on a problem where there was no clear “answer,” so they had the freedom to be creative with their possible improvements and innovations.

Submitted Projects

In addition to our desires for the class and the students, we also wanted to solicit projects that would create something of value for the project partners. To help us achieve these goals, Professor Linna and I conducted several meetings with the project partners and also created detailed guidelines in a project submission form. Our project partners went above and beyond to propose projects for our students that would meet our shared goals. Our students are working on a wide variety of highly relevant topics, as shown below:

  1. Automation of the process of reviewing and amending existing vendor contracts to conform to the requirements of Article 28 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
  2. Automation of data breach analysis and advice for financial institutions
  3. Development of a technology tool that assists couples in dividing their assets in divorce
  4. Centralization of resources and process automation to assist attorneys working on pro bono asylum applications
  5. Automation of legal research for state consumer protection laws that govern gift cards
  6. Improving the process of verifying compliance of SEC disclosure documents using checklists and automation where appropriate
  7. Automation of Intellectual Property cease-and-desist letter creation
  8. Automation of third party subpoena response workflow

Laying the Foundation for Innovation

Before training the students in any technology, we began the semester by introducing the students to non-technical foundational skills such as process improvement, project management, and leadership. The idea was to foster innovation through early exposure to methodologies that promote a deep understanding of the problem and current state, going to “gemba” where the work is done, suspension of jumping to conclusions and making assumptions, rapid prototyping to test ideas, interaction with stakeholders, and striving for continuous improvement and continuous learning.

The importance of focus on the customer and the people and processes that deliver products and services cannot be overstated. When properly leveraged with this understanding, technology is an incredibly useful thing, and we have seen it  do amazing things to improve the delivery of legal services. The students are building their innovation projects using either Neota Logic (a tool often used to build expert systems) or ThinkSmart (a workflow automation platform). Additionally, we have two teams supplementing their Neota Logic applications with documents instructing the project partners on how to train models using Kira (a supervised machine learning tool).

My Role: Technologist, Innovation Coach, and Relationship Manager

I am very fortunate that Professor Linna entrusted me with so much responsibility for his capstone course. At the outset of the course, we defined specific roles for me, as described below:

  • Chief Technologist—I am here for the students as they are working with Neota Logic, ThinkSmart, and Kira to answer questions, put together learning materials that I think would be most beneficial, help coordinate their training, and provide insight as they work through the development process.
  • Projects and Relationship Manager—The student teams are using Agile project management and the Improvement Kata to work towards meeting a specific challenge set by their project partners. I am there to communicate with the project partners, the student project teams, and to facilitate communication between the project partners and student teams. I ensure that the expectations of the project partners are being met, no issues go unchecked, and that the student teams have what they need to succeed.
  • Innovation Coach—As an innovation coach, I lead student teams using the Improvement Kata, which is based on the Toyota Way and lean thinking. My job is not to solve the student’s problems, but to coach them through a disciplined process of discovery and learning. My job is to empower the students so that they continue to develop and become as successful as they can be. First, within the Improvement Kata framework, I ensure that students follow project management and process improvement best practices. Second, I help them establish target conditions–intermediate steps on their way to meeting the challenge. To achieve each of these target conditions, students identify all obstacles and then work on one obstacle at a time to overcome it. Students generate ideas and then determine the most efficient way to test their ideas (for those familiar with lean thinking, this consists of Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles). Third, I help them identify root causes of obstacles they are facing, and help them see how they, themselves, can remove barriers to their success. Finally, I encourage them to take the overall challenge articulated by their project partners as a baseline, and look for ways to deliver greater value to project partners. Being client-centric is a key component of lean and design thinking. Listening closely to clients and employing empathy as practiced in lean and design thinking allows professionals to better understand their customers’ problems and innovate by finding new ways to deliver value.

This capstone course highlights the competencies we emphasize at LegalRnD, and has been a great opportunity to engage students and create value for outside clients at the same time. I am looking forward to seeing the students’ final products in a few weeks.

Think you can deliver legal services better? See a need in the legal industry you want to meet? Have the passion for innovation? Starting a company or firm will require support and “find[ing] [the] village that it will take for your start-up to grow.” You may find your village at the Legal Tech Show. Legal tech start-ups brought their A-game to the ABA Legal Tech Show 2018 in Chicago, kicking off the event with a start-up pitch competition sponsored by Clio. Many pitches clearly defined a specific problem in the legal industry, who the stakeholders were, and how each solution would solve the problem.

The next morning, I continued the theme of start-ups, attending the session Creating Your Own Legal Tech Start-up with hosts Robert Ambrogi, Law Office of Robert J. Ambrogi, and Andrew Arruda, CEO of Ross Intelligence. The attendance at the session was a testament to many in the legal industry embracing innovation and technology. The presentation centered around ten tips on starting your own company, which can also be applied to existing legal entities looking to deliver legal services differently.

