Questions and Answers About Succeeding in Law School (follow up to 15 Tips for Success in Law School)

This document answers 7 specific questions I was asked about succeeding in law school.

1. What are some ways that students can succeed/stand out in law school?

In the first year, because students are not involved in major ways in extracurricular activities or curricular activities that don’t involve traditional classroom courses, the main way to stand out is based on performance in class. If a student answers questions in a way that seems to meet with the professor’s approval, everyone in their class is aware of that fact. On the other hand, students need to avoid always having their hand raised to answer questions because that may appear to be overdoing it. If you know, or think you know, the answers to many of the questions the professor asks when the professor is not cold calling on a specific student, try and save your hand raising for the harder questions where very few other hands are raised.

Beyond the first year there are many ways to stand out and/or succeed. Students can be invited to join the staff of one of the law journals. Students usually have to participate in a writing competition to be selected and your grades may also be taken into account. Another activity at law schools where you get to be a star if you do well is in one of the upper level moot court competitions. Most schools have some kind of mock oral argument students are required to do in their first year or first semester of the second year, but after that there are internal moot court competitions of various kinds. While the main intraschool competition is usually an appellate competition where you argue a legal issue before a judge, although not usually a real judge until later rounds of the competition, there are also trial competitions and even negotiation competitions where you negotiate against students representing the opposing party to reach a settlement of a legal dispute. Usually, second year intraschool moot court competitions are used to select students who will compete against teams from other schools in interschool competitions that are held the following semester or year. The interschool competitions can involve a specialized subject area or can be a general appellate or trial competition. If this seems like something that might interest you, there are opportunities to attend some of the moot court arguments taking place at your law school so you can decide if it’s an activity for you. Another path for students to follow is that some students enroll in clinics, in lieu of traditional classes, to the extent the school allows you to do so. Most schools have numbers of clinics that represent clients in different settings and in different fields of the law. This gives you experience with real world lawyering and may introduce you to people who work in a field that interests you and can even open up summer job opportunities. Finally, law schools have a range of extracurricular activities that students participate in such as student organizations with a particular focus, a student newspaper that covers events at the law school as well as developments in the law, a student government structure where students hold positions of leadership, and the opportunity to serve as a student representative on various faculty committees. No one can or should do all of these things because you still need to focus on your course work even though you have successfully survived the crucible of the first year. Therefore, you need to pick the opportunities that have the greatest appeal to you. That’s very much an individual decision.  
     
2. As a law professor, how do you feel about the overall usefulness of supplemental study aids? Or would you recommend that students stick to the materials that are required for a course?

My recommendation is that you try to learn what you need to from the assigned reading and discussions of that reading in class. This is partly because it is the best path to true understanding of the material and it is partly because to a great extent the goal of a legal education is to teach you to be a self-learner, something you will have to be throughout your career as a lawyer no matter what kind of job you have. The law changes all the time. You have to able to learn new things relevant to your field of law - a new statute, a new regulation, a new court decision, whatever it is that impacts the law in your area of practice. Because law changes and because you may wind up practicing in an area you never studied in law school, something that happens to many people, law school can’t just focus on imparting specific knowledge to you. It has to teach you how to read and understand legal material. Reading secondary sources, someone’s analysis of a court decision, for example, can’t provide you with the skill you need of being able to understand primary sources, the legal material itself.

However, there are situations when seeking outside assistance is necessary. When you are preparing an outline of the materials studied in a form that will be useful for studying for exams (organized by legal doctrine and not case by case), you may come across material you are uncertain about. At that point, I would recommend going to the law library and taking out a treatise or hornbook for the course you’re taking and read the section on the concept you are having trouble understanding. Treatises and hornbooks are written by academics who are experts in the field you are studying and are less likely to steer you in the wrong direction by oversimplifying or misstating what you have been studying in class than the typical study aid. However, some study aids are prepared by academics, often by a professor who wrote a casebook on the subject, and they are much more reliable. Nevertheless, since you will be tested based on what your professor taught you, you should never substitute a view of the law provided by someone other than your professor for what your professor taught. Professors grade exams based on what they taught and not based on someone else’s view of the law, even an expert in the field. Therefore, you have to be cautious in your use of material other than the material read for the course and the way that material was taught in class.
 
3. What are some of your pet peeves that your law student often triggers?

I think the only real peeve I have, and I’m sure it’s shared by many faculty, is when students aren’t prepared. That can be when they are called on in class or sometimes when students come to a faculty member’s office because they don’t understand something discussed in class. When students come to my office for that purpose, I want them to have specific questions about the assigned cases that demonstrate they have tried to understand the material on their own. I don’t want them to just ask me generally if I can explain all over again a legal concept we’ve spent several classes discussing.
 
4. In the classes you have taught, what are the gaps that students need to fill in between lectures and readings in order to do well on the final?

