Brown Boy Goes to Law School

So a few days before class started, I was roaming around the law library, and I randomly ran into an Akron Law alumnus from 1980. He was a pretty successful criminal defense lawyer, and he had this advice to give:

• Don’t take any shortcuts in law school. That refers to cheating, and apparently, many people will cheat in law school. But it goes beyond that. It applies, to a lesser extent, to study groups and study aids and cliffs notes and old casebriefs….and that stuff isn’t gonna help you. Apparently, all that stuff is “crap.” Whereas that stuff, especially cheating, might get you an A or B on your exam, you will be a crappy lawyer. You will only be hurting yourself. Because law school is not as much about learning the law, as it is learning to think like a lawyer. If you don’t sit down, hunker down, do the grunt work, outline, brief, do the reading and read through the cases and invest lots of time to try to figure out the reasoning behind a certain case or decision, well, then you will be like the tons of “mediocre” lawyers out there who don’t make that much money and aren’t really satisfied with their lives.

Interesting perspective.