Tip #1, “scratch your own itch.” “Find one problem and solve it more thoroughly than anyone else.” Become obsessed with your problem. “Fall in love with your problem”, as Erika Pagano would say. Not everyone will think your idea is good, but by knowing everything you can about your problem, and listening to your customers, you can push past traditional boundaries.

“Sell something. Anything. But do it better.” You don’t have to change the problem, but you do need to solve it a different better way on creating your own legal

 In order to push past boundaries, you will want to  #2 “find other crazy people like you.”

Who is your A Team? The ability of lawyers to collaborate with professionals of other disciplines was an additional take-away from from this tip. You want professionals with diverse thought and complimentary skills that you can see yourself working with in the future.

 

Once you create a company, you don’t want employees who come in and just take a paycheck. Culture is key. Passion is key. Set and define it within your organization. “Culture is the bedrock of how the company operates – it forms the environment in which a company’s strategy and brand either grows and blossoms or shrinks and dies.”

The culture of the ABA Legal Tech Show Chicago brought me back a second year. A culture of innovation and support for entrepreneurial aspirations. The Tech Show left me energized and empowered for the future of the practice of law.

For more on the 10 tips to a successful start-up see https://rossintelligence.com/10-tips-starting-company/

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help lead Computational Law workshops at the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law, working with Jeffrey Sharer, co-chair of Akerman’s Data Law Practice and Dan Linna, Director of LegalRnD and Professor of Law in Residence at Michigan State and Adjunct Professor of Law at Michigan. Professor Linna encourages students in his classes at Michigan and Michigan State working on innovation projects to tackle problems using a “people, process, data, and technology” approach. In our Michigan State capstone class, Professor Linna and I trained students in lean thinking, the Toyota Way, and the Improvement Kata during a workshop in early January. Students learned about design thinking during a February workshop with Margaret Hagan, the Michigan State version of which was attended by leading practitioners from around the country and Canada. The Computational Law workshop provided the opportunity to demonstrate how lawyers can innovate by breaking down legal tasks and reasoning into rules.

Rules- versus Data- Driven Artificial Intelligence

Professor Linna began the workshop with a discussion of rules- versus data-driven artificial intelligence. Rules-based artificial intelligence automates advice by applying a set of predefined rules or logic to user input. In a data-driven system, on the other hand, some subject matter expert (e.g., a lawyer) “trains” the system to recognize patterns by feeding it data with “labeled” outcomes. A rules-based artificial intelligence system, such as Neota Logic, works well to centralize knowledge and automate legal advice in an area that is heavily codified (e.g., bankruptcy or most other areas of civil law). Data-driven artificial intelligence systems, such as Kira, have the ability to automatically organize, flag, and prioritize certain document clauses, for example, greatly assisting in cumbersome tasks such as contract review and due diligence.

Akerman Data Law Center

Following Professor Linna’s discussion, Mr. Sharer introduced the students to the Akerman Data Law Center–an expert system he built using Neota Logic. The students in our LegalRnD capstone course at Michigan State are learning Neota Logic, and some teams are using it for their innovation projects with Akerman, Perkins Coie, Davis Wright Tremaine, and Michigan Legal Help. It was inspiring for them to see a finished product and how it is being used by one of the country’s most forward-thinking law firms. For me, the most important takeaway was Mr. Sharer’s point that it is easy to get swept up in the possibilities of legal technology; but for a product to truly improve the way legal services are delivered, its “legal inventory” must be “complete, current, actionable, and affordable.” To learn more about the Akerman Data Law Center, I encourage you to visit the Akerman Data Law Center website, and to read Professor Linna’s blog post detailing his interaction with the platform.

Comparing Legal Tech Use-Cases

As the final component to the lecture portion of the workshop, I discussed the differences between Neota Logic, ThinkSmart, and QnA Markup. Created by David Colarusso, Director of Suffolk LIT Lab, QnA Markup is an open-source platform that can be used for simple document construction and building rules-based question-and-answer systems. Mr. Sharer gave a great example of how Neota Logic can be used, so I focused most of my time on demonstrating use cases for QnA Markup and ThinkSmart, a workflow automation platform. To help prepare the students for the second half of the workshop, when they would build their own applications in QnA Markup, I demonstrated an application that I built that helps a user determine when a contract has been formed under UCC Article 2-206 or 2-207.

During my presentation, I emphasized how easy it had been to create this application because I first took the time to create a flowchart of the law. Once you map all of the possible outcomes and pathways a legal issue or process can take, building the expert system or automated workflow is relatively straightforward–even with sophisticated tools like Neota Logic and ThinkSmart.

I really enjoyed being a part of this Computational Law workshop. Many possibilities exists to better understanding legal processes, automate them, and improve legal-services delivery. I look forward to finding new ways to make legal advice more accurate, accessible, and actionable.

