The Shark

access group announces $10,000 scholarship winner

[julie anne]

The votes are in, and the winner of Access Group's "My Inspiration" scholarship contest for law students is none other than Branigan Robertson, a fellow 1L of mine at the Chapman University School of Law.

For his funny and honest video of why he was inspired to go to law school - justice, cute baby seals, and all that jazz - Robertson gets a $10,000 scholarship to use for school expenses. Score! He also got a Starbucks card after his video was shown at the Chapman Law 1L orientation. Double score!

That should make a dent in the $32,950 for a full year's tuition at the private university.

To be honest, Branigan wasn't my first choice, but he was high up on my list of favorites in the top 10 videos submitted to the competition. In full disclosure, I had no idea what schools the contestants attended before I ranked the videos.

Contestants who received honorable mentions and a $1,500 scholarship are:

• John Grimm of the Georgetown University Law Center - Honorable Mention for Quality
• Ted Cardos of the New York University School of Law - Honorable Mention for Humor
• Anna Grace of Northeastern Law School - Honorable Mention for Realism
• Ana De Frates of the South Texas College of Law - Honorable Mention for Creativity
• Joseph Duerst of the Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law - Honorable Mention for Appeal

Congratulations to all the winners! Take a look at their videos here.

first year humiliation: a rite of passage, always.

[julie anne]

From standing in line at the university business office next to 2Ls and 3Ls, from passing by more experienced students in the hallways in my first full week of school, and from being laughed at by the 2L boyfriend for my primeval 1L law school student ways, I have learned there are certain things that just scream "1L law school noob".

Are you channeling Quasimodo by having a ginormous backpack filled to the brim with ginormous casebooks, and cluttered with a rainbow of pens and highlighters? You just might be a 1L law school noob.

Upon entering the law school library, do you gracelessly struggle to get out your ID, attempting to balance your casebooks and coffee mug, while 2Ls and 3Ls brush on past (which happened to me this morning)? You just might be a 1L law school noob.

Do you highlight every single sentence in your casebooks because, dude, everything is important? Does the sight of your professor riffling through the class roster or even anything slightly resembling that (i.e. your date flipping through a menu, your dog digging in the backyard, etc.) make you break out into a cold sweat? Do you dream, as I did, about the horror of your casebriefs suddenly being deleted and being replaced with tons of photos containing Photo-Crashing Squirrel? 

And do you write a blog post during a cancelled class when you should really be reading ahead and briefing more cases? Then you definitely are a law school noob.

Calling all 2Ls, 3Ls, law school survivors and professors. What things do us 1Ls do that are a dead giveaway that we are 1Ls? Feel free to comment below!

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.

'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.

more from orientation: a view from a non-traditional law student

[julie anne]

One of the surprises I received during my first day of orientation at the Chapman University School of Law was running into an old coworker who writes a column at the newspaper I used to work for.

Turns out, he's following in the foot steps of his daughter, a recent law school grad, and going back to school after being out for 27 years.

Here's a bit from his column, which appeared Wednesday in the Orange County Register:

"The road to law school at 50 could be a column itself. Ever try to find out from a J.C. you attended 30 years ago what a cryptically ominous 'action taken' on a transcript means? Ever try to keep pace with a bunch of too-smart-by-half twentysomethings in a three-month banzai-run of a prep class for a Law School Admissions Test that has nothing to do with law?"

Read his column in full here.

life in law school: orientation! (wear comfortable shoes.)

[julie anne]

There are a several things I learned yesterday, during the Chapman School of Law 1L orientation.

First, law school orientation means swag. 

After signing in during orientation registration, the nice people behind the table handed me a nifty messenger bag with law school merch inside. I'm talking a lunch bag, an accordion file folder, a 1GB flash drive and a nice pen in a nice box. Awesome because I had yet to purchase a flash drive and was planning to purchase one. Not so awesome because I had decided to walk to school that morning.

Which brings me to the second thing I learned yesterday: Your business casual shoes that were kinda comfortable when you put them on at 7 a.m. are not so comfortable when you've been running around to get your student parking pass, your student ID, and your law books. 

My feet were so angry at me by the end of the day, that I decided to just wait on the hefty law tomes because I knew there was no way I was going to be lugging them home in addition to my laptop bag and my swag bag.

The third and final thing I learned yesterday - in addition to the usual stuff about succeeding in law school, being healthy in law school, not being a smelly hermit, etc. -  is that law school students are not so scary as they are sometimes made out to be and as I had imagined them to be.

Besides the tons of people who introduced themselves early on during orientation, the law students we were assigned to sit with during the lunch hour were more than willing to give us pointers on surviving law school, and also volunteered honest evaluations of some of the teachers listed on our schedules.

Sure, there were students who made unnecessary comments during some sessions, and some people who had already formed cliques and had erected their clique-y walls, but on the whole, everyone I met was friendly and open.