The biggest gap is in issue spotting. Classes are taught topic by topic and students always know what issue will be talked about during any given class. By contrast, exams will give you a set of facts that raise a number of different issues and you have to identify the issues, describe the applicable legal rules used to resolve those issues, and then apply the facts of the exam question to those legal rules. It’s the first of those three tasks that isn’t really taught in law school classes. Students must review old exam questions, hopefully with the members of your study group, and identify all the issues and then discuss how to analyze those issues. The second thing that is critical to doing well on an exam that is not taught in class is time management. Exams are usually very time pressured so you have a lot to write about in a limited amount of time. You have to use your time efficiently to do well on the exam.   

5. What role does a student’s cold-call performance play in their overall grade and your perspective of said student?

At my law school and probably most law schools, faculty are limited in the amount they can count class participation in a student’s grade. Moreover, faculty don’t have to count class participation at all, it’s only an available option. That limit on class participation is always true for first year classes and usually for all large enrollment classes. By contrast, it’s unlikely to be true for small seminar classes. When I say count participation, I mean increase a student’s grade based on participation. Poor class participation is not used to decrease a student’s grade. In addition, all law school exams are graded anonymously so faculty don’t know whose exam they are grading since the exam is only identified by an exam number and not a name. That means that any impression a teacher has of the student’s ability, positive or negative, can’t be a factor in exam grading. I’ve always thought anonymous exam grading was a great strength of the law school grading system and I’m surprised it isn’t a standard practice in undergraduate exam grading and in other graduate programs.

At the law school where I taught, I separately submitted a list of students who received class participation points and those were added to their exam grade by the registrar’s office. The current law school rule at my school is as follows: “An instructor may recognize superior classroom performance by individual students by adding a one-third (1/3) letter grade increase to the student’s course grade for grades other than A or F. To make an addition to the grades of individual students, the instructor shall submit a list of the names of those students whose course grades are to be benefited by the practice at the same time that the instructor submits the list of final examination grades by student examination number. The Registrar’s Office shall integrate the classroom participation letter grade increase with examination grades.”

Now that you have all that background information, my answer to your question is poor performance in answering questions in class doesn’t adversely impact a student’s grade except in a comparative sense. If some students get some minor credit for class participation and others don’t, the students who don’t could get a slightly lower grade, but how much it matters depends on how a student did on the exam. If a student did very well on the exam, participation would have a very minimal impact, if any. More importantly, poor cold-call performance could be a signal that the student is unlikely to do that well on the exam, but that isn’t always true.

It’s also true and probably unavoidable that I often formed a view of a student based on their performance and behavior in class. I formed a very positive view of the ability of some students based on excellent classroom performance, both cold calling and volunteering, a neutral view of students who participated only when required and whose answers were acceptable, but not superior, and a negative view of students who were unprepared or whose answers showed they did not even begin to understand the material under discussion. However, those were views I kept to myself and had little impact on a student’s grade for the reasons described above, except in a seminar class. Moreover, I could change my opinion if I had a subsequent opportunity to observe the student in another setting.

6. How has the pandemic changed the law school experience and is it likely to have long term consequences?

The pandemic has made profound changes in the law school experience and the longer it goes on the more extreme those consequences will be. Ask any law student who began law school school in Fall 2019 and then had to transition to completely online education sometime during March 2020. They will tell you that many things changed in their law school experience. The ways law students experienced the changes depended at least in part on the technology the school used for its online education. Did it use asynchronous learning so students and teachers were not simultaneously in a virtual classroom at the same time? By contrast, did it use synchronous learning so students met virtually at the same time with their teacher and classmates for each class? In this style of online learning, it is possible to get closer to the dialogue between teacher and student that takes place in a traditional class. That, of course, requires that students have the necessary equipment and a good enough internet connection. Some law schools did a better job than others of making sure that students got the technology they needed to participate in online classes. For example, using a cell phone to join a Zoom meeting or other online platform is not as satisfactory an experience as using a tablet or a laptop that is up to date enough so it has the necessary camera and microphone. Some law schools used a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online instruction. Whatever system the law school used, it was nowhere near the experience of being physically present in the law school building, able to study in the law library, have meetings with classmates of both a social and academic character, going to meetings of organizations, hearing an array of speakers accompanied by the ever present free food. One traditional aspect of the law school experience is bonding with classmates who are divided into sections where they take most of their classes with the same students. This intense bonding does not occur when classes are virtual and students don't get to know each other well. Some law professors make efforts for students to get to know each other by having students prepare "getting to know me" videos and other similar techniques. However, these techniques cannot make up for the constant interaction that occurs in the law school building. In addition, other aspects of student life have changed as well. Most students were required to move out of their dorms and often moved home to conditions that were frequently not as conducive to studying. This fall, law schools are either continuing online education or using a hybrid form of education with some small classes conducted in person, other larger classes held virtually, or some larger classes switching some students from one mode of instruction to the other depending on the day of the week. Moreover, even when some classes are live, other events at the law school only exist virtually. That is easier for some activities than others. The longer this continues, some of the virtual events may become a permanent part of the law school experience since they are cheaper to organize, particularly if they involve speakers who don't live in the area, and are likely to draw a larger audience since people who don't attend the law school are more likely to join events that are free and open to the public and don't involve the burden of traveling. Ideally these could be hybrid events with the law school community attending in person, but speakers and audience members from other locations attending virtually. Whether there will be other permanent changes, it's too soon to know.

