Top 5 Steps to Take Before Starting Law School
- Jan 12, 2017
- 5 min read
Performing well in your first year of law school opens up so many opportunities. Whether you want a high paying firm job, a prestigious clerkship, admission to Law Review, an increase in you academic scholarship or transfer to a better law school they key to these outcomes are great 1L grades. Over a decade, I have taken note of the five most important steps my most successful clients took to achieve these sort of goals. Here are my top five steps you should take before starting law school.
Do Your Homework
It’s really important that you do your research on 1L success in the months and weeks before you start law school. There are a couple resources I think are incredible and advise my own clients to read. One resource is a website called TopLawSchools.com. Be advised that many of the contributors on this forum can sometimes be a bit direct and opinionated. However, when we put our egos aside there is a lot of great information here about law school success. While the forum is worth browsing on your own it can be a bit overwhelming in terms of content. To make things more convenient here is a link to the articles I encourage you to read that specifically relate to first year law school success.
What I like about these articles is that if you read them at this early stage your eyes will be open to law school in ways that your peers may never see or understand. Many of the strategies referenced in these articles are steps I’ve taken for a decade with private clients who have a performed well in the first year of law school.
Settle Your Relationships
It is so important to begin law school with a clean slate. Unhealthy relationships are never a good idea but they can absolutely wreck your first year of law school. In my first interview with potential clients I always ask about their dating or marital life and whether the role they believe their family or parents will play.
The most important thing is that you have people in your life that understand that the next year of your social life will be drastically different. You will be largely unavailable and maybe not in the best of mood a lot of the time because of the stress that comes with law school. Thus, having a circle that understands how to support you is monumental. If you are not sure about your circle then it’s a good idea to have a frank discussion about boundaries and expectations.
Over the years of working with 1Ls to succeed in their first year, I have seen a few clients suffer in the first semester because of a failed relationship or a well-meaning helicopter parent. At the same time, clients that have heeded my warning have avoided a lot of potential conflicts.
Get A Typing Software
Aside from reading, every law school student spends most of their time typing. The faster you can type without mistakes the better grades you are likely to earn. The reason for this is because law school exams are very time restrictive. Most often students who are able to type more characters earn more points. This makes sense because most of the points earned on a law school essay exam are the result of writing analysis.
Typing faster means that you can fit more analysis into your essay exam within the allotted time. In my experience, in the days before an exam once a student knows the law and the arguments to make to an exam question the practical ability to type words at a faster speed makes a difference in the points earned on the page. So while a pre-law student does not yet know law developing better typing skills will have a direct impact on exam performance and final grades.
Subscribe To Amazon Prime
Most law schools are notoriously bad when it comes to textbooks. Not only are the books for the first year over priced but it is very common that your law school may not even have enough of them. Before I started giving this advice I can’t begin to tell you how many of my clients were stressed out in the first week of school because they desperately needed a book for class that the bookstore did not have enough of.
Amazon Prime will solve all of your problems and even safe you money. Before law school starts you definitely want to have an account running. There are a couple of other cool benefits of Amazon Prime that will certainly come in handy. First students can enroll for Prime at a discount, which means you will save money. Second, delivery with Prime is a lot faster which is an important feature since it is likely that you will be under a tight deadline to get the book immediately so that you can begin reading for class.
Get A Head Start
Most people advise pre law students not to begin learning the law until law school begins. The main reason for the cautionary advice is that because law school text are so exhaustive you won’t know what information to focus on and you may very well end up spending a lot of time learning information your professors will not cover. While this is true there are ways to work around this outcome.
For many of my clients because I have previous years of experience with professors at their law school we are in fact able to focus on the material that is commonly tested across all professors at their law school. Even in instances where a client is attending a law school I do not have previous experience with, there are still certain topics that accredited law schools are required to test on. Knowing what these topics are is a plus even when a client wants to get a head start on the content but is not sure what law school they will ultimately attend.
In my experience, clients that I prepared for 1L months before the beginning of first semester performed appreciably better. Not only were they more confident on day one but they were also better able to understand the material both in class and in their daily reading because each course’s content felt more like a review than an entirely new learning experience. Because of this head start my clients also were able to begin outlining their courses and taking practices exams weeks ahead of their peers. I’m sure you can imagine how that having more time to digest and process rigorous law school material would give you a significant competitive advantage.
About Author:
Franklin is a Law School Success Consultant focusing on the first year law school and summer employment or judicial externships. Learn more about Franklin by clicking on any of the links below:
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