The Shark

newly admitted students: a boalt 1L tells you how it is

[abony holmes]

I have spent the last week participating in Boalt’s admitted students weekend.  I’ve tried my best to convince students to come to Boalt by telling them all the wonderful things about us.  I've also let them in on some things I don't like so much.

In the process, I’ve come up with a list of good questions to ask alumni and current students if you are an admitted student trying to decide what law school to attend:

1. Do/did you like it here? It’s an incredibly simple question, but you can get a lot of valuable information from the content and the manner in which it is answered. I was always wary of students who needed to put down other schools to explain why they loved their school.
2. What are you doing this summer/what is your current career? It’s no secret, law school is a professional school, and even with the current economic situation, it's meant to provide you with career opportunities better than those you would get with just an undergraduate degree. As a follow-up question, ask how their degree from <school name> helped or hindered their job search.
3. Do the students get along? It may be hard to get a straight answer, but there are schools with reputations for competitiveness over cooperation. If you hear students complain about gunners or show a tendency to obsess about their grades or the grades of their colleagues, (especially if they obsess about the grades of their colleagues) it is probably a more competitive environment.
4. What has been your experience with the faculty/administration? Bad teachers and unhelpful administration can make a law student’s life miserable. Just imagine what those poor kids at Chicago are suffering through, with no internet in their classrooms.
5. What other schools did you consider? Find a student who considered schools similar to your own, and then grill them about everything you can think of. They probably did their fair share of research, and you can use their research to supplement your own.

For those of you considering Boalt, my answers to those questions are after the jump. 
For further commentary on new admit weekends, click here and here.

linx: dating would be a good stress-reliever, no?

[cynthia foster]

Let's get you amped up for life after law school:

• Temptation: Taking the Lead Post Law School (singles coach)
• Introducing Ms. JD's National Women Law Students' Organization (NWLSO) (Ms. JD)
• The Elephant in the Room (Law School Academic Support Blog)

how to bail out of the legal industry and (maybe) keep your dignity

[brian lauter]

If you do not possess my foolish optimism regarding the recession and its affects on job prospects, maybe a few non-legal J.D. success stories will cheer you up. 

For instance, Mekka Don, The “Legal” Hustler, perhaps sensing the impending recession, quit his job at a top 10 New York law firm to pursue a career in hip hop.  His first mixtape, “Law & Order,” with DJ Mick Boogie, dropped last week.  You can download it from his blog, and follow his meteoric rise to hip hop fame and fortune via weekly webisodes posted on his YouTube channel.

If you don’t have the lyrical skills to be a lawyer-turned-rapper, and you don’t think you can learn, maybe you should consider lawyer-turned-television writer (times two), lawyer-turned-baker, lawyer-turned-priest, lawyer-turned-cartoonist, or my personal favorite, lawyer-turned-Playboy model.

If a recession really does hit the legal profession hard, we may have a slew of interesting ‘lawyer-turned’s to look forward to.  I’m shooting for lawyer-turned-astronaut, but maybe I should be more realistic.

outlining, multimedia-style. it makes sense, doesn't it?

[justin gosling]

Outlining is one of those ubiquitous law school chores that just plain sucks.

I've spent the past few weeks dancing around the inevitable and this weekend I finally gave in... now I'm neck-deep in commercial outlines and a semester's worth of half-assed class notes. Fantastic.

The worst part of outlining is that the process is downright tedious, but you can't skimp on preparation because creating the outline is a refresher course in the particular subject you are studying. That said, I'm always looking to cut corners and I can't shake the feeling that there is a more efficient way to compile an outline.

Here is a thought: why don't publishers distribute digital copies of law school casebooks and commercial outlines along with their physical counterparts?

Sometimes the summary tables or tests in casebooks and commercial outlines simply need to be copied verbatim, but I really hate spending time duplicating the stupid information when it would be extremely easy to just copy and paste the sucker from the casebook into my outline. We've already posted that purely digital legal wares probably won't work for law students, but what about giving us access to both the digital and physical versions? That might actually work. Most law school students want the physical copy so they can scribble notes in the margins, but I think they would also like the access to the same text in a more convenient medium. Not only could they supplement their outlines without worrying about transcription errors, but they could synthesize the text into spoken word or do any number of things in addition to reading the physical book.

Publishers will probably roll out the usual infringement mantra and say if they provide freely copyable digital versions of selected works, then file sharing and other evils will make their profits disappear. Somehow I'm not sure future lawyers are eager to sacrifice a few hundred grand for taking a thirty dollar commercial outline.  We're too worried about passing the character and fitness portion of the bar. So come on publishers, give us access to a digital version of the product I've already purchased.

recession: who cares? not this law student.

[brian lauter]

Newsflash: there might be a "recession." Other than having to sift through the media’s sensationalist economic coverage on my way to news I actually care about, the recession, or economic slowdown, or extended seasonal slump, has not affected me (my financial aid checks never bounce).

However, after hearing about Davis’ Career Services issues and reading about the drop in summer hiring this year at top law firms, maybe I should be paying more attention.

Some argue that the legal profession is, in fact, in the midst of a recession and that, as law students, we should be worried. Others argue that a Wall Street recession will boost lawyers into the upper echelons of society, thrusting upon them the richly deserved social status and prestige that has proven to be so elusive.

Setting aside the panic and the delusions of grandeur for a moment, it seems to me that a meaningful downturn, whether real or imagined, has really just brought more mid-level firms into the process. NALP reported a 5% increase in the number of firms participating in Fall 2007 OCI, indicating mid market firms are participating more in on campus hiring. In addition, firms with large non-corporate, non-M&A practices may not be hit as hard by a recession.

I am not an economist, but after a little research I feel like I won’t be hit too hard, financially or socially, by any sort of recession. If this rolling readjustment continues and those financial aid checks keep coming slow and steady, I may just be able to afford a trip to New York in a few weeks.

heads up: new dean chosen at king hall

[cynthia foster]

Looks like King Hall has a new dean.  UC Davis public interest/Chicano studies professor Kevin Johnson, who writes the immigration blog for the noted Law Professors Blog Network, has been selected by the search committee to fill current dean Rex Perschbacher's spot.  Johnson's book Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink its Borders and Immigration Laws was published in October of last year.

ratemyprof: is organization key to successful teaching?

[justin gosling]

This article about what makes a good professor (from the Best Practices for Legal Education Blog) got me thinking about how my current professors compare with the article's version of "best" and "worst" professors.

The author (Justin Myers, a recent law school grad) has solid criteria to separate the cream from the crowd: good professors meet expectations set forth in course descriptions, move dialog along with a purpose, are knowledgeable (yet humble), and keep the class interesting. I'd like to add the quality of organization to the list of what makes a "good" law professor.

Organization is the biggest difference that separates my "good" and "bad" 1L professors. All of them know their material quite well, but the puzzle pieces do not necessarily fit together when the information is poorly organized.

"sexy rexy" assuages all the king hall hysteria over a 10 slot rankings drop

[brian lauter]

Remember last week, when The Shark posted the leaked 2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings?  Unlike these, they were not fake, and they were hard to ignore (even for Brian Leiter).

If you are at Boalt you are probably pretty happy with the new rankings.  If you are at University of Miami School of Law  you are probably not.  If you are at USF you are too cool to care.  If you are at the University of Baltimore you are just happy to be included.

Maybe you are inspired.  You want to create some rankings of your own.  You could rank based on library square footage and number of minority students.  You could rank based on mean LSAT scores and peer assessment ratings.  Or you could cross reference the 2009 U.S. News Law School Rankings with the Top 44 Law Schools by Peer Evaluation in your search for Law School Rankings Truth.

I don’t get too worked up about rankings, and I agree that law schools and law students often seem to suffer from a complete lack of perspective regarding the U.S. News rankings, but I was still worried when I saw U.C. Davis had dropped 10 spots to 44.  Apparently, so were quite a few of my classmates, many of whom attended a student meeting last night to discuss the fall. 

After reading the responses of students and law school deans compiled on Above the Law, I was also worried that the response would be more embarrassing than the ranking.  Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a relatively even-tempered email from Dean Perschbacher blaming “weak placement figures and bar passage during 2006” for the drop and assuring us that the 2007 numbers, which are “already in the bank,” are better.   

Since employment is the ultimate goal of law school, the placement numbers are, to me, the most important metric in the U.S. News formula.  Career Services at Davis is pretty useless, so if rankings hysteria ushers in a new era of employment emphasis here, I am all for it.   If pouring resources into Career Services doesn’t have the “happy side effect” Sexy Rexy is looking for, maybe messing with the employment numbers will do the trick.

So, while Davis probably won’t be issuing any press releases regarding its U.S. News rankings this year, maybe the 10 spot drop and any student uproar that follows will make the job search a little easier for future King Hall-ers.

Full email after the jump.