 

Law school success doesn’t come easy. It takes a great deal of hard work and determination. But when you land your dream job, you’ll realize how rewarding the experience truly was! Though I am a 3L, I still vividly remember my first year of law school. It was incredibly rigorous, but I made lifetime friends and professional relationships that I am forever thankful for. I also like to think that I gained a little bit of knowledge along the way as well, which is why I’m here writing for you. Back then, I didn’t understand how important the following five things are. I wish I had learned them earlier in my law school career, and my hope is that they are beneficial to you today.

YOUR 1L GRADES ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT

I know grades are never anyone’s topic of choice, but in law school they’re incredibly important. Unlike undergrad, law school has an independent “curve” for every class as well as a “class rank” where the students are ranked according to their GPAs each semester. The curve grading scale contributes to the infamously competitive atmosphere within law school. Professors will grade each exam and then rank the exams against one another, adding to and subtracting from the initial grades so that the overall grade distribution matches the school’s specified curve (usually a “bell curve” or “normal distribution”). This means the exact number of As, Bs, Cs, etc. is predetermined and students’ grades must be made to fit into those allotments. Students tend to loathe this grading scale because they can be pushed down a letter grade. For example, if only 10 Bs were allotted and the professor graded 12 exams as Bs, the lowest 2 Bs will become C+s and so on. This grading technique is tough, but most professors offer “participation points” that will be applied to your final grade, so participate early and often in class!

DEVELOP HEALTHY HABITS & FIND YOUR BALANCE

This is law school. It is an experience unto itself. In undergrad, free time seemed to be in abundant supply. In law school, there never truly seems to be free time. There are always more assignments to read and work to be done, not to mention social activities in which to participate. It’s easy to fall into the regimen of fueling yourself up with coffee and/or Red Bull to stay awake, ordering pizza because you don’t have time to cook and spending all-nighters because there aren’t 25 hours in a day (unfortunately). Of course, you will absolutely run into nights where all of the above are necessary, but you always have to think of how this will affect you. Mental health is just as important as physical. It’s crucial to set boundaries for how you will let law school control your life. Keep the cheat meals to a minimum, set study goals so you aren’t pulling an excessive number of all-nighters and commit to time dedicated for relaxing. Whether it’s Netflix, working out or simply hanging out with friends, make sure that you devote time to clearing your head of all stress.

PREPARATION IS EVERYTHING, READ FOR EVERY CLASS

I know this task may seem impossible at times, but it’s incredibly important. Even on the first day of class you will have readings, and professors will expect you to be prepared. Showing up to class and expecting to “wing-it,” or hoping to sneak by without being fully prepared would be a disservice to you, the professor and your classmates. Your job, right now, is to be a student of law (unless you’re a part time student, in which case you would have two jobs). You are here to be “zealous advocates” for all those whom you will represent in the future. The only profession in which it’s acceptable to perform 30% of the time is baseball. If you happen to be unprepared for a class, which happens to us all at some point, and get the double-whammy of being cold-called, then you should say, “I’m sorry Professor, but I’m unprepared today.” Professor Stromwell, who removed Elle Woods from her class for being unprepared in Legally Blonde is not someone you will come to face in law school. Your professor may berate you, but they’re human too. They will move on. Fair warning though, you may be on call for the entirety of the next class — depending on the professor. Classmates and professors alike appreciate your honesty and respect you for not wasting their time trying to power through something you are not prepared for. Be present. Be prepared.

UTILIZE YOUR RESOURCES TO BUILD A BRAND

The minute you step foot into law school, you are building yourself as a future lawyer. Your words, actions and attire speak to your character, whether an accurate representation or not. This goes for social media as well. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter provide you with an ability to build a virtual identity as well. Be sure to consider your postings on social media. The people you interact with daily are your potential opponents, co-council, judges or employers. Your brand is something that will follow you through law school, interviews and your future career. Also, don’t forget to take time to come out of your shell and introduce yourself to the people in your section (this will come in handy for final exam study groups) and attend law school sponsored events to meet new people.

GET TO KNOW YOUR CAMPUS AND SCHOOL BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS

Where is the law school located? Is there a bus that will take you to your building or do you need to drive or find alternative transportation? Do they have parking? Do you need to purchase a parking pass or pay by day? Find your classrooms and research the organizations you’d like to get involved in. Doing these things before classes start will remove a great deal of stress, as everything happens so fast in law school. If you’re unsure of what organizations would be a good fit, attend luncheons and events that different organizations host during your first month of school. There’s no shame in just testing the waters, and having a few free lunches while doing so. And, don’t hesitate to reach out to the e-board members of organizations that peak your interests. They’re there to help.

What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know: An Introduction to the Study of Law by Tracey E. George is a good read before you start school.

 

Cross-posted from: https://lawpreview.barbri.com/5-things-know-law-school/