Going To Law School

Tip to those who want to work in Louisiana: brush up on your Napoleonic Code.

hurting i think i just saw your buddy in the elevator

woot

2 years finished, got job.

congratulations!

Congratulations.

ty

Small lit firm with decent clients, interesting work. Pay is low for the market but liveable.

nice. what kind of litigation?

General commercial I guess - the stuff they're working on right now is a mix. Two of their main things right now are a trademark case and a holocaust art restitution case, although I don't think they're necessarily art and IP oriented.

wonder what burt_stanton is doing right now

Oh man, would love to know. Was he banned?

i hate being a lawyer now, as i sit in the renovated law library from my alma mater.

Two months and four days until the first day of law school. Somehow pulled a 180 on my LSATs last summer and seriously considered applying to Ivies etc. until I realized that 90% of funding in the states is earmarked for domestic students, even at Columbia, Harvard, etc. etc.

Coming from a background in poli sci and internat'l development, was hoping to be at McGill here in Montreal, where you get training in both common law and the civil code in one go-around, but I'm still waitlisted as of today (LSATs not considered in Quebec since they're English-language aptitude tests) and once I can find an apartment I'm off to University of Toronto. School's got biglaw/corporate vibe to it and a relatively cut-throat reputation, but adequate space for other stuff.

Just scanned through the thread and trying to decide where I should stand on the excitement/dread matrix

good luck, AIM.

Feel like there are fewer law schools overall (and maybe relatively) in Canada, but given population discrepancy I'm not sure if that changes market saturation/job prospects/etc. Not that that matters, necessarily.

jdunderground is the most terrifying thing I've seen all week, mind you. Heh.

unlikely you'd know, at this point, where you stand on that matrix. but it's good that you're thinking about it. too many people go into law for the wrong reasons, and regret it.

yeah, good idea to stay away from jdunderground -- for mental health reasons, if nothing else. not that it can't be rough, but you don't need to have your face rubbed in it.

i feel like a rotting husk of a former man. will law school give me back my humanity?

― burt_stanton

rip

Thanks!

More excited about this than I come off. Surely this will be beaten out of me eventually, but entering with total cynicism can't possibly be a wise move.

My mom was a real estate lawyer in Toronto in biglaw for a while until my sisters and I were young. Having had a front row seat to what that lifestyle means and does to you, I know I'm not heading that way - not a BAD thing to do, but not a balanced thing to do.

At the moment, part of me wants to use law as a means into policy work with internat'l orgs/ngos that line up with what i've already been studying for the past however many years, but I spoken to enough people to know that halfway through first year, I could fall madly in love with Torts. Or something.

Basically:

- entering with a vague sense of direction and optimism, but with enough cynicism and openness to change to not get totally blind-sided by the nasty surprises of law school
- willingness and acknowledgement that the only way through this is a SHIT TON of difficult work of intense volume, and that you thus need to reallly want to do this
- just enough of a non-law life to maintain sanity (1 evening a week?)

Am I missing anything?

First of all, congrats on the 180, I assume you know how rare that is. I imagine that you got a very nice scholarship given that you opted out of the top US private schools, and low debt is a great way to go.

What you have there sounds basically like the right attitude and approach. I would also add that it's a good idea to get in touch with and embrace your competitive side, because you need it for motivation. I think this is kind of counterinstinctual for left-leaning liberal artsy types, but I really found it useful to be able to admit to myself that I DID want the A, which meant beating 90% of my classmates in any given class.

About those three points, Alex (and repeating here that Hurting's law school advice is uniformly awful, and his rude awakening will be coming in the next 24 months):

- the first one is good; but more important than cynicism is an "eyes on the prize" attitude. Think about what you really want to do and how law school can help you get there throughout your time at law school. People who enter law school to do NGO work and end up doing corporate law stuff generally did NOT get converted by the magical genius of their Contracts professor -- they simply started stopped thinking like themselves and started thinking like the rest of their classmates. Keep the end in sight, and think about the kin of lawyer you want to be (as opposed to the kind of lawyer you can easily get a job and make some money as),

- take the word "difficult" out and this point is true for a handful of law schools (Chicago, McGill, I dunno about Toronto); take out "difficult" and replace "SHIT TON" with "fair amount", and the sentence is true for 98% of law schools in North America. This stuff is not generally that difficult, although law students have enjoyed convincing themselves that it is for generations.

