Hey, you’re going to be a lawyer, take a look at this
First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be
I started thinking about going to law school almost exactly two years ago. At the time, I was working as the court reporter for the Ottawa Citizen and was starting to find the fit between myself and journalism a bit off. At the same time, I was being paid to observe the daily lives of Ottawa’s criminal lawyers and, as so frequently happens when anyone starts to become disenchanted with something, the next most proximate alternative started to look seriously appealing. I did love going to the courthouse each day and observing all manner of trials, so eventually it just made sense to set myself on a path to actually practice law myself, instead of being employed as a constant observer.
Fast forward through the LSAT prep and the test writing and the score release and the application process and the waiting for the acceptances and the acceptances and all the other gauntlets that literally every other potential law student faces, gauntlets not insignificant but not particularly important right now, and I was at the point where I started to tell people that I was leaving journalism and going to law school. At which point, a strange and panic-inducing phenomenon started cropping up in my life: people started treating me like I was already a lawyer.
Not all the time, obviously, and no one was hiring me to take their cases or anything, because I don’t know anyone that criminally stupid. But as soon as people heard I was quitting to go to law school, friends and colleagues started asking me my opinion on various legal issues that would crop up in the news. At one point, my editor at the Edmonton Journal, the last place I worked, dropped some parole documents that had come in on my desk and asked me to look over them. Now, I was a crime reporter at the Journal, so reading parole docs was a regular part of my job, but on this particular occasion he specifically asked me to do it because I was going to be a lawyer.
All of these tiny incidents, even if it was just being introduced to a new person as “This is Laura, she’s going to be a lawyer,” has sent me into the same paroxyms of fear and has inspired a lightning-fast soliloquy from me that goes something like this:
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t think we should say that I’m going to be a lawyer. I mean, yes, I’m going to law school in the fall. I did get into law school, that is true. But I mean, right now, I’m not even there yet. I don’t even have a class schedule. And then I have to pass, like, all my first year classes. And second, and third. And between those years, I have to get jobs that are related to the law. And then after that, after all that, I have to article and pass the bar and…”
And then I would sort of pass out or curl up into a tiny, sweating, hyperventilating ball.
What scares me about all these weird interactions was not the reminder of the metric ton of work I’m facing in the next three years or the distant, looming title of lawyer, the one that comes with many derisive looks and lame jokes. It’s the idea that, because I’ve decided to go to law school, I should already know a bunch about the law. It’s the same feeling I had as a 17-year-old on the first day of Journalism school, when I looked around the lecture theatre at Carleton that held more people than my hometown and was convinced that every other 17-year-old there had already edited a newspaper or scribed a Globe and Mail focus piece or was a direct descendent of William Randolph Hearst.
I was wrong then, and I’m pretty sure I’m wrong now. First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be. The internet is filled with discussion threads of panicked people in my position asking upper-year law students what the best things to read in the pre-law school summer are, and the answers are almost universally the same: nothing. Relax. The next three years will be filled with law books and case briefs, so take this time to do nothing.
So, okay. I’ll try to relax. I’ll be okay.
I think
[...] Hey, law students by Andrew Potter on Monday, July 5, 2010 2:55pm – 1371890 Commentshttp://www2.macleans.ca/2010/07/05/hey-law-students/Hey%2C+law+students2010-07-05+18%3A55%3A52Andrew+Potter Things are quiet around these parts blogwise, but shouldn’t all you incoming law students be spending your time prepping for classes anyway? Maybe not, argues Laura Drake in her inaugural blog post for Maclean’s OnCampus. [...]
It only gets worse the further in you get. I can’t even count the amount of free legal advice I was asked (and declined) to give throughout the course of my legal studies, and that seemed to be par for the course for my colleagues as well.
Thanks for a such an interesting (and funny) piece. I look forward to following along as you share your journey through law school with the rest of us
[...] original post here: Hey, you're going to be a lawyer, take a look at this : Macleans … 5:33 pm | admin | Tags: divorce lawyer edmonton | No Comments [...]
During my single year of classes at the U. of A. Faculty of Law, we had two sayings that, for me, still sum up my abortive attempt to become a lawyer lo those many years ago:
1. “Before first year, you’d kill to get into Law School; by second year, you’d kill to stay in Law School; by third year, you’d kill to get out of Law School”; and
2. “The top third of the graduating class make the best professors and judges, the middle third make the best lawyers and the bottom third make the best money.”
Have fun. And always respond to requests for advice by quoting your rates — that should dry up those requests right quick.
I’m a fourth-year Journalism student at Carleton, planning to apply to law school for Fall 2011. I echo your observations about first-year Journalism, and going through that experience hasn’t saved me any nail-biting about law school.
I haven’t even applied to law school yet and people are already asking me a) what area of law I want to practice b) where I want to work and c) random legal questions I don’t know anything about.
[...] about what’s new and what you may not yet know. As another incoming student noted, most people don’t know anything so take comfort that you’re not [...]
Not all first year law students are lawyers… but many will act like they are.
As a journalism student currently studying for my LSAT, thank you for this! I felt the same way entering j-school as you did and ended up loving every minute of it. Hopefully law school is the same. Good luck!
As a j-skool grad, journalism abortee and recent first-year law school survivor, welcome! You’re correct that everyone is scared shitless–even those most annoying of creatures who pretends they know everything in class (…they don’t). The vast majority of people continue to have no idea what they’re doing right through final exams, and yet come out of it, inexplicably, with completely acceptable to absolutely incredible grades. BTW, your writing abilities will help a TON. You’re almost guaranteed a decent grade on an exam or paper if you can put across your idea clearly and coherently, no matter how good that idea is. Just be thankful you aren’t an engineering grad…