Today was my last day of classes. I have four finals to take over the next two weeks. Then, no grades until February. However, as I have completed my first semester, I thought I would share the lessons of my first four months as a law student. I do not know how valid these lessons will be going forward, but looking back I wish I'd known these things from the beginning.

One: Briefing cases is all well and good, but it's probably more important to outline, make flashcards, or otherwise look to the "big picture" from the beginning. Many 2L and 3L students said the opposite; I should have ignored their advice. Several professors even suggested that attempting to outline was probably unnecessary until mid-way through the semester. This just puts a lot of work and cramming off until the last few weeks of class. This past week it felt like classes were getting in the way of finals preparation! Briefing cases is important for day-to-day class preparation, but memorizing certain terms and working on a course outline while concepts were fresh would, I believe, have better prepared me. I guess we'll see at the end of next semester whether I'm right.

Two: It doesn't pay to read ahead. This is a small lesson I learned early on. Reading more than a day in advance left concepts insufficiently fresh for adequate response to whatever my professors had in mind.

Three: Even when you're prepared, you're not prepared. I did all of my reading and I never missed a class, all semester long. I almost never felt unprepared at the beginning of class. And yet my professors on more than one occasion would present a question that I simply could not answer. I would stammer something and they would get that look in their eye--if you go to law school, you'll know this look. It is a look that says, "Slacker! I see you didn't do the assigned reading! So here you are wasting everyone's time with your inadequate responses." It is not a fun look. Protesting will do you no good. The assumption is never he didn't understand. The assumption is always he didn't prepare. This is frustrating, but you must let it go. There's nothing you can do, and your chance to shine will come around again eventually. Or not, at which point you can take solace in the anonymity granted for final exams (Okay, so maybe Chris Langdell did one thing right).

Four: Law school is a trade school. No matter how smart you are, no matter how great your school is, academic approaches to the law take a back seat to judicial approaches to the law. The irony, of course, is that the other thing in the back seat is practical lawyer skills. So you get neither the practical approach to lawyering wherein applicable skills might be imparted, nor the academic approach to lawyering wherein one might discuss the law as it ought to be. I've made my peace, more or less, with the third approach, namely, the rigorous attempt to teach students to "think like lawyers." Ostensibly, this is to bridge the gap between academic undergraduate work and practical legal work, neither of which actually have much place in the law school. I need to think about this further, there's something wrong with it... but the point is, I didn't know what I was getting into. I do now, and it's fine, but I was not entirely prepared for the experience.

I think that's it. I'll retcon this entry if I think of more. One semester almost over--exciting! That's almost 17% of law school over and done.