We Were Wrong: On Preparing for Law School

Of all the sections of the original book, the advice regarding preparation for law school stands out as in need of a rewrite. It is, in retrospect, completely wrong. While Later-in-Life Lawyers is a distillation of the advice of thousands of nontraditional law students, I feel that on this particular issue, those students got it wrong; a strange outcome, considering that they have got everything else pretty much right, although perhaps this is nothing but my personal opinion creeping in.

As LILL is essentially a student-driven publication, I am reluctant to address this issue by amending the body of the book—this book is not the opinion of an author, but a compilation of advice that seems to have worked well for thousands of students, and will likely work for the current reader. The advice given by the law students themselves is valid. But, with regard to preparation, it is wrong. Here’s why.

Having just written an entire supplement urging prospective law students to fully research the financial aspects of law school, to make sure it is the absolutely correct decision for their future, and to appreciate the gravity of their career choice, it seems somewhat odd, after one has spent months fretting over such matters, to simply turn around and say, “Oh, now that you’re going to law school, sit back and relax until school starts.”

The work doesn’t end after being accepted into a law school. This is where the work begins.

In fact, doesn’t it seem even more odd that a law school preparation guide contains information telling the reader that preparation is unnecessary? It’s akin to publishing a cookbook, and then telling the reader that recipes are a waste of time, and that the reader should simply wait until they get hungry and then order takeout food instead.

The general consensus in LILL, and many other pre-law guides, is that academic preparation for law school is unnecessary, and preparation efforts would be far better spent getting one’s life in order prior to law school. I agree with the latter, but not the former; being prepared for law school does require one’s personal and mental affairs to be in order. Absolutely, one should be preparing for law school in non-academic ways: reading newspapers on a daily basis, relaxing, cleaning the house, taking care of health care appointments, ensuring that the car has had its oil changed, pre-addressing Christmas card envelopes, etc. One should enter law school refreshed and without distractions to the fullest extent possible. But not at the extent of making sure you are prepared for what law school is in fact about—learning at least a little bit about the law.

Much of the advice about academic preparation is based upon proofs in the negative. For example, many say that reading about first year substantive law is impractical because you might learn the wrong things, might get hopelessly confused, might have a professor who teaches something completely different. Looking back on law school, I can conclusively state that such excuses are baseless.

(It should be noted that this advice/opinion is exclusively for first-year courses, which by definition are entry-level and require no prior knowledge. I am not for one moment suggesting that any pre-law try and prepare for a third-year trial practice course, or an advanced estate planning and tax law class, in advance. That would be silly. That written, the first-year courses are the course that count: civ pro, contracts, con law, criminal law, torts, property.)

Law school admits students from all types of undergraduate programs, many if not most of whom have absolutely no background in law whatsoever. It follows that the first year of law school, certainly the first semester of law school, requires no pre-existing knowledge of the law. This is another reason many suggest that no preparation is needed. In a sense, they are absolutely correct. No preparation is needed; 1L is a beginner’s guide to law. That is not to say, however, that preparing is futile or lacks any benefit whatsoever, and it certainly does not suggest that preparation is damaging. Further, many suggest—and I agree—that the first year of law school is not actually that difficult in terms of concepts and black letter law, and that it is fairly easy for a diligent student to understand. But again, this is not the same as saying that one cannot gain an advantage by hitting the ground running.

Particularly in light of this supplement, which cautions strongly that law is extremely competitive and only the best and luckiest succeed, far more so than in prior years, I cannot sit back and suggest that pre-laws ignore academic preparation for law school, missing out on a potential advantage, necessarily over their classmates. In this sense, first-year is regrettably a zero-sum game, and all law students should treat this as seriously as they treat the financial analysis above. Please remember that curved grades in law school mean that at the higher and lower ends of the scale—getting an A instead of an A-, or an A- instead of a B+—can be a matter of a few percentage points, or even fractions of a percentage point. These grades will be used by employers to judge your suitability to work for them. Small differences do matter.

It is true that a student of modest academic abilities will likely survive the first year of law school: they will follow the material, take most of it in, survive the stress, and be able to regurgitate the material during law school exams. But looking at it from a different angle, the basic nature of the material also means that a 0L (a pre-law student) can also follow the material, take most of it in, and start to gain an understanding of the material before setting foot in law school. In other words, there is no reason why a law student should be seeing the material for the first time in a law school classroom.

No one is suggesting that students hit the classroom prepared to take the final exam. That too is silly. But as with most things in life, a little preparation goes a long way. Stepping into situations cold, as it were, is foolish in nearly any circumstance. When there are simple ways to prepare, and when the stakes are so high, not preparing is worse than foolish.

