Friday, May 27, 2011

Book Review. Law School: Getting In - Getting Good - Getting the Gold, Part one: Getting In

Thane Messenger was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, "Law School:  Getting In - Getting Good - Getting the Gold".  I'm going to give a review of it here.

"Getting In"

In the grand tradition that things were always better in the past, it is probably true that for law school students, things actually were better in the past.  It was easier to get into law school.  It didn't cost as much.

Now, stakes are pretty high.  Admissions are very competitive.  The cost is astronomical.  Perhaps most important:  a large number of people in law school will never really get good jobs.  Moreso than at any other time, a bunch of folks will really regret having attended law school, because they made a lot of bad decisions along the way.

A large part of the reason it took me this long to go to Law School is that I really didn't know what I was doing.  I didn't understand how things really worked.  Some of the guidance I got was actually wrong.

In a way, I feel like this book came to me 20 years too late.  There's a lot of advice out there about Law School, and a lot of it isn't very good.  There are a lot of misconceptions. 

Some kids are lucky.  There's a reason why Ken Griffey Jr and Sandy Alomar Jr. were major leaguers.  There's a lot of genetic lottery luck in there.  However, they also happened to grow up in the households of Ken Griffey and Sandy Alomar, respectively.

They didn't have to guess what to do or how to do it.  They had an expert in the house to help them figure it out.

To some degree, I think this happens with college educated people, too.  Children of doctors seem disproportionately to become doctors.  My father and two uncles worked in computers.  When you have a role-model who shows you the way, it is a lot easier to walk down a certain path.

I used to have a friend named Beth (not her real name) who went to law school, got a biggo job with biggo money and was a superlawyer.  Her father was also a very famous litigator in New York City.  It's not an accident that she knew what she had to do in order to get into a good law school.  Nor is it an accident that she knew what to do once in law school in order to land a dream-job upon graduation.

This book, to me, is a bit like having somebody explain those secret handshakes.  The first third goes into quite a bit of detail on everything involved in getting into law school.  I really, really wish I'd had this book 20 years ago.  My life probably would have played out entirely differently.

I did have the feeling, as I went through the "getting in" part, that I knew a lot of what he was saying, already.  Thing is, this is something I've been contemplating for 20 years.  When I was a recent college graduate, I knew, at best, maybe 10% of the stuff I knew before I read this book.

The book basically confirmed nearly everything I had already formed an impression on.  It also added to that knowledge.

In a way, that's really saying something.  I spent 20 years gaining this information and the book actually added considerably to it.

The book goes into a great deal of depth about the importance of the LSAT.  I actually wish I had read that part prior to taking the LSAT in the Spring.  I would have gotten a better score, and probably a better scholarship, if my head had been on straight, there.

It explains quite a bit about the admissions process.  Touches on things to do before you start law school.  I feel good that I was doing most of this stuff right.  However, if I had tried going to law school 20 years ago, knowing only what I knew then, it would have been an unmitigated disaster, to be certain.

The book goes at length about law school rankings, the importance of selecting some schools over others, and other realities that, frankly, sometimes are a slap in the face.

People who don't know can form reasonable-sounding opinions based on common sense.  Unfortunately, that doesn't always work in the real world.

The tidbits of wisdom in the book are almost too numerous to mention.  For instance, are part-time programs as good as full-time?  Do the rankings really matter?  Which schools should you shoot for?  What implications do they have for your career?

In a way, this reminds me of something a guy once said in a video on getting good college grades.  Basically, it boiled down to, "If you really wanted to help your kids, you would not just say 'hey, be careful out there'.  You'd give them specific tidbits of information, one at a time, when they leave, like, 'if you're at a stoplight, dont' turn your wheels to the left while stopped, even if you're going to make a lefthand turn.  If you do, and you get rear-ended, you could get pushed into oncoming traffic and a head-on collission'."

That's a bit what this book is like.  Instead of general platitudes like, "get into the best school you can", it tells you what schools those are, and how you can do it.

I don't want to publish much of the content of the book since I think that'd be unfair to the author.  Suffice to say that I found it to be a great education in the subject of getting in to a law school that can get your career started.  Again, I wish somebody had given me this information 20 years ago. 

"Getting Good" and "Getting the Gold"

The advice in this section is partly common sense, but partly some stuff that's not very intuitive.  He focuses on what to spend your time on, how much time to spend, etc.  He also references some other resources such as LEEWS. 

It does help having a guide on this section, since once law school starts, it's almost too late to do what it takes to be a top performer. 



As for Getting the Gold, the book goes into some depth as to how few jobs are really the big money jobs that many folks envision when they enter law school. 

This section ties in a little bit with "getting good" as it describes what's important to employers.  (For instance, it addresses the question of law review or not, and whether to pursue part time or summer work.)

Again, like the first section, this is stuff you could find out if you could talk to countless top graduates, but if you can't, then this book does a great job of summing it up.

I would go so far as to say that if a person is contemplating law school and doesn't already know everything in the book, that they shouldn't make the leap before getting the information.  If you can get it from your uncle who is a partner at one of the largest law firms in town, good for you.

However, if you can't get it anywhere else, this book is a great place to find the information in one convenient source.

The link is at the bottom, here.  I get no sort of referral and I'm not even an Amazon partner.  So, my recommendation is based only on my opinion of the material:

http://www.amazon.com/Law-School-Getting-Good-Gold/dp/1888960809

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

CWRU Calls Today

Got a call on the cell from a 216 number.  Couldn't imagine who it would be, but it turned out to be CWRU Law.  If we rewind a little bit, CWRU Law rejected me outright a few months back.  I was a little stunned at the time.  I wasn't even waitlisted.  I was one of the "Wow, you really don't belong here" guys.

Now, I really didn't intend to attend CWRU.  It was a bit of an ego-stroke thing.  I wanted to be accepted.  I also graduated from CWRU b-school.  So, I guess there was a sort of sentimental angle to wanting to be accepted to the law school. 

The caller said they're re-evaluating some of the applicants based on some sort of new or revised criteria.  She asked if anything had changed in my circumstances or whether I would be interested in them taking another look at my application packet.

In all honesty, I was going to go to U of Toledo all along, anyway.  They actually came through with a $10,000 a year scholarship.  (Roughly half-ride.)  So, they've been pretty good to me so far.  As sure as I was that I was going there before, once I got the scholarship, that pretty much sealed it. 

For the briefest of moments, I considered lying just to see if they'd re-consider my app and perhaps admit me.  However, I simply told them the truth:  that I have decided to go to a different school.