A long while back I was asked to give a few observations about law school. I will skip to the most important eight months of your young legal career: the first year. To put it simply, the first year of law school will determine what your next two years of school will be like, what your job search will be like and what your first few years out of school will be like.
Most 1Ls (first-year law students) think that in-class preparedness and participation will equate to positive scores. This is not the case. On the contrary, some of the poorest speakers in class turn out to have some of the best grades. That is common because the entire semester hinges on a final exam for which you have had no feedback whatsoever during the entire class.
During law school, save for perhaps a rare midterm, you will be writing for a professor who has never given you a thumbs up or down on anything. Classes in which you think you know everything might very well leave you with weak grades, while you’ll be baffled by how you got such a high score in the class you showed up hung over for. Likewise, skilled writers in undergrad will be shocked by how poorly their writing professors deem their writing. You might also marvel at how poorly the high-scoring papers are written.
This touches on the subjective nature of test taking, and how seemingly arbitrary the grades you get will be. For instance, everyone in our 90-person section knew what would be on our Constitutional Law I final: a commerce clause question, a dormant commerce clause question and one other small issue mixed in. Likewise, we knew what cases would be important to know because, besides how few were assigned during the semester, only a portion of those were relevant to the two types of commerce clause questions bound to be on the test.
So, you might ask yourself, how do you prepare to differentiate yourself from a huge class of smart people that all know exactly what’s coming on the final? You don’t. To be sure, the very top of the class will be better at issue spotting and reasoning than the bottom group. But in between those small groups is the other 80 percent of the class. Grades will be handed out only after they’re forced into a curve. This means that, although about 80 percent of the class wrote the same paper, one person will get an 89 and another will get an 85. What’s the big deal, you may ask? First off, 89 is now the top 25 percent of the class, and 85 might barely be in the 60th percentile, although you won’t know because they don’t break down the grades that low.
What is another problem with this system? Because law firms have nothing concrete to go on besides class ranking once they dip past the top 10 percent of the class, they simply look at the numbers and refuse to extend interviews with those near 85, instead opting to interview (then reject) those just inside or outside the top third, which, you might be surprised to learn, is the difference between an 88 and an 89.
One way students foolishly hope to supplement surprisingly low scores in order to attract job offers is by working at a journal. I say foolish because the top 10 percent have already “graded on” to the best journal. This means that a few meager slots are available to others based on sheer writing ability. Sure, the top 10 percent, by virtue of their first year scores in all important areas such as the archaic rule against perpetuities, felony murder and the dormant commerce clause might have “earned” the right to semi-plagiarize horrific writers talking about securities law, but that won’t console you when you are doing a shelf check at midnight the night before for a second rate journal. The fact that no interviewer has yet asked me about a journal, and probably will never ask either, is but the salt in the wound.
It would take volumes to explore all of the completely lame aspects of law school. Until I bother to write those out I have one piece of advice for you: don’t let that $60 application fee make you feel obligated to take out $100,000 in loans. It’s just not worth it.