iLawStudent.com

December 18, 2009

Warning to Those Applying to Law School

Filed under: Law School Tips — Tags: , , , , — Kris @ 2:48 pm

I was talking to some “pre-law students” the other day in the cafeteria, answering any questions they had while dishing out some independent advice. One of the most important things an entering law student should know before going in is the legal market is saturated. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone from entering law school that wants to. There will always be positions for those who are talented and knowledgeable. What I am saying is that an overwhelming number of law school graduates are flooding the legal scene (in Texas and around the nation) and there will be less pay and less jobs to go around.

Along these lines, don’t go to law school because it’s something to do when you get a weak degree. Go because you have a genuine desire to work in the law. If not, law school is too expensive just to collect another diploma. Head to business school or some other higher education path if you’re heart isn’t in the law.

August 18, 2009

Tie Up Loose Ends Before Law School

Filed under: Law School Tips — Tags: , , — Kris @ 9:05 pm

Law school is about to start.  Before it does, make sure you get everything else out of the way so you can concentrate on your school work.  If you’ve read this law student blog before, you know I highly recommend bursting through any procrastination you might have.  This applies to non-school work to.

Two big items are law school loans and textbooks.  Make sure you have these taken care of and you’ll save yourself headaches in the very near future.  Also, other to-dos include getting back on a school schedule with workouts included, washing clothes, cleaning your room and car, and eating breakfast.

April 8, 2009

Procrastination In Law School

Filed under: Law School Tips — Kris @ 6:29 pm

The students I admire most in law school are the ones that are able to go right through their homework.  My biggest achilles heel when studying is procrastination.  I know other students suffer from the same problem.  I think the best cure is just to attack your assignments head on and not try to ease into them.  For example, just take a 4 hour block of time and tell yourself for the next four hours I’m studying evidence.

Studying in concentrated blocks of time improves efficiency and helps you retain the information better.  If you’re fragmenting off bits of time for breaks, talking, Internet, etc. then you won’t retain the information as well and it won’t strongly connect to other parts of the subject area.  Also, fragmenting usually ends up taking much longer than had you just run through the material straight.

Sit at an empty table, grab a water and a snack and start studying.

February 4, 2009

Law School Job Services

Filed under: Legal Careers — Kris @ 8:10 pm

Today our law school had representatives from the different types of jobs in the legal sector share insight on their respective fields.  The contact ratio was awesome at 1:1.  I spoke with a solo practicioner, corporate lawyer, small firm lawyer, federal government attorney, and local district attorney.

I’m not directly interested in all of those jobs, but I did want to here what different people are saying within the industry and get a pulse for the legal market.

I went to the solo practitioner first.  No surprise here.  I want to start my own practice/firm.  I discovered one particularly valuable gem that I did not know.  The attorney recommended I share a law office with other lawyers to get clients.  He said this was the source of most of his work.  I was planning on a smaller office for less cost, but that his idea has been noted.  I tried to ask him as many practical questions as I could and he shared some of his experiences, but after 5 or so minutes I think he was ready to be done.  Another positive from this question and answer session was he reaffirmed a lot of my initial thoughts on going solo.

I next went to the small firm representative just to get acquainted on what was going on and indirectly ask for a blueprint on starting my own.  She indicated she worked about 60-70 hours a week for decent but not great pay.  She wasn’t a partner and had no desire to be one or go anywhere else.  The firm only concentrated on family law.  She seemed genuinely satisfied with it and that’s great for her, but not for me.  I thanked her and headed to the corporate law table.

The corporate world has sounded appealing to me, but after hearing the advice on getting into the exclusive world of corporate law I started removing any interest in that realm.  The corporate attorney advised I work 4 or 5 years in a non-legal setting for what niche I want to go into and then apply to a corporate position.  My life isn’t that long.  I’m not going into 4 or 5 years of anything.  What if I decide I don’t like the legal aspect of the niche once I get into a corporate setting?  Good insight on the difficulty of entering corporate law and undoubtedly sound in the advice of becoming involved in the technical aspect of subjects, but 5 years is a long time and I’m way too diverse in my interests to concentrate on any one thing that long.  I need to be all over the place.  I take into account she was just providing one opinion, but it would have taken a lot of incentives just for me to seriously consider corporate law anyways.

I had noticed the federal law table ever since I stepped into the “fair” or whatever it was called.  The lawyer at the table only had one person stop by for the 30 minutes I had skipped tables.  Its always good to visit the underappreciated tables because their is a good chance they’ll be eager to talk with you.  In this case, that wasn’t the case.  The attorney from a subdivision within a government office wasn’t particularly enthused to be there.  I asked him if I could speak with him for a few minutes and he replied with a meager answer of yeah I guess so or something to that tune.  The “fair” was about to close in 10 minutes so its safe to say he was ready to end his 2 hours of being on display.  However, once I started talking with him he started sharing some light into the governmental legal world.  The most interesting highlight was that there was currently a job freeze.  He also noted that not all government jobs are listed on their job site so keep that in mind if you’re looking.  You may have to dig deeper to find different areas of legal spots.

Finally, I went to the district attorney table.  As you might expect, the average age here was much less than the rest of the room.  The “fair” was closed but I hung around to look at the pamphlet-type information and see if any of them came back.  Sure enough one DA did and was very friendly/helpful.  He was also very close to my age (just by looks) so that helped with a more candid conversation.  He also said there was currently a job freeze, but that it could be lifted at any time.  Very interesting @ the 2 jobs freezes.  However, he suggested I contact the office if I was interested in an internship and seemingly left the possibility of getting one at very high.

