How to Be a Lawyer. Jason Mendelson
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reduce their recruitment costs. It's as simple as that. But it's a numbers game and the uniformity of law school curriculum, combined with consistency of grind needed to succeed as a junior lawyer, allows for a codependent relationship between firms that hire lawyers and law schools. And it's not just firms. The same is true with judicial clerkships, which tend to be even more tribal.
If you are reading this before law school, do everything in your power to crush the LSAT. It's the key metric that admissions people look at. Also there appears to be a correlation between LSAT performance and law school performance. How we know this, we are not allowed to tell you, but we've seen some convincing data from a very good law school on this subject. The LSAT is also your most manipulatable data point to get scholarships and more generous financial aid packages. Just about anyone can improve their LSAT score 10 to 20 points with preparation, which on the edges can be the difference between a tier 1 and a tier 3 law school.
For the majority of you reading this book, you've chosen your school and the ranking is what the ranking is. If you are in a top 20 law school, you probably can knock on any employer's door with the right grades and get a response. If you are top 40, it's a bit harder, and so on. So, what do you do if you are worried about your law school ranking?
Remember that these rankings only affect the first job you get out of law school. After that, no one will care where you went, it's all about how well you performed as a lawyer. So, the ranking is only a momentary concern. We both have worked for and hired great and terrible lawyers from top ranked and lower-ranked law schools. For us in hiring (not subject to tribalism in a Big Law hiring committee), the school is but one data point among many others. Yes, it's interesting, but no, it doesn't seal the deal.
Most importantly, the very best lawyers (which includes our guest authors) are the best because of what they've done and how they've done it, not where they went to school. Great lawyers are not ones who we stop and think about where they went to law school. Did they go to Yale or Cappodocia State Law? We just remember that they did a great job for us and feel fortunate to work with them again. The key is to learn in law school what you can (and learn it well) and then figure out how to apply that to the real world. That's why we've written this book.
We spoke to a hiring partner at a Global 50 law firm and asked if there was any correlation between making partner and which law school a person went to. This firm hires from all over the world. It hires from U.S. law schools ranked 1 to 126. The answer was “no.” Not only was there no correlation according to this person, but people from lower ranked schools tended to turn over less in the early years.
If you are feeling anxious about your law school ranking for the job you are looking for, we recommend networking your way into the employer long before you actually need a job. Find a way to give them something interesting to look at. Perhaps try to show them that you have the missing soft skills that so many junior lawyers lack. Get some experience outside the law school that indicates you could be valuable early in your career. In other words, be like Avis and try harder. You'd be surprised how many lawyers who went to highly ranked schools don't.
A couple of words about Big Law, which has a negative reputation to many people in law school. We would argue to not dismiss Big Law out of hand. Done correctly, it can be some of the best training for whatever you eventually want to do while getting paid handsomely. Also, you can leave at any time, and you have yet another thing on the resume to market. Putting yourself into a large student debt portfolio while dismissing the most lucrative part of the market may not be the best business model.
In our experience many folks who want to do public service pay off their debts and then can go do what their calling really is. Whatever you choose, remember that your first job out of school is only that. Get the job, become a great lawyer, and figure out what the game plan is later.
CHAPTER 3 Classic Coursework (What Is It Good For?)
Depending on where you go to school, who you have as a professor, and what your own personal interests may be, you will have a wildly varying experience taking the “classics” at law school. Perhaps, inherently, you find yourself intrigued by rabbi trusts, fertile octogenarians, hairy palms, firework explosions on train platforms, or the seemingly infinite ways to define a human death, but what's it all worth when you are at your first job out of school?
This chapter gives advice on what practical knowledge could come out of these classes. In other words, “Okay, I'm dying sitting through civil procedure. Is there anything I could use to make myself a better lawyer once I graduate?”
We won't waste your time with the obvious: if you want to be a constitutional lawyer, pay attention in con law, okay? If you want a fancy billboard one day that has your picture on it, torts and civil procedure might just be your jam. We are going to try to unpack what could be important taking the mandatory classics for when you aren't practicing in that particular area.
Keep our four core concepts in mind and ask yourself the following: How is what I'm learning today potentially applicable to solving a client problem tomorrow?
Note that there are also some variances in which of these classes are mandatory depending on where you go to law school.
Torts
Of all the classics, at least torts is the funniest, right? But if you aren't going into personal injury law, it's irrelevant, right? Wrong. Believe it or not, torts are prevalent in legal areas such as trusts and estates, business, and acquisitions. In short, people do bad things to one another, and it shows up all over the place in the real world. Think of it this way. Torts is really about one party (or parties) doing something that hurts another party (or parties) either intentionally or unintentionally.
And let's face it, people do stuff to one another all the time. What you may not realize is that there is probably a tort for that. Your banking client calls a customer of their competitor and talks them into changing banks while talking trash about the competitor? It could be a tortious interference with a business relationship and subject to treble damages! Ouch. The list is long. Most law schools focus torts on personal injury, but in the real world, it's actually widely applicable.
Also in torts, one studies negligence, which includes the concept of foreseeability. Again, law schools tend to focus on things like malpractice or poor Mrs. Palsgraf, but not how foreseeability matters so much in how contracts are drafted. For instance, the best contracts are ones where parties have their interests aligned, rather than an agreement trying to force good behavior. In both situations, the ability for a lawyer to foresee the potential misalignment of incentives and how a counterparty could game a business arrangement is key.
As far as the product liability section of torts goes, enjoy it for the stories and think how lucky you are that driving a car is infinitely safer today than it was 90 years ago.
Bottom line: Torts is super useful to build your intuition and ability to see around corners for future issues. Issue spotting (past, current, and future!) is a key trait in how to best think like a lawyer.
Contracts
Oh, contract law class. What you could have been. But you weren't. This pertains to our law schools and from reviewing current course outlines at several well-known schools. Apparently, we weren't alone.
Let's review. Most contracts classes teach that a contract is about mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; adequate consideration; capacity; and legality. Then you try to test these limits and learn about illusory promises, consideration (or lack thereof), and the parole evidence rule.
You study case law, actual contracts, and then debate in class whether the paper would stand up in court.
And almost none of these matters in the real world. Let's look at the data.
First, only 0.1% of contracts entered into actually go to court, according to Contract Assistant, a contracts management platform company. While the data is less public, it appears that