Law Schools

5 Essential Tips For 1Ls That No One Else Will Teach You

The essential guide to getting through 1L year and beyond.

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If you’re a 1L (or anyone who went to law school and wants to reminisce about what you did right and wrong), this is the most important article you’ll ever read. Maybe not. It’s at least pretty important though because as law school kicks off and students are shuffled between orientations, forced to read interminably boring cases from the 1800s, and left to wonder where Blackacre is and why everyone cares so damn much about who owns it, students are going to come to a lot of conclusions about how law school works.

Almost all of these will be wrong.

It’s not the 1L’s fault. Law professors feed them wisdom about law school viewed entirely from the clouded lenses of Ivory Tower telescopes peering into dorm windows. The older students willing to hand out unsolicited advice are assuredly just interested in telling you how smart they are. In any event, you’re hearing a heaping dose about the law school experience as they want it to be, not necessarily how it is.

1) “Look to your left, look to your right…” but not for the reason you’re told.

Law professors get all excited in their tingly parts when they repeat this gem. As the old adage goes, “Look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here next year.” It’s from The Paper Chase, the law school movie for people too old for Legally Blonde.

The maxim is supposed to frighten students into hunkering down and working hard because law school has an unforgiving attrition rate. It’s a good reminder, not for working hard (if anything’s going to drive a student from law school it will be debt or ennui, not arduous classwork) but for embracing genuine networking. Look at the apple-polishing super student gunners: at least one won’t pan out to be a famous lawyer. Look among the party squad barely paying attention in the back row: at least one of them will be the managing partner of a Biglaw firm. You can’t guess who’s going to be the most valuable business contact of your life from a law school lecture hall, so go out of your way to meet everyone.

Law school isn’t going to teach you this, but no matter where your career takes you — Biglaw, Public Interest, Academia, the Judiciary, Government, Small Firm/Solo Practice — it’s a business. You’re going to need friends in high places as you scramble marketing yourself as a professional. Don’t skimp on forming a good relationship with your classmates to get one notch higher in class rank. You probably just slighted the future partner who could send you a referral.

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2) Prepare for class backward.

Take everything you’re hearing about how to prepare for class and flip it backward. Instead of reading the cases and figuring out all the individual “facts” and “holdings,” survey the syllabus and figure out what you’re talking about in class that day. Ruminate on what the professor is going to ask. If the lesson plan is about proximate cause, figure out the philosophy behind the concept, figure out why that standard is superior to the alternatives, figure out why “foreseeability” might matter. This is where a commercial outline (more on that in a minute) can be very helpful.

This may sound like a lazy way to prepare, but it’s called “hedging your downside risk.” If you at least take these steps and nothing else, at worst you’ll flub facts on the case but not look like you don’t grasp the overall concept.

But more importantly, if you supplement this approach with diligent work you’ll be much better off. After you figure out the major themes of the day, read the cases to fill in those answers with specifics. You’ll find you won’t be wasting time on irrelevant facts when you have some clue what the professor is aiming at. If you’re covering the Rule Against Perpetuities, you’re going to care a lot less about that zoning ordinance the court blabs about for two extraneous paragraphs. The bottom line is you’ll be more organized if you know what questions you want to answer before you begin your research.

Bizarrely enough, this is how ACTUAL LEGAL WORK IS DONE, yet law school never seems to approach it this way.

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3) Commercial outlines are awesome.

Opinion varies, but I thought these things were fantastic. Our resident law professor here at Above the Law disagrees. Sure, commercial outlines might profile different cases than your casebook and that’s information you don’t need for your class. But you’ll learn soon that lawyers are, by design, risk averse and casebook selections gravitate toward the mean. Your Civil Procedure class is not going to skip International Shoe, people. And commercial outlines — if not used as a crutch — synthesize the key information from the cases.

When you’re buying one of these, check how closely it matches up with your casebook. The less daylight, the better. As a personal story, my Property casebook was written by the same professor who wrote the commercial outline. I skipped almost two weeks of class and rolled into the exam having only read the outline and obliterated the curve… not that I’m bragging. OK, I am bragging actually, but the point remains that a good outline, as narrowly tailored to the course material as possible, can be invaluable. Professors don’t like to say it, because they feel it demeans their contribution to the learning process (which it doesn’t), but it’s true.

Speaking of things professors refuse to admit…

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