The Shark

1L playbook: a grain of salt.

[dennis]

Last year during my 1L orientation, two female law review members came into my section’s room for a Q&A session.  

One of the girls was a blonde who wore a starched button-down, pencil skirt, and pumps. The other girl was a redhead who wore a school T-shirt, jeans, and flipflops. They looked like catalog models for Express and the school bookstore.

I don’t know if it was staged, but the two girls started sparring during the Q&A session.

Redhead: “I love, love, love Microsoft OneNote. I have amazing categories for all of my notes and can show y’all how to make custom functions!”
Blonde: “I don’t even bring my laptop to school. I hand-write all my notes.”
Redhead: “OneNote is really useful for your outlines. I make these sprawling outlines with multicolored tabbies!”
Blonde: “I don’t outline. I’m all about flash cards.”

They were tit-for-tat for the entire Q&A session: if the blonde did things one way, the redhead did the complete opposite.

Both girls were successful students and had completely different habits and personalities. The exchange really illustrated the cliché: “Do what works for you.”

Many of you 1Ls will find out that law students love to give advice. The motives for the advice givers are mixed (cue the Eurythmics). Some upperclassmen are condescending or just want to see how long it will take to make you cry, but I suspect that most students genuinely want to be helpful.

Just remember to take all advice with a grain of salt. There is no universal magic method or secret. Other law students can tell you what works for them, but ultimately you have to figure out what works for you.

dechert no offers just one more sign of a frosty recruiting season?

[cynthia]

Our sister publication out of Philadelphia, The Legal Intelligencer, has an article up (reg. req.) on the Dechert no offers you might have heard about earlier in the day on Above the Law.

To make a long-ish story short, the firm has made offers to 50% of its 2009 summer class. The remaining half have been informed that they'll have to wait until January 2010 to find out if they've got a spot at the firm.

The implications of this are pretty extensive, especially when couple with ATL's assertion that Dechert is going to be actively recruiting 3Ls.

Gina Passerella of TLI has yet another angle: 

Of the 20 or so firms she is tracking in and around the area, Lennon said only four have given offers so far. Large law firms typically want to give offers to summer associates as quickly as they can once completing evaluations and assessing practice area needs, she said, because they then have to begin recruiting on campus for next summer’s class. They want the students who received offers in the summer to act as advocates during the fall recruiting season, Lennon said. 

With some firms not hiring for next summer and others questioning the lead time between hiring summer associates and bringing them in as full-time attorneys two years later, firms are taking their time this year. 

"Now, here in the real world in 2009, I think firms generally are going to wait as long as they can to make these decisions," Lennon said.

So what's the deal, here? Playing current summers against their law school compatriots, in a fight to the death over an offer? I think ATL got it right: Dechert is trying to trade up.

the best value for your loan dollars.

[cynthia]

Yesterday I was directed, thanks to TaxProf, to a list of the National Jurist's list of law schools that give you the "Best Bang for your Buck."

While generally unmoved by the top 25 (which you can see, sorta, here), I did find it interesting that Hastings, despite its near-constant tuition increases, is holding it down for California at #54. 

The qualifications for making it on the list were pretty strict:

• Public schools with a maximum of $25k annual tuition
• Private schools with a maximum of $30k annual tuition 
• 85% employment rate upon graduation 
• Higher bar passage rate than state average  

The schools were then ranked according to these statistics, with North Carolina Central University edging out BYU for the top slot. 

The saddest part of this piece, however, was the headline of the piece that came directly after it: "Is Anyone Hiring Now?" As if to say "What the hell does it all matter, anyway?" If you're asking yourself that question, you might want to check out these 100 blog posts.

superhero power of choice: signing that offer letter.

[cynthia]

From a National Law Journal commentary on fall OCI:

One of Northwestern's fearless leaders, William Chamberlain, assistant dean of law career strategy and placement, has the following nugget of wisdom for all you 2Ls entering what will no doubt be an interesting recruiting season:

"...accept your offer quickly. The key is to get a job for next summer. Smart students will not rely on NALP's 45-day guideline but rather accept their offers as soon as humanly possible. From the school side, we have dealt with all sorts of reactions by firms to the economy and are urging our students to be risk-averse. Any sense of entitlement will be fatal this fall."

Be grateful! Be conservative! Be inhumanly fast, if humanly possible! Be BigLaw.

offer day happy hour specials, coming to a miserable dive near you.

