7 Things No One Tells You About Going To Law School

***This is a co-authored piece by one of my classmates, Chad Boykin, and I. Read more about Chad here.  My writing will appear in plain text, and his writing will appear in bold. ***

As most of you know, in addition to my job as a paralegal, I am a full-time law student in the evening program at the North Carolina Central University School of Law. I haven't really talked about school much on the blog, since it doesn't have to do much with fashion, but since I am taking the blog in more of a "lifestyle" direction this year, it only seems natural that I would devote some of my writing to my experiences as a law student. My first law-school post is dedicated to things no one ever tells you about going to law school, but should:

In The Beginning: Pre-Law

1) Getting accepted is a long and arduous process that often takes more than a year.  Applying to law school is not like applying to undergrad or even grad school. It takes a lot longer. First and foremost, you must register for the LSAT, or "Law School Admission Test." This test is only given about three times per year. This means, that you can't just decide to take it and take it anytime. Furthermore, unless you are a genius, you are probably going to want to give yourself some time to prepare for the LSAT. It's not a common sense test. It consists of a bunch of diffiult and bizarre things you've never seen before,  and learning these things will never ever be useful to you. But apparently, the test is the best predictor of how you will do in law school. 

After spending months in grinding study with piles of study books and stacks of practice tests, taken in timed conditions you should be prepared for two things. First, friends and loved ones will resent you because you are ignoring them and spending all your time studying for the LSAT. Still others will be jealous and resentful that you want more out of life that the $10/hr receptionist job you landed with your $25,000 Bachelor's degree. As you move from LSAT to law school to law practice the animosity actually gets worse, not better. Second, once you realize the time, effort and sacrifice it takes to take the LSAT you will encounter another strange phenomenon:  an ever-growing number of people who claim to have taken the LSAT on a whim and excelled, savant-like, into the upper echelons of the LSAT hall of fame. Like a clown car with more and more buffoons emerging from the depths, they will tell you how they bounced from their couch, plopped themselves down in front of the LSAT on a moment’s notice and with barely any preparation whatsoever knocked out an incredibly high score. This, friends is bullsh*t. Bullsh*t, too, gets worse and not better as you go down the path of the legal profession.

Once you take the LSAT, you have to wait a month to get your scores back, (during which time you will feel like the biggest simpleton that ever walked the earth.) If you are happy with your score and don't need to wait another 3 months to take it again, you move into phase two of the application process, which involves writing lengthy "personal statements," where you engage in the difficult art of convincing people much smarter than you that you are a decent person and that your motivations for becoming a lawyer arise out of your sincere wish to help others. Then you have to get transcripts from every school you ever went to. Acquiring some of these transcripts will be similar to Indiana Jones' experience in obtaining the lost ark.  Finally, you will have to convince other people who aren't required to say good things about you due to blood relations or marriage to write letters of recommendation trying to convince the admissions office that you deserve to be in law school.  If you are able to acquire all of these things, you must then mail them to a special monopoly service that charges you more than $150 just for the favor of mailing these things to the actual law school. (which the law school also requires.) I registered for the LSAT in February of 2011, took it in June, submitted my application in November, and finally received my acceptance letter in March of 2012. When I hear people say, "I almost went to law school," my internal polygraph determines that that is a lie. Anyone who has ever done it understands how long and hard it is to get accepted to law school. The idea of going through all of that and then backing out is ridiculous. If you entertained the thought of attending law school, that is certainly believable, but in no way is it the same as "almost going."

Interlude: A note on “pre-law” as an actual thing

You may, from time to time hear undergraduate college students tell you that they are "pre-law". This sounds impressive, but all it means is that they want to go to law school. That’s it. There are no courses as an undergrad that you have to take to apply to law school. There is something called “pre-med” and this applies to doctors. They take specific courses of study to prepare for medical school. Which brings us to another dirty little secret about law, and that is this: You get a J.D. which is a Juris Doctorate but you DON’T get to be called doctor, even though you have a Doctorate. There are PhD’s in History who get to call themselves doctors, doctors can call themselves doctors, and there are Chiropractors practicing today who do not even have a Bachelor’s degree who get to be called doctors. But attorneys with a Doctorate don’t get to call themselves doctors because that would be confusing.  

Law School Proper

2) Reading the textbook and coming to class and studying is not enough.  You assume that if you read all the cases in the $300 book you are required to purchase that will not be worth the paper it's printed on next year, come to class, take notes, and study, you should make an A on the exam, no problem. Wrong. Sure, you will be prepared for class, and you will learn a lot, but you will almost certainly be missing crucial information. Cases are a good teaching tool. They make for great talking points and class discussions, where many people will voluntarily make fools of themselves, but in the long run, you can't rely 100% on a lot of them because:

1) They are no longer good law;

2) They are from another jurisdiction*; or

3) They involve bizarre facts that will rarely if ever repeat themselves and therefore don't represent the "general rule."

I have found that commercial study guides, such as Emmanuel's and Gilbert's outlines do a great job of encapsulating the whole class and presenting what is really important in a clear and concise way. However, you can't rely on them too much on them because they won't have "local law" that you may see on an exam.

