A Look Back. Part 1: Lets go to law school

It is hard to believe that more than four years have passed since I decided to go to law school. I do not feel that different on the inside, but I know I must have changed because I am still young enough that 4 years constitutes a significant segment of my life.

My decision to go to law school was not a deliberative one. In fact, I do not really remember thinking about whether I should or not. My girlfriend at the time was applying to law school, so I decided I would just see if I could get in somewhere. I would not have articulated it in this way at the time, but I was looking for some direction in my life. I was looking for a career after contentment, excitement, and happiness had eluded me on the other career avenues that I had tried. But really it was more of a gamble than it was a deliberation. I did not think about the hours I would have to work, or what a lawyer does, or the thousands of dollars in debt I would have to incur in order to finance this venture. I remember the exact moment at
a Mexican restaurant when I simply said: Maybe I should go to law school; it seems like it could be interesting. And since that moment, I never looked back.

Compared with everything else, applying to law school creates the most unrewarding stress. As pointless as the bar exam seems at some points, what you learn is a lot more relevant to the practice of law than what you have to learn for the LSAT. That exam really is worthless. I probably could have received a higher grade and into a better law school, but as with the bar exam, once you pass and get into law school or get your license, there is no reason to dwell on the exam any further.

After getting accepted into several schools and knowing I was going to actually be going to law school, I started to wonder exactly what I would be doing. I read A Civil Action and watched The Paper Chase and checked out from the library some guides to law school, the titles of which I have long forgotten. These guides provide no real help to someone curious about the law or law school. If fact, I would recommend to anyone considering going to law school to never read a single book with a title anything close to "Surviving your First Year" or "How to Succeed at Law School without Losing Yourself." They mostly provide advise that means nothing to you until you are actually sitting in a class room and will only cause you to worry unnecessarily about the Socratic method outlining a case. Probably the best thing you could do for yourself if you want to preparing for law school is start reading cases. They won't make sense to you. I really didn't know how to read a case until at least the first half of the first semester. Part of the difficulty of the first year is just learning how cases are structured and what you are supposed to be getting out of them, and learning that is mostly just reading enough cases that you become familiar. Now I am not saying that you should use your last summer before law school to read cases. In fact, the even better advice I could give someone is to spend the summer doing something that you love and enjoy. The most important lesson I learned in law school was that an attorney looks like me, thinks like me, writes like me, and works like me. It is true for everyone. When you are done, you are an attorney, so before you go filling your head with all sorts of ideas that other people have about what it means to go to law school and how one should do it, you should just do what it takes to be you.

Before I get too preachy and pretend I have any wisdom about how one should treat the time before law school, I should conclude, but first, one thing with which everyone who has gone to law school would agree: from the moment you send your acceptance in until you walk out of the bar exam, you will think about the world differently, and there is nothing you can do about this. Not that this would be any different if you spend 4 years intensely doing something else. By sending in the acceptance letter, a whole chain of events begins that led me to where I am now.