Bridging the Gap Between College and Law School

The following excerpt is from Bridging the Gap Between College and Law School by Ruta K. Stropus and Charlotte D. Taylor.

Excerpt:

What to Bring: A mind trained in analytical thinking and an ability and desire to write are staples for the journey through law school.

You may or may not have had a pre-law advisor who guided you to some of the courses that might help you prepare for law school. Regardless of your major, if you are still in college and have the opportunity to select electives, make sure that you take logic (usually offered by the philosophy department) and writing courses.

If you have been out of school for a while, enroll in a refresher course, such as a graduate or continuing education course or two. The number of students who somehow fail to realize that the practice of law involves a great deal of writing is astounding. If you hate the thought of spending the bulk of your time composing anything from a partnership agreement to a court memo, law school probably is not for you.

Although popular culture portrays lawyers as spending their days in courtrooms in front of juries and nights in fancy restaurants impressing clients, most of the work of lawyers, especially new ones and certainly law students, is far less glamorous.

Law school demands many hours outside the classroom just reading cases (expect three hours out of class for each hour in class, or about fifteen hours per class each week), and countless more completing legal writing assignments (give yourself at least ten to fifteen hours for a five-page paper); in practice, these numbers go even higher. Nothing will help you succeed more than the ability to read and retain large amounts of information and write about it effectively. Start developing these skills now.

Consider taking courses that require reading difficult texts and synthesizing large amounts of complex material into a workable format; upper level literature and philosophy courses are excellent choices for acquiring these skills. One of the problems students face at the outset of law school is reading the required text. The bulk of what you have read up to now likely has been what we call “descriptive texts.”

In college, you probably read textbooks on various subjects. In your life or career, you probably read manuals and guides on how to accomplish particular tasks, operate equipment, assemble toys, and perform various other functions. Otherwise, you undoubtedly read novels, articles, and other informational pieces, for different reasons. What these texts all have in common is that they each explain a topic or skill; in short, they are all descriptive. In terms of quantity, you were probably expected to read several pages a night from your college textbook. At work, you were probably expected to get through reading material at your own pace to fully understand it.

In law school, both the quality and quantity of reading is radically different. In terms of quality, you are not reading descriptive texts or books; instead, you are reading original cases, often very old ones written in outdated, difficultto-understand language. You cannot zip through and skim the pages to get a feel for the topic. You need to spend time, and lots of it, just to understand the case.

And, just when the quality changes, so does the quantity. Instead of reading several pages a night, you are very likely to be assigned a hundred pages a night. Many students simply are not ready to read so many pages of this dense text. There are online options that can help develop these skills. Such sites include www.4lawschool.com or others. They cannot substitute the actual experience of reading and processing the cases, but can help you learn to analyze the main points of the case. In many cases, the decision is lost in seemingly complicated legal jargon, and these sites can help you break down the information.