Law School 101

My first semester of class is officially over and only the final exams stand between me and a couple weeks off. Hoo-fucking-ray!!

Anyway, I now feel qualified to make a couple of observations that will hopefully be of value to any blurking potential law students out there on what to prepare for as you enter law school.

1) Law professors are technology retards. Really, I swear most of these profs. wouldn’t know how to put together a power point presentation if their life depended upon it. One day, we had a guest speaker who was an innovative leader in the area of medical malpractice lawsuits. What was her brilliant innovation that was shocking the legal world? PowerPoint. Yes, I said it, PowerPoint, and yes it is the end of 2006. She figured that if you put images into a PowerPoint slide show and let a jury see that it would be much more effective than just bloviating to the jury all day. Brilliant. Too bad the business world figured stuff like this out 10 yrs ago.

If you came from an undergrad program like business where you were accustomed to seeing slideshows, graphs, diagrams, etc…get over it, there is nothing to see in law school except the back of your fellow student heads and your teacher pacing in front of the class room as they cast about questions hoping that some hapless student will furnish them the answer they are hoping for. Law school is merely reading, writing, speaking, and listening; if you are lucky your property book might have picture in it, but don’t get your hopes up.

2) Last summer, I ran into a 2L (second year law student) at SU and asked him how he liked law school. His response: “It great, the professors are good and the staff is really looking out for you. It would be fantastic if it weren’t for all the other students.” I looked at him with a puzzled expression, so he expounded, “The other students, they suck.” I asked him to explain, but he just shrugged and said, ‘You’ll see.”

Shortly before the fall term started, a friend came up to Seattle to visit. She had recently graduated from Pepperdine’s law school so I wanted her opinion of school as well. Her response, “It’s okay, except for the fact that it’s like reliving high school.”

Get the idea, if you liked high school you’ll probably like law school, if not, it might be a long three years. Unlike other graduate programs, law school classes are big. There might be 100-300 1Ls starting out each year. Compare that to a graduate program in engineering or biology where the first year class might be 25-50 students, maybe 75 if it’s a large program at a big school, but that’s a stretch. So, who do you think is a tighter group, the 20 people starting an advanced degree in Electrical Engineering or the 250 people fighting to be in the top 10% of their law class? Anyway, put that many people together and let them fight amongst themselves for supremacy and see what happens, it is the basic ingredients for high school redux.


There are probably more stuff that I could post here, but I need to get back to studying. As I said, I still have exams between me and a few weeks of freedom.