January 16, 2009

Westlaw Rewards

Filed under: Law Student — Kris @ 3:17 pm

Or Lexis Rewards.  I wish I had the patience to keep up with the daily offers and research points, but I just don’t have the discipline.  If you do, there are some tremendous prizes waiting at the end of the rainbow.  You can also help yourself become more familiar with using these two legal search engines more efficiently.  This is certainly a valuable trait should you need to research caselaw at your job.  It also helps to know the system when you’re writing any article or paper.  On that note, both are very amenable to providing live help with your paper.  In fact, I believe Westlaw support is available 247.

January 14, 2009

There are Two Types of Geniuses

Filed under: Law — Kris @ 7:56 am

One takes complex things and makes them simple and one takes simple things and makes them complex.  I don’t know if this was my professor’s (Professor Liu) own, but it definitely sounded good.  He was talking about Posner when he mentioned this.  Posner would be someone who makes things more complex.  I’m always amazed by those that make things simple.  Its no coincidence that all of my favorite professors have this trait.  I much prefer straight forward, blunt truths or opinions than cleverly worded wizardry.

January 13, 2009

Cornell Using Google Adsense

Filed under: Internet — Kris @ 5:12 pm

This is very surprising.  Yesterday I was searching for FRE 401 and came up with the Cornell Law web page on the Federal Rules of Evidence.  Apparently Cornell now uses Google Adsense to offset the costs of their website.  I’m not knocking it.  It’s always good to make money when you can, but this is very surprising for an institution of Cornell’s stature to use pay per click ads.

The implementation of the single banner ad does raise questions though.  Although not technically against the Google adsense policy of encouraging clicks, they certainly do create the suggestion you click on them.  Right above the ads, the pages read “Donations cover only 20% of our costs.”  Wow.  Definitely pushing the limits here.

January 9, 2009

Craig Ball – A Must Read

Filed under: Law — Tags: — Kris @ 5:45 am

If you don’t know who Craig Ball is, you should.  Mr. Ball is the front running expert in law and technology.  I actually had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Ball speak at a CLE this summer over e-discovery and he was simply amazing.  His knowledge is supreme and his delivery was fantastic.  You can read a list of his publications at CraigBall.com.  You can also see a list of his upcoming speaking engagements.  

I was lucky enough to attend this CLE for free.  A professor sent out an email inviting students to come, but very few attended.  I’m under the impression CLE’s usually aren’t very exciting but I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  It was definitely one to remember.  They even handed out binders stuffed with information packed articles on technology, how to leverage it, and so much more.  I need to go take a look at that notebook and reread some of the information.

Although you don’t have the notebook, a lot of the Ball information is on his website and you can find more searching Google or Westlaw.  

I had a chance to briefly meet Ball afterwards.  Really nice guy and his intelligence is off the charts.

January 5, 2009

Grades Finally to be Released

Filed under: Cases, Law Student, Legal Careers — Kris @ 1:56 pm

Initially it was January 2nd.  Then January second became January 5th.  Now that day has arrived and I am very anxious to see my grades.  At the same time, I feel the school has let down the students.  We work very hard for our grades so understandably we want to see the results of our studying.  To delay the possible release of the grades until January 5th is over the top.

Understand that if a professor hasn’t turned the grades in yet, I am aware they can not post them.  If a professor lazily submits grades in February, that’s another critique.  In this case, I know two of my four professors were ready to turn in grades two weeks ago, if not sooner.  I would really like to see those grades if at all possible, but I can’t because of some bureaucratic reason or another.   [Edit: The following sentence is an update.] Our associate dean has sent out two emails telling students not to email or call about grades and reminded us the school was closed for the holidays as if the only thing stopping them was those coldhearts from the University.  I can just imagine the dean and staff right now, sledgehammers in hand, trying to bust through the locks so they could get the grades in.  The only thing stopping them would be an army of security and campus police force strictly enforcing that nobody touch campus property until the school calendar said so.

What it all comes down to for me is this: We pay $798 per hour.  There are roughly 1,000 students attending law school averaging somewhere around 13 hours.  That adds to $10,374,000 per semester.  So $10,000,000 per semester and they can’t get our grades in ASAP?  It’s ridiculous if you think about it.  I’m not asking for anyone to work Christmas Eve or Christmas, but I would expect the administrative staff to be able to imput the grades within a week of receiving them.  After all, law school is education but it’s still a business.  From my understanding, the teachers hadn’t even been given scoring sheets to turn in by January (got an email from a professor).  Thus, the expected date moved back.  What probably happened was they saw the 2nd fell on a Friday and decided to get in one last weekend.

I’ll probably talk to some of the student organizations and see if we can do anything about this for next Christmas break.  I think the grades were up to the professors in the Spring.

December 31, 2008

Arizona DUI Law: The Blood Test

Filed under: Law — Kris @ 9:36 pm

Here is the story that got me on this subject:

Charles Barkley was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol early Wednesday.

Charles BarkleyBarkley

An officer with a task force that targets drunken driving saw the former NBA star run a stop sign about 1:30 a.m., Gilbert police Lt. Eric Shuhandler said. Barkley was in Scottsdale’s Old Town area, a trendy spot in the Phoenix area. “I am disappointed that I put myself in that situation,” Barkley said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The Scottsdale police were fantastic. Now it is a legal matter and I will not comment any further as it is a legal matter.” The 45-year-old Barkley, now an NBA television commentator, failed standard field sobriety tests after the officer smelled alcohol on him, and he was arrested. Barkley declined to submit to a breath test but was given a blood test. The results weren’t immediately available.

The text is from ESPN.  I’m really opposed to the idea of a forced blood test.  One should not be forced to give blood whether or not it tends to negate or prove innocence.  I would contend that a non consensual withdrawal of blood is an unreasonable search and seizure and is in violation of the Constitution.  This law needs to be changed.  A person’s skin should not be pierced by a police officer, no matter how much pressure there is/was to pass such an amendment to the current DUI law.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress