The more you sweat in peace time, the less you bleed in war.

Now, I've never served in the armed forces. Truthfully, for most of my life the closest I've come to battle experience is the psychological warfare that goes on between teenage girls. However, on some level law school is much like being at war.

My crim law professor this past semester was a former army JAG officer, who, every chance he got, liked to compare law school to going into battle. All semester long you train and prepare for the big fight (in case I've failed to mention this before, in the majority of law classes the final is worth 100% of your grade). Then when it comes time to study it's like loading your fighter plane with ammo. The plane should be well fueled and ready to go - eat and sleep properly. You have to maneuver the plane through the battle field (final) and hit only the assigned targets. As soon as you finish your first mission you must immediately move on to preparing for the next. Anyway, you get the picture...

For most of the semester I thought he was just using this tired metaphor as a way to reminisce about his army days. Though, now that I have gone through my first battle I fully understand what he meant. Since finals have ended I have absolutely had PTSD type flashbacks of things that I may or may not have missed or answered incorrectly on my exams. Additionally, a week ago I took some law school friends with me to a Christmas themed pub crawl that some non-law school acquaintances had put together. Even after we had each consumed enough alcohol to kill a small child, we could only stand in the back and watch the non-law school crowd dance and laugh the night away. It was like the world was a little darker for the four of us because we knew how bad things could be. We had been through the trenches and had seen things that could not be unseen.

High school called, it wants its drama back.

You would think that a group of 20-somethings and up who took the LSAT and impressed all the necessary people to get into a post-undergraduate program would be above the cattiness and gossiping of hormone fueled adolescents, but you'd be wrong. In fact the stress and pressure of school mixed with the ability to purchase and consume alcohol any time one wants only worsens the situation by five fold.

Most law schools break their incoming class into sections, the size and number of sections varies by school, I'm sure. At my school there are 4 sections (three full time and one part time/evening) and there were close to 100 people in my section but by finals, my first semester that number had dwindled to just less than 90. You share all your classes with your section. So you quickly become one large dysfunctional family, going to lunch together in between classes, studying together, and only talking to yourselves at school sponsored events (which leads to a lot of intersection drunken hook ups that everyone else hears about).

When you have a fairly large group of people it's can be expected that they will break into smaller groups. For the most part the drama and gossiping is not nearly as malicious as high school, but everybody knows something about everyone else. It's pretty safe to assume if one person in the section knows something it won't be long before the entire section knows. I probably know way more than I should about the sex lives, health issues, background, etc. of my classmates, some of which I haven't spoken more than two words to.

The legal community is small and you do not, 15 years from now, want to be remembered as the one that drank a little too much at the weekly happy hour and made out with a couple of guys AND girls from your section or the one who could not get along with anyone.

Opinions are like...

... everybody has them.

As I have learned this semester when it comes to legal research, much like any other type of research, there are primary sources and secondary sources. Law school, in general, is very much the same. Your primary sources are your professors and any materials they provide you, as well as the student handbook, and your casebook. Your secondary sources are everything else, and believe me there are a LOT of things that fall into this category. Everything from commercial supplements and outlines to advice from fellow law students and people who have already been through the ringer.

Although I have heard horror stories of people maliciously giving bad advice and information, I was lucky enough to not have experienced it first hand this semester. Though that doesn't mean all the advice and info I was given was on the up and up. Everyone I've met these past few months have been very willing to help those of us just starting out. Everyone from my fellow 1L's to 2 and 3 L's to faculty and staff and family friends have shared their different tips. Unfortunately, a lot of it is completely irrelevant.

There really is no substitute for learning straight from cases and the professor. When you have questions about class material, and you will at some point, be sure to have them resolved by your professor ASAP. There is no sense in going through the entire semester thinking one thing only to find out you were completely wrong the week before the final.

Also, be weary of relying too much on what others "know". Regardless of how confident someone else may be chances are they don't know anymore than you do, they're just better at pretending they do. The same goes for commercial outlines and supplements. If they disagree with what your professor has taught always go with what your professor has said. Neither is necessarily wrong but at the end of the day your professor will be the one grading your exam.

