For you 1Ls out there, networking is still something that is only a vague worry. But to the 2Ls and 3Ls it’s one of the last straws in our grasp as we seek to find someone willing to provide us with gainful employment as a lawyer. Unfortunately, the only guidance people have often comes from the school’s career services office, the same sort of people whose idea of good advice for students is telling them not to eat at cocktail receptions. When I was in consulting, a lot of my job was networking, and I’ve put together a few tips for those of us who are still working hard to land that first job in the legal field.
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It’s that time of year again. Spring is starting make the weather tolerable again for those of us in the more northern latitudes, and the student bar association is plastering the law building with fliers for this year’s gala, or, as many of us know it, Law Prom. So what’s to justify shelling out for overpriced tickets on a law student budget? Here are five reasons.
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With the law school year drawing to a close, my 3L friends are having to face their looming graduation. Ask them how they’re handling things and the standard answer is that they’re worried about the job market but optimistic. When you get past the “elevator speech” they give in job interviews though, there seem to be about 5 ways that people are actually handling the impending change.
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Even well into my second year of law school the most common question from relatives and non-law school friends is, “what’s it like?” I’ve always struggled with this answer, in large part because there’s no way to describe law school succinctly enough to fit into the flow of normal human conversation. Like any good “I swear that I’m really not a gunner, no, really guys, I’m not” law student, I just couldn’t seem to let the question go. The result is this, a point-by-point walk through of a randomly-chosen day in my life as a 2L.
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You can tell a lot about a law student by what he or she was doing before coming to law school. In fact, knowing how a person made it to law school can often tell you which type of student they will be. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.
The Straight-Through
The largest group. If not a majority, certainly a plurality. From the law school’s perspective, these students represent rising academic stars with fresh ideas, unencumbered by convention. From the perspective of the older students, the kids coming straight-through from undergraduate or graduate programs are a bit like puppies, “with a cold nose, bright eyes, glossy coat, and the brains of a stunned herring.”
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Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house —Robert A. Heinlein
If you ever want some entertainment, walk into a law school and ask a group of students what 17 times 50 is. Chances are you’ll get a bunch of blank stares. One or two might be attentive enough to pull out a smartphone and open up the calculator. What you probably won’t see are students trying to figure out the answer in their heads.
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One of the more popular notions around “modern” law schools today is that the traditional practice of teaching “Black Letter Law” (that is, teaching students what the law actually says) is, at best, only a tangential concern. What students really need, the modern theory goes, is “practical experience.”
Of course, we can’t simply throw students into an actual courtroom and have them “give it the ol’ college try” (well, technically we could, and it would likely be just fine, but the ABA gets all testy about that sort of thing and most schools like being accredited). So how do we get students something that looks superficially like the experience they will need? ”Skills” courses, of course.
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A couple nights ago as I was leaving the law school (around 10 pm; it was an early night) I ran into a friend who was cleaning up after the Moot Court Honor Board’s contract competition and we killed a few minutes catching up on each others’ lives current courses. She gushed about how great her courses were, and I followed suit. Around the point where I was raving about my Estate Tax class, I paused and asked if she was often still in the building this late. And then she said it. “Well, yes, but it could be much worse, so I’m happy.”
Now, I’ve thought the same thing to myself hundreds of times, but hearing it from someone else tripped a switch. I realised something. There’s a term for being happy on the basis that things could be worse: Stockholm Syndrome. But that’s what happens in law school. Maybe it’s a second-career thing. I mean, it could just be my own fault for having had such a stressful life before.
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Some of these guys need some kind of ethical philosophy to justify it. Some guys like “live free or die.” But that’s all bullshit. I know that now; that’s all bullshit. You do it because you were trained to do it, because you were encouraged to do it, and because, eventually, you, you know… get to like it…
- Martin Blank, Grosse Pointe Blank
With the holiday season now on the wane, I’ve once again started to become vaguely aware that I will soon be ending my annual visit to the family homestead on the banks of the Great Black Swamp (it’s a thing, look it up) and returning to the mistier, though blessedly less mucky, habitat of law school. Mixed in with the impending reality of the impermanence of the season (and its attendant free time) is a reminder of an uncomfortable reality that I first became aware of around this time last year. I can’t say for certain that this reality isn’t simply an oddity of my particular group of law school cohorts, but, on the basis that I’d prefer it to be so, I suspect that it’s rather pervasive amongst law students in general. Chances are that it’s going to catch at least a few members of this year’s 1L class by surprise as well.
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There’s an old saw about law school that goes like this: “as a 1L they’ll scare you to death, as a 2L they’ll work you to death, and as a 3L they’ll bore you to death.” While I can’t vouch for the veracity of 3L boredom, I can understand how the 2L “work you to death” claim got started. What the cliche doesn’t say, though, is that most of the “work you to death” schtick is self-inflicted. Some people get on a journal and quickly realize that copy editing isn’t as much fun as they thought it would be. Others become research assistants and end up spending most of their waking hours in the law library.
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