[cynthia]

True to 2009 form, I'm relaying some bad news. Above the Law has broken some more for law students and recent grads:

• Proskauer Rose is extending its 2009 class deferment, at least in its New York office. The firm, which already deferred incoming associates to March 2010, is hitting the pause button all the way to November 2010 now. This is, coincidentally, also when the 2010 class is supposed to be starting. LOL ?
• Mintz Levin has deferred half of its incoming class to April 2010 and half of it to January 2011. The latter group will be offered a stipend. 

Our sister publication, The AmLaw Daily, also has some great news of its own. Skadden has elected to cut its 2010 summer associate class in half, and has changed its "recruiting process" by making all its offers on one day in late September (rather than at the tail end of the program, as most firms do). 

I'd say this seems like a cold offer-esque ploy to get students to take other offers first, but, really, how many offers can rising 3Ls be expecting to get next summer? -3 each? 

Those lucky enough to land spots in Skadden's 2010 summer class will receive those offers on the same day--Sept. 22, which the firm has dubbed "Skadden Offer Day." The firm will continue to give those who receive offers 45 days to evaluate them in compliance with informal guidelines set by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP).

Skadden Offer Day! I'm envisioning the Hallmark cards now.

attack of the annoying networkers.

[dennis]

CNN just unleashed its list of “The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers.” Many of the listed annoyers are also rampant in the legal social networking world, such as “The Friend-Padder” “The Lurker” “The Self-Promoter.”

The hallmark of an annoying social networker is that he does not talk with you, but at you. He does not care about who you are or what you have to say because you exist for his benefit (ie. to increase his follower, friend, and visit counts.) This why the annoying networker constantly adds people on Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn that he has no interest in, and that he will never interact with.

The annoying networker uses his online friends, visitors, and followers as a way to appear “connected” when he is anything but. This type of spam-networking, or non-networking, is counterproductive because your 1,000 LinkedIn connections are rendered moot by a single connection who says “I don't really know him. He just randomly added me.”

Law students, especially unemployed law students, can quickly fall into this trap and turn off peers, lawyers, and recruiters.

Here are five ways to avoid being that guy or girl.

1. Think before you add: Do you really care what this person has to say or are you just adding the person to increase your audience? On LinkedIn, don’t add anyone that you would not be comfortable with a recruiter contacting.
2. Create, don’t aggregate: It's okay to occasionally link to something that you find interesting. But the majority of your tweets and blog posts should not be links or summaries of other people’s content. Contribute something original. Don’t clog our readers and feeds with content we already saw on law.com or Bitter Lawyer unless you're adding commentary or some other useful content. 
3. Brag not, bore not: Unlike a personal blog, social networking sites require that you think about your audience. Before posting, consider if you would be interested in reading your post if it was authored by someone else. Would you really care to read that someone is in the library again or working on a brief?
   
   This also applies to messaging. Don’t message your casual acquaintances and slip in comments about making law review or your recent A+ in torts. We will think you’re that guy. I promise.
   
   
4. Prestigious Eyes Test: AKA, avoid overshare. Before posting, ask yourself if you would be mortified if a recruiter or your law school’s dean saw your post, picture, or tweet. Also think about the impression you are giving your peers: I know of a student who did not get onto the law review editorial board soley because he kept tweeting about how miserable his first year on law review was.
5. Engage: the whole point of networking is to engage other people, or “add value,”  for others. This means writing meaningful replies to posts and tweets, and taking a genuine interest in what others have to say. Remember, if you don’t really want to engage other people then you don’t really want to network.

life in law school: please don't call on me, please don't call on me.

[julie anne]

If you're reading this, then I survived the three-day Chapman Law orientation and the first day of classes.

As far as orientation goes, I didn't know that just sitting around and getting talked at could be so tiring. As far as classes, I'm sure that today everyone was just as scared as I was, but hid it a whole lot better. 

If you go to my school and are in my class, I'm the shifty-eyed girl who sat in the front row of property who giggled nervously at the professor's jokes: yeah, those jokes are kinda funny, but, dude, what if he calls on me next?

All throughout that first class today, I had visions of being the one person in all of 1L-dom who couldn't regurgitate portions of the assigned cases.

I also imagined that I would somehow be found to be unsuitable for the rigors of law school in the manner that that emperor guy who wasn't wearing any clothes was found out.

I would march into the classroom, armored with and secure in the fact that I had prepared for class as best I could, but somehow someone - either the professor or a fellow law student seeking to draw first blood - would call me out and point that armor out to be flawed and inadequate.

"But mother, she doesn't belong in law school!"