Law school requires an inordinate amount of self-study. In fact, it’s fair to say that law school is self-study. The Socratic method is so inefficient at transmitting information from professor to student that self-study is the only means a law student actually learns the material; class time is taken up with fluff, showboating by professors and gunners, wrong turns, unprepared students and silly questions. There is precious little “here’s what you need to take away from this case.” Both before and after class, students will spend hours discussing the material, re-reading the cases, and reading outlines, casenotes, and hornbooks to understand and digest the material. One does not need to attend class to learn the material, or at the very least, to learn 95% of the material (the other 5% being the professor’s “…and remember this for the exam” nuggets given to encourage attendance).

There is no reason a diligent pre-law cannot cover an entire first-year course prior to getting to law school, and probably understand the majority of the material fairly well; after all, a few months following acceptance to law school, that same student will be expected to self-study the same material anyway, and not much changes in one’s academic abilities during those few months. Again, I’m not suggesting that anyone try to learn the material before attending law school to the point that they try to pass a first-year exam (although I am now convinced that most could). I am suggesting that pre-laws are intelligent, capable, and that the material is not of such a high level that they cannot digest it until they are actually law students.

But what to learn? How does a student obtain the material needed to read a first-year course, and know that he or she is not learning the “wrong” material? Easy. First year courses at almost every law school are virtually identical, regardless of jurisdiction. In fact, the 1L year is so universal that any good commercial outline or basic primer will cover the necessary material, and wondering if you will learn the “wrong” law is like wondering if you will learn the “wrong” way to add two numbers together, or the “wrong” chemical formula for ethanol—there isn’t a whole lot of leeway. Nor is there when it comes to basic U.S. law: i.e., the universal first-year law curriculum. Although law is not a science, and there is famously no single answer to any question of law, don’t let this mislead you to believe that there is no answer, or that only a law professor can guide you through the material. The first year of law school is about the basics. Your task is to learn well-settled law—universal concepts that apply as much in New York as they do in California, Illinois, or Texas. You simply cannot learn the wrong material, if you study from a 1L source.

Where does this material come from? Commercial outlines, student outlines, online sources, Nutshell guides, even casebooks and hornbooks (although the latter two are more than you need at this point of pre-law preparation). Even if you pick the “wrong” commercial outline for a pre-1L review of, say, Contracts (that is, one that is keyed to a casebook that your professor does not use), the material covered will still be nearly 100% identical to the material covered in your first-year contracts class, and it will cover the concepts of every contracts class more than adequately.

In all first-year classes, no matter what your professor’s teaching style, no matter what casebook you use in class, and no matter which law school you are planning to attend, the material covered and necessary to succeed in the class is available in advance, and available in easy-to-understand publications, cheaply (or even for free). You will not accidentally learn some strange and foreign body of law that is irrelevant to the respective class in the first-year curriculum, as that kind of law simply does not exist. You cannot go wrong, even if you are the unluckiest person in the world or deliberately try to learn the “wrong” kind of law, which is the point of this brief injection of my explicit opinion. There is literally no harm you can do to yourself by reading up on 1L courses beforehand. Absolutely none. In short, a 0L student is intellectually ready to learn the material, and by picking up a commercial outline or a more readable summary of a first-year law school subject, will be learning the correct material.

Working smart, not hard, is the key to law school success, as LILL points out on many occasions. Unless you are the President of the United States, you do have time—plenty of it—to take a few hours each week and start reading first-year materials. Start small, with perhaps a free downloaded outline for each course, just to get an overview. Then buy a handful of used Nutshells or commercial outlines on eBay. Or check them out in the library. Post an ad on C raigslist for materials. If you live in a town or city with a law school, there will be hundreds of ex-1Ls looking to make some money back from their materials, and they are likely happy to toss in their own outlines—an added bonus—as they will no longer be threatened by a competitor-colleague.

The point is: you do have the time to prepare, you have the materials to prepare, and it’s such a simple and beneficial task. The material is not difficult, especially when the pressure of being questioned in front of the entire class isn’t looming, and it’s foolish to miss this opportunity.

There’s yet one additional benefit deserving its own paragraph: you might just find that you find the material outrageously, inconceivably, unacceptably dull. If so, this will be the cheapest lesson you ever have. Decide then and there to forget law school. Save yourself a very costly mistake.

* * *

Yes, this does go against the grain of commonly-accepted wisdom, but I believe that many pre-laws draw the wrong conclusion when hearing other law students and lawyers say that no preparation is necessary. Do not “sit back and relax” before law school. There is a golden opportunity to get a head start on law school by going above and beyond what many other law students will do by way of preparation.

And after reading this, perhaps the general advice will change, and perhaps the next edition of LILL can contain a fully-revised section in which law students fully endorse pre-law preparation as the best practice.

Until then, please be careful.

This is from the Epilogue to the Second Edition on pages 317-23.