Always check your sources!

It's only a lot of reading if you do it.

Over the last few years, as I told people that I wanted to go to law school I was met with a lot of comments along the lines of, "I sure hope you like to read, because you'll be doing a lot of it." Well, I wouldn't say that I love reading, but I certainly don't dislike it. Given the time and interesting subject matter I definitely like to read. God knows I got sucked into those first two Twilight books (just the first two, they got really ridiculous and annoying after that and I had to just get the summaries of the last two from Wikipedia). Also, I never really acquired the skill of speed reading so I was slightly worried that I'd spend the next three years in a dark corner of the law library reading until my eyes bled.
Thankfully, like most things, it really hasn't been as bad as people said it would be. That's not to say that's it's been a walk through the park. See, those people who told me I'd be doing a lot of reading had it slightly wrong (or perhaps I just mistook their statements). It's not the quantity of reading, it's the quality. I'd say on average I only have to read 40-60 pages a week per class. However, you are expected to know the ins and outs of each case you read for class. You should know who was arguing what and why. What the court meant by what they said. Even, what the court meant by what it didn't say.
However, you will almost certainly NOT be tested on the cases that you've read (though some professors may give extra points if you can name the relevant ones on the exam). The whole point to reading and understanding cases is that they illustrate some part of the law (or in some cases what used to be the law). In law school, you don't have textbooks that teach you the rules, you learn from examples. So, try not to get hung up on and upset over a certain case because the bad man went free or the poor old widow didn't receive any damages for her husband's wrongful death, but ask yourself what is the significant law from this case. And that, dear friends, is quite possibly the most valuable piece of information I got going into law school.

*One minor, semi-related note: buy your books online on Amazon or eBay. It's so much cheaper than the books stores, even brand new!

Becoming a lawyer is expensive!

Never mind the $26K price tag on one year of law school, everything about law school is expensive. Every time I turn around it seems like someone/thing is asking for more money for one reason or another so that one day I can become a lawyer.

It starts before you even know for sure that you are going to law school. The LSAT (Law School Admissions Test) costs about $125 a pop, and like the SAT you can take it (or if you're like me and don't do so hot the first time around, have to take it) multiple times. Then, you have to pay $110 to sign up for LSDAS, which compiles all your letter of recommendations, transcripts, applications, etc. and sends all your information to the schools you apply to. Then, there is a $50-100 application fee for each school you apply to, and each school requires a law school report from LSDAS (your applications, essays, LORs, etc.) which are $12 each.

The cost of tuition for one year of law school ranges from $18K to $32K (at least in Texas), and that doesn't even include your casebooks. My books for my first semester cost almost $1,000 (for five classes), luckily I will be able to use one, possibly two, of them again next semester.

Then, with one week of school under my belt, I attended a mandatory informational session with someone from the Board of Law Examiners (BLE). I was informed that I would have to file a Declaration of Intent to study law and include a $190 fee. Two months later, I was required to pay $10 to have my fingerprints taken for the BLE.

I refuse to add all that up to see exactly how much I've dished out thus far, but I can only hope that the eventual pay out will be more than worth it.

*In case you want to have a good laugh and tally all that up, keep in mind that is pretty much the bare minimum of what it costs to go to law school. There are prep courses and additional supplements and practice books that can be purchased. But on the other hand if you qualify some fees can be waived, and there are scholarships and grants. So don't let the giant price tag get you down. If there's a will, there's a way.

Birds of a feather

All the professor are real characters. From the one who gets so excited about civil procedure that she flaps her arm so fast you swear she'll one day take flight to the torts professor who drums his fingers together like Mr. Burns to drive home the point of negligence. As a matter of fact everyone in law school is just a little bit weird. Yes, everyone. Even those four guys who always sit in the back row and are just a little too cool for school; they're weird in the fact that they're not weird like everyone else.

My bLAWg

I'm currently wrapping up my first semester at a private law school in Texas. I can only speak from my own experiences but I can't imagine that my school, section, professors, etc. are substantially different from any other. So to follow are my discoveries of the known and not so well known truths about law school.