Thankfully, I wasn't called on today. But it's only the first week of classes.

1L playbook: when to outline.

Ed. note:  I'm very pleased (thrilled, even) to introduce our newest blogger, Dennis Jansen. Dennis hails from the University of Minnesota, where he is a 2L. You can read more of Dennis's writing at his site, No634. I think you'll find him to be quite hilarious.

[dennis]

Last year, during my 1L orientation, Professor Doe came up to the podium of the lecture hall and said: “You should have already started your outlines. If you have not done so, start immediately.”

There was a visible wave of shock in the room, and I suspect that everyone was too busy panicking to listen to the rest of the speech.

After the speech, our orientation leaders herded us back to our home room and immediately did damage control. “Doe is a great professor but don’t listen to him,” they said, “that was bad advice.”

For the rest of the day, student presenters would come in and say, “I heard you guys got crazy advice from Professor Doe! Did he actually tell you to start outlining already?! Isn’t that crazy-talk?”

Professor Doe’s advice did seem like crazy-talk until about two weeks before fall finals when I realized that I had barely started outlining. 

I still think outlining on the first day of school is unworkable for most law students. Most 1Ls cannot produce any meaningful outlines (or even class notes) during the first few weeks of school, but I don’t recommend waiting until the last minute either. It’s not good for your heart. Trust me.

I also do not recommend stalking upperclassmen for their old outlines.

The purpose of outlining is the process, not the product. When you make your own outline you have to synthesize the material and figure out if there are any gaps in your notes. Some people call this process “studying.”

If you are completely lost in a course, remember to use the syllabus as your basic outline structure. You can supplement any gaps in your notes with a nutshell or the course outlines available on LexisNexis.

Be careful not to rely too heavily on outlines made for other professor's classes, because what Professor Doe will probably emphasize different things than Professor Smith.

For those 1Ls want some ideas on how and when to outline, here are some of the outlining schedules that I have noticed:

• The Sprinter – Don’t worry about outlining until the end of the semester when a small sense of panic sets in. This is the law school equivalent of cramming. Be careful, because the amount of cramming time that was okay for undergrad is probably inadequate for law school. This is what I did first semester, and I only recommend this method for the people who work well on adrenaline and caffeine, and those who suspect that they are, in fact, Chuck Norris.
• The Backtracker – Begin outlining during the last month of the semester. Spend a week on each class, and outline for your finals in reverse order (the first outline is for your last final). The theory is that outlining in reverse order will make the finals period easier because the information for your first final will be fresh in your mind and you will only have to review information for your subsequent finals because those outlines will already be done. This has worked for several of my classmates and works well for students who feel more comfortable with the extra review.
• The Rotator – Begin outlining about one month into the semester. Set aside a day each week to synthesize and outline the material for a single class. Focus on a different class each week and by the end of the semester your outlines will be mostly finished. This method also allows you to review material as the semester progresses, so you won’t completely forget the first month’s concepts by the end of the semester.
• By Chapter – Most professors will break down the reading assignments into units or chapters. An easy way to make progress with your outlines is to synthesize your notes for each of the course sections as you finish them. This is similar to the Rotator method, but a little less structured and more tailored to the natural stops and pauses in the semester. This is also a nice way to make sure there is no lingering confusion before you move on to the next portion of your class.

There are also plenty of students who don’t outline at all and use things like note cards and supplements. Because, as with most academic advice, you have to figure out what works best for you.

Good luck!

'tis the season for new students, new dreams.

Call it the last rite of summer, the annual migration of law students back to the classroom. 

With Hastings College of the Law starting up Monday, we spent time with an interesting student. Maria Juliana Escobar Gutirrez, a 24 year old LL.M. student, is already a lawyer in her native Colombia, where she has practiced criminal defense. 

Drawn to law by her mother Blanca, a judge in criminal court, Gutirrez started studying law at Rosario University in Bogota at 15, getting her J.D. at age 21. She’s starting at Hastings this year to pursue a specialty in international law and human rights.

Check out her story below.

"new" trend: cancel that summer shit.

[cynthia]

I've added a few more firms to the 2010 summer program/offer table. Among them: Howard Rice and Loeb & Loeb, both of which have canceled their summer programs entirely. The latter went whole hog and canceled its summer program "indefinitely." Whoa! New trend? Possibly.

In the meantime, check out how many of the firms on the list have canceled their programs outright. I'm bad at math, but it looks like a large percentage. Are we witnessing the death of the summer associate right in front of our eyes?

What do you think?