- you want as much personal life as you can possibly fit into your life. One full night a week and one full day every weekend is a MINIMUM, and you will also have and want to have some down time every day.

i'm a really competitive person but generally found it impossible to want As very badly and didn't like to be around people who did (nb i did sometimes get better grades than them anyway). you are gonna turn into a different person but it's not all bad. the bad parts i feel are slowly lifting away 14 months after graduation and i'm becoming myself again and having fun, it's weird. and i am going to be the kind of lawyer i wanted to be, though not in the same subject area.

i mean not the same as i thought i would do when i started law school, i changed my mind pretty soon after that

Changing your mind is legitimate and can happen, but +10 years out of law school it becomes clearer who changed their mind and who had their mind changed for them, you know?

yeah

and repeating here that Hurting's law school advice is uniformly awful, and his rude awakening will be coming in the next 24 months)

Not really sure what this means, especially since I haven't given very much "advice" here other than that post. But so far my experience is that better grades open more doors, whatever you want to do. So it's worth it to buckle down for at least your first year and say "fuck it, I'm going to try as hard as I can to get the best grades I can." And to that end, it's better to just be honest with yourself. I do NOT mean that you should go blabbing about grades with your classmates. But I don't really believe people who say they don't care about grades, unless they go to a high enough ranked school that grades don't matter.

If by "rude awakening" you mean that big law firm life sucks, (1) I missed my shot at it anyway because of the economy and (2) I don't have any illusions about it. Even if you want to work in a non-profit or government, you need the best grades you can get today because there are just many more graduating law students than there are jobs. I don't think things were anywhere near as competitive ten years ago. But I happen to like the little firm where I landed quite a lot, and hope to stay there.

"Not really sure what this means, especially since I haven't given very much "advice" here other than that post."

"Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (1638 of them)" -- I would understand why you wouldn't want to click there, but if you did, you'd see the absurdity of what you just typed.

The rude awakening is one that comes to all who chase grades -- soon there are no more grades to chase, and failure is something more substantial than a letter.

Didn't find that to be true in the 6 years I worked before law school, doubt I will find it true now. Doing your best to figure out how to succeed at something and then applying yourself is not a recipe for failure.

I mean if your point is that grades aren't that big in the grand scheme of things, then of course that's true. But first year law school grades probably matter relatively more than almost any other grades you can get in any field. There is no good reason NOT to chase grades at least for that year.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Me-Ow1918.jpeg

Hey, before I call your vis-a-vis first year grades and how to succeed in the legal world into question again, how'd that law school transfer that your first year grades were going to guarantee work out for you?

your wisdom vis-a-vis

I didn't apply to transfer because I didn't want the debt. Several people from my section with about the same grades as me transferred to Harvard, Columbia, NYU.

Besides, I really don't see your point - if I had applied to transfer and not gotten in that would prove that you shouldn't care about grades?

So this is really happening. Just found a place to live in Toronto. Move in three weeks. Classes start Sept. 8.

Was wandering through the law library this weekend in my spare time and randomly pulling books off shelves only to realize that I can't make head or tail of any of it.

Occasional thought: What the fuck am I getting myself into?
Less occasional thought: Why the hell am I doing this exactly?
Thankfully, at least wrt the latter, there was a fairly timely reminder.

LMAO. And so, of course, three days after finding a place to live in Toronto, and preparing to move, McGill deigns to take me off their waitlist and accept me.

McGill: 13500$ total expenses a year instead of 39000$ at Toronto due to Quebec gov't subsidies and my Quebec residency status. Also, I'd walk out with a BCL *and* an LLB - not the US-comparable JD from University of Toronto, but degrees in both common and civil law in 3.5 years is nothing to sniff at, especially given that I want to head in the direction of international public interest work. While Toronto has insanely good funding for international human rights internships and quality connections with non-governmentals, McGill's nothing to sniff at either - they're hosting the Global Conference on Human Rights in Diverse Societies in October (https://secureweb.mcgill.ca/efchr-events/) so...not a bad option at all.