Turns out that the only enemies I had that day were my angry, mutinous feet.

help give $10,000 to a fellow law student

[julie anne]

What would you do for a $10,000 scholarship to (help) fund your legal education?

Would you channel your inner film noir detective? Would you rap about what inspired you to go to law school? Would you unveil your deep dark secret Billie Mays fetish?

Law students who submitted videos for and made the top 10 of Access Group's "My Inspiration" contest did.

In the contest, law students were asked to submit videos describing what inspired them to attend law school, and 10 finalists were selected from 113 eligible videos. Voters now have the opportunity to vote for their favorites through Aug. 21.

The creator of the video with the most votes gets $10,000 for school, and up to five other videos, voted on by Access Group judges, get $1,500

Sounds like an easy 10 grand, right? Just slap together a video with a family member’s camcorder of you reading your law school admission essay, and you’re golden.

Not so fast there, Mr. Demille.

Turns out, law students – surprise, surprise – went above and beyond the YouTube quality vlog and put together some pretty elaborate, professional-looking videos

Here's the list of the finalists - and their respective schools, courtesy of Access Group - from my least favorite to the one that gets my vote:

don't send the wrong message with a message tee.

[julie anne]

As previously discussed here on The Shark, there is no shortage of advice on the Interwebz on how to nail the "business casual" dress code for 1L orientation. What there is a shortage of, however, is what to wear on the days following orientation week.

According to The Boyfriend - who, if you'll recall, is heading into his second year of law school - his fellow classmates started off dressing fairly neatly: the guys wore shirts with collars and nicely pressed pants, the women avoided sweatpants that displayed any, um, cheeky verb ending in "y" across their bottoms.

But as the year wore on and especially as finals rolled around, he noticed law school fashion entropy in action: flip flops replaced shoes as the footwear of choice, and daily grooming became optional rather than mandatory.

With you all as my witness, I will not be one of those people.

So what should we wear to class?

My guess is any outfit that is comfortable and respectful of your professors and fellow students. And by respectful, I don't mean you have to be funeral chic. Just don't wear something that would make people nervous about looking in the wrong place or approaching you for fear of being engulfed in a cloud of noxious fumes.

Ladies, that means avoiding low-cut blouses that could possibly lead to a wardrobe malfunction. Gentlemen, that means not looking homeless.

And for ladies and gentlemen, it would probably be a wise idea - at least until professors and your fellow students get to know you - to avoid message tees that could send the wrong message.

Here's a list of my top 11 favorite message shirts from CafePress in no particular order.

1. Don't Call On Me
2. I (Heart) Slutty 1Ls
3. No Comment
4. I'm With Gunner -->
5. Where is this class going and why am I in this handbasket?
6. Gunner
7. I'm really excited to be here (Why? See #6)
8. The problem with law books? No pictures!
9. Do not disturb
10. Don't bother. I have no idea.
11. Keep your hypotheticals to yourself

Got a funny law school shirt idea? Share below!

what to wear to law school orientation?

[julie anne]

As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. The same holds true for law school orientation, which, for other soon-to-be 1Ls like myself, is only a couple of weeks away.

Ladies, you do not want to be "that girl." You know, the Elle Woods wannabe who insists on wearing the pink velour jumpsuit that reveals a tramp stamp when she sits down, or the bedraggled "slutty hobo" that blawger Jansen Dennis encountered during his first year orientation at the University of Minnesota Law School.

And gentlemen, you do not want to be "ewww." Do not pop your collar. Do not bathe in Axe Body Spray or similar body scent. Do not wear flipflops, and, if you insist on doing so, please keep the toes looking as un-Hobbit-like as possible. We at law school orientation do not want to lose our first and/or second breakfasts staring at your hairy feet.

With this in mind, I started swimming through the clothes in my closet looking for orientation outfits after I received my Chapman Law packet requesting that 1Ls wear "business casual" for this first of many law school rites of passage. 

I had seen the dress code before when I used to work in a newsroom, but the outfits I encountered were on the more casual end of the "fashion" spectrum. If memory serves, I think there were even Hawaiian shirts involved.

With no other point of reference, I turned to my old friend the Interwebz for guidance, where there is no shortage of tips for getting the right balance of business and casual.

For starters, there's Polyvore, a site that my super-fashionable cuz introduced me to. You can sift through clothing collages - or "sets" as they're called - for inspiration on outfits. I did a quick search for "business casual", and loved the "Green Can Make Things More Interesting" set and this untitled set.

You can also take the advice of blawgers Dennis, of No634, and Huma Rashid, of Reasonably Prudent Law Student, who offer great ideas of what and what not to wear.

With all the researching, I still don't know exactly what threads I'm going to be rockin' come orientation day, but I do have a better idea of what to shoot for. Dressy black pants, maybe. Daisy Dukes, no go.

Got ideas for what to wear to law school orientation, or have a story of a super horrible law school orientation outfit that you or another student wore? As always, feel free to post below!