7. Do you know of any programs (e.g. writing workshops, boot camps) or any books that are great resources to study over the summer before starting law school?

I’ll start with writing workshops and boot camps. Some law schools have summer early start programs they make available to some of their entering students. If one is offered to you by the law school you’ll be attending, you should enroll in it if you can. It will be helpful not just in getting a head start on your legal education, but getting comfortable with the school you’ll be attending and getting to know some of your classmates, faculty, and school administrators. Otherwise, I’d advise you to create your own program of preparation if you want to improve certain skills rather than enrolling in an existing program. My reason for preferring a self-directed program is that succeeding in law school requires a lot of self-discipline. You have to be able to create a study schedule and stick to it every day without anyone else providing a structure that forces you to keep to the schedule.

You could start preparing for the discipline needed to succeed in law school by designing and completing a summer preparation program for yourself. The good thing about that practice in scheduling work for you to do and keeping to the schedule is that not much turns on it. If you didn’t do anything to prepare for law school before you started, you wouldn’t be behind when you started. This is just about getting a head start. In fact, some people recommend you take time off the summer before law school and enjoy yourself. Here’s a link to a list of things to do during the summer before you start law school provided by the Law School Academic Support Blog called Ten Tips for Preparing for Your 1L Year: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/academic_support/2011/05/ten-tips-for-preparing-for-your-1l-year.html. It includes things like “Have fun with family and friends this summer.” Another kind of advice I’ve heard is to take care of personal things you won’t have time to do during your first year such as going to the doctor and dentist, buying presents you will need to give to friends or family during the year and may not have time to shop for while in school, and things of that nature.       

If you want to do some reading that will help to prepare you for law school, there are quite a few books that are recommended for that purpose, but I’ve never actually read any of them. It’s possible that the law school you’ll be attending will make such a list available. I found a list of 3 books on one website about law school preparation that show up on many lists of books to read before starting law school: The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law by Ward Farnsworth, Getting To Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams by Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul, and Getting To Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams by Robert H. Miller. The American Bar Association has a longer list on its website at https://abaforlawstudents.com/2019/06/12/books-to-read-before-starting-law-school/. I googled “beginning law student book recommendations” and got links to lots of lists and you can do the same thing.

As an alternative to reading several books, you could explore some of the content on the list of links to free online material that I maintain for beginning law students. Some of the material is an overview of the law school experience and other material is more specific. The list is divided by category. If you read a number of articles within one of the general categories, you’ll see some of the same points repeated. That tells you it is something that law school professors and others agree is important for succeeding in law school and you should place it on a “things to do to succeed” list you create for yourself. My list of online material is available at http://www.lharpaz.com/americanlegalsystem/firstyearresources.html. I update the list each year so the links should work.

If writing is the skill you want to work on, that requires a different kind of material. Once again, however, there are plenty of free resources online. One example is https://legalstudiesms.com/learning/free-legal-writing-resources/. It is a list of 30 free legal writing resources. There are other lists of resources as well as tips for improving your legal writing. I searched for “improving your legal writing skills” to find relevant material. If you want to improve your basic writing skills, such as following grammatical rules, there is also plenty of general material on improving your writing skills available online.

Legal writing and writing for other purposes have many things in common, but there are some special characteristics of legal writing. One characteristic of legal writing is that it is formal writing so you don’t use slang and often don’t even use contractions - although I used two in this sentence, but then this isn't legal writing. Another is that you don’t use inflammatory or exaggerated language to make a point. You let the legal analysis make the point and then you reach a conclusion, but in an understated way such as “Therefore, the plaintiff can prove that . . . .” You don’t add adverbs to say, “Therefore, the plaintiff can clearly prove . . . .” because the argument has to persuade the reader and not the way the writer summarizes the strength of the argument. A third aspect of legal writing is that organization is very important. Legal writing uses headings and subheadings dividing the presentation into sections which provide, in effect, an outline of the document you are writing whether it is a legal memorandum written to send to another lawyer, a brief presented to a court, or any other form of legal writing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the goal of legal writing is clarity so that the reader can easily understand the points the writer is making. There are often complicated concepts to describe in legal writing so communicating them clearly is the goal of the writer. That means accurate word choices are important and many times a simpler word is more appropriate than a sophisticated vocabulary word added to dress up your writing. Clarity is also achieved by avoided overcomplicated and overlong sentences. These can frequently be divided into several sentences to make it easier for the reader to understand what you have written. Any work you do during the summer before law school to improve your writing skills should work to achieve these attributes of good legal writing.