* Another Jurisdiction means it’s a Court decision from another place where the law is different. I could have just said it that way but then you would not know how much I know and what was the point of that $100,000 student loan? Oh, oh, the things I know.

3) You don't always get a return on your time investment. Law school is one of the first scenarios I have come across where working hard does not equal a good grade. I know complete slackers who barely do any work and come to class drunk who are in the top 30% of the class, and I have also seen very intelligent successful people who spend hours and hours every week on law school work and struggle to maintain a 2.0 GPA. I don't know why this is. I think some people are inherently geared toward the type of testing that law school involves and others just aren't. Either way, it sucks to feel like you aren't seeing results from your hard work while other people aren't doing anything and are making better grades than you. At the end of the day all that really matters is passing the bar and even that is questionable since there are Internet millionaires now, inventing apps and things like iFart that 12-year-olds spend their parents' money on that I don’t even know about.  Seriously, Facebook is now anachronistic. You damn kids GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

4) Common sense does you no good in law school. When you take an exam, just pretend you are in make-believe fairy smurf land. Seriously. Using your real-world knowledge to make a determination about how a legal situation would play out is the kiss of death to your grade. As a paralegal, I have a lot of real life legal experience. I have had to learn to make a concerted effort to forget all of that for exams.

An example that really stands out in my mind is a torts exam where I was supposed to answer that a small, one-inch scratch on a person's leg was a compensable injury. In the real world, I know that a lawsuit like that wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on (in fairness some of the nice tan paper is kind of expensive). However, I learned my lesson with that one and from now on, I provide only make-believe smurf-world answers.

5) Your grades don't really matter (most of the time). As long as you make good enough grades to stay in the program and graduate, they only matter if you are planning to work for a big law firm in New York City, trying to get your LLM. (Masters of Law), or impress a girl. If, however, you are planning to work for yourself or a small to medium sized local firm, or the District Attorney's office, no one is going to care what grades you made in law school since you will basically be making no money anyway. The only thing anyone will care about is whether or not you passed the bar exam. Your clients definitely won't ask you what your grades were, because most of them could care less whether you are an attorney or a con-artist, as long as you can do whatever they want you to do.

HINT: If you don’t know what a prospective client wants you to do about a given situation that they are prattling on about, ask them directly.

6) Get ready to get fat. I recoiled in horror when I saw old photos of attorneys I knew when they were in law school. They looked horrible. They had baggy saggy eyes, haggard zombie faces, and their bodies were swollen, obtrusively bloated with hanging mounds of body fat. I hadn’t seen so much excess baggage since I worked at US Air. I decided that I would not let it happen to me, no way no how. Naturally, it happened anyway.  I am still adjusting to the surreal feeling I get when I walk down a flight of stairs and feel a little 2 foot man hanging off my stomach and then realize the little 2 foot man ACTUALLY IS my stomach. You will do a lot more sitting than the human body is supposed to do and it will take its toll on your physique. Unless you are Barbara Moore. If you are Barbara Moore, you will actually get in the best shape of your life in law school. She should write a book, actually because it’s one of the damndest things I have ever seen. 

7) Popularity does matter. People will forget many things that you say, they will forget many things that you do, but they will never forget the way that you made them feel.

The importance of law students to their community is enormous. If you want proof just spend a few minutes around them. They are smarmy, self-important, whiny brats that think they know everything and anything. And those are the ones I like. But you have to ignore that and develop good relationships with them. Why? First, because YOU ARE ONE OF THEM and all that selfish, jerky nastiosity besmirches you too. Second, and more importantly, because they will most likely be a good source of referrals when you graduate. And that means your best source of money. That’s what people are good for, folks, money. So, don't be a jerk. Be nice to people because it may mean money one day.

Seriously. Law school is the hardest thing most people do (that is until they do something harder like experience cancer, lose a child or parent, quit smoking, or perform open heart surgery on someone). Because of the impressionability of that chapter of your life, the experiences you have in law school tend to stick with you forever. You will share a bond with people you went to law school with that will often last throughout your entire career.

I started out law school as many others do, with a competitive attitude. I was one of "those people." My first semester grades really brought me back into the real world and I re-adjusted my goals. Alienating yourself from your classmates by trying to "beat them" on exams will not help you in the long run. Beating them with your fists, however, is great stress relief and frankly, many of them deserve it. Find a study group and study together for exams. Help out your classmates. Lift each other up. Literally, it’s great for building bone and muscle strength and can help stop the getting fat problem that happens from all the sitting on your keister.

I don't care how smart you are. One day you are going to find yourself in a situation where you have no idea what you are doing and you will need help. If you managed to make some friends instead of opponents in law school, you will most likely know someone who knows (or will pretend to know) what to do and will do you a solid.

But then again I know lots of selfish, obnoxious jerks who excelled and have great careers making tons of cash. On the other hand, I also know lots of hard working, respected, diligent, good-hearted people who are helping others every day. Many of those people are languishing in poverty and drowning in endless miserable debt. So what is the single take-away from life and law school?

It is this:

The wicked prosper and the righteous suffer.