Law School Discussion

Quote from: Miss P on November 05, 2006, 03:17:36 PM

I know a handful of recent grads from Fordham who all had federal clerkships (two circuit-level) and ended up with essentially the jobs of their choice.  They were all in the top 10% of the class and came into school with scholarships and other predictors of success.  I'm sure other people in the top half of the class do just fine in the NYC market, but they're certainly not at Skadden in the same numbers as CLS grads.  The OP didn't seem that interested in biglaw, however.  I think the answer is that Fordham is a very fine school if you are not absolutely committed to the most competitive jobs (V10, etc.)

Do you know what the starting salary difference is between biglaw and whatever the next "lower tier" is? The last I heard, biglaw was mostly starting at $145k in NYC.

biglaw firms give 2L summer associates $2900 A WEEK... A FREAKING WEEK...

Last year Cardozo law school actually called me in June, a few months after I was accepted, and said that they might have some money left over to give if I chose to attend.  A few of my friends received similar offers from various law schools so even schools that you are no longer considering may come back and try to offer you some money to get you to come. 

I usually have to do about 40-50 pages of reading a day.  It took me about 4-5 hours to read all that in the first 2-3 weeks of law school.  Once I learned how to efficiently brief cases, i'm getting through 40-50 pages within 2 hours... and that includes random IM's, bathroom breaks, and LSD checking

The first two months of law school is really not that bad.  You don't have any major assignments to worry about and a lot of the classes are straightforward.  Law school starts getting very difficult and stressful once your open memo is due.  There you will have to manage a very time-consuming research assignment while keeping up with reading assignments.  FInal exams begin about a month or so after you hand in the first draft of your memo so you need to start worrying about outlining at this point.  At this point classes also start to get very confusing because you begin to learn about the more complicated areas in the law like the Erie Doctrine.... 

In my opinion the forced curve makes law school the most difficult.  You can't simply do your best or perform well.  You have to perform better than a certain percentage of your classmates.  You have to worry about the legal geniuses that seem to understand everything after reading the case once and the overachievers that spend 95% of their free time just studying.  You certainly don't have to be a legal genius and you don't need to spend all of your free time studying to do well but they are your competition and you have to deal with it. 

That is actually the same exact timer I brought into my October LSAT.  I actually had no idea that you could turn off the sound function.  I had to use a screwdriver to open it up and I removed the wire that caused it to beep.  Being the jerk that I am I then exchanged the soundless timer for a new one.  Hope this helps.

For the love of God...
PLEASE PURCHASE A LAPTOP COOLER!
I had a Dell Laptop 2 years ago and my motherboard melted because the thing got so incredibly hot.  It costs about $30 for a decent laptop cooler and it should prevent your laptop from melting to death.  A laptop cooler is a fan that sits under your computer and blows cool air at it.  It is usually powered via a USB port.  Bringing a laptop cooler to class might not be the best idea but if you're using the laptop in your room, it would be wise to have it hooked up to a cooler.