The deposit on the apartment in Toronto is only 300$ and I haven't signed a lease yet, and while there would be some paperwork hassle with the government loans/bursaries application, I can't think of a major deterrent to just saying 'fuck it' and staying in Montreal. My only hesitation is that for the civil law portions of your classes, all of your material (and thus 50% of your total material) is in French, which I can handle as reading material, but additionally the university strongly recommends that you take at least one class in first year in French. My French is good, but not sure if it's up to the task of legal academia.

Also, with five weeks until the start of classes, the idea of a total 180 is giving me whiplash. I think I'm going to do it, though.

You would be crazy not to do it.

good luck man! lawyers are cool by me

if u stay u can be my lawyer

Yeah? Yeah. University of Toronto has a reputation in Canada as the stronger school, maybe? But that's because it's singular focus on common law means that they offer a much more rigourous standard of legal education for the one system, but it's really only THE school to be at if you want to end up on big Bay Street firms.

Glad that you have my back on this, though. Major life decisions should rarely be made w/o consulting the Internet. Haha. (Seriously, though, perspective from people who have done the law school thing is useful. Thanks!)

Oh actually I didn't know Toronto was considered the stronger school. I thought you were going to the better school for cheaper.

I may not actually know enough about the Canadian legal market to advise. My general feeling is that there are only two factors that should make up the bulk of your law school decision - cost and what it does for your career. Stuff like "funding for human rights internships" shouldn't be a major factor - you can do internships coming from any school, and ultimately there's a good chance you won't wind up working in the particular area you want to. Especially in something like international human rights, where jobs are scarce and competitive.

Well, they're neck and neck in terms of goodness, to be honest. Just different focuses. Toronto pitches itself very much in the mold of top tier American schools, including the pricing schedule. Rigorous common law training, Socratic method, corporate tilt, hyper competitive, etc. etc., direct ties to a lot of big name firms in Canada. (It helps that as a city Toronto is the centre of corporate law in the country.)

McGill is well, one of two schools that have a bijuridical curriculum and the only one that teaches a transsystemic approach - you learn both systems of law simultaneously in a comparative structure. It's innovative and leads to a lot of really creative and interesting ways of looking at law, esp. from an international perspective. So my point is, you might be better trained in a standard sort of legal process at Toronto, but you walk out of McGill with a very unique perspective on the law.

Hope that clarifies. (The advantage to having both systems, in theory is that you're more marketable anywhere internationally because 60% of the world uses droit civil, and any federal gov't work smiles on being able to work in either context.)

"the advantage to having both systems, in theory is that you're more marketable anywhere internationally"

tbh I'm a little skeptical of this -- it's not like my common-law based education me "marketable" in other common-law countries. Although it does sound very interesting to be trained in both and have the comparative perspective.

Otherwise it sounds like McGill is a better bet unless what you really want is to work in a top Canadian firm.

Mmm. Yeah. I think the marketability isn't necessarily the BCL in and of itself, but rather the familiarity with both systems - lets you dance back and forth across the line, esp. in things like internat'l commercial arbitration and so forth.

In theory, at least.

dudes who have gone to law school, some advice! writing my professors about my "aspirations for law school" and I'm not really sure what to write beyond having interests in "international law" and "public interest law"

so my question is, how good of an idea did you all have of the areas of your interest before you applied?

(btw congrats AiM! good thing you haven't changed your display name yet!)

i thought i wanted to do IP stuff and it somewhat drove where i applied, but i wasnt ttly set on it or anything.

i think that unless you already have a really strong legal background somehow, like ur reading cases regularly for enjoyment or something? idk, you really cant grasp what it's gonna be like. anyway im like 5+ yrs out & have worked for the gov't the entire time

i had not a very good idea, just public interest. you can (and should) talk about non-law stuff you've done.

I wasn't sure, beyond knowing I wanted to be a litigator.