If you’re feeling anxious about upcoming interviews for your first “legal” job, that’s normal. Here’s some advice from the 100 or so law-student interviews I’ve conducted.

1. BE YOURSELF. The best job interviews proceed like a normal conversation.

🔹 Do not recite rehearsed answers.

Dear 1L, Legal research takes time. How do you know when you’ve done enough? Follow this checklist:

1. Find, pull, and skim three relevant cases (from secondary sources, sample briefs, searches under keywords & headnotes, etc.).

Dear 1L, One job I do is reviewing writing samples for lawyers and law students who are applying to legal jobs. Here’s a strong suggestion:

Include a short cover memo with your writing sample—even if an employer doesn’t require one.

Why?

Dear 1L, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan reportedly was unhappy about her 1L fall grades.

True, she was at Harvard, but her B and B- grades from her first fall were not something she was eager to “write home about.”

Dear 1L, I hope you are ok. Everyone is in some state of reeling, it seems, this weekend.

My message is that you did nothing wrong. It is just the brutal curve. 90% or more of you will not be in the top. You are, in no way, alone.

I do not fully understand why law schools grade this way, or why the curve at one law school can be so dramatically different from that at another.

🔷 Check the formatting of your punctuation marks. 🔷

1st:

If you have commas, semicolons, or periods at the end of bolded, underlined titles, is the punctuation also bolded & underlined? Should it be?

Dear 1L, You should include your LinkedIn address (your .url) with your email and phone number at the top of your resume.

➖ Did you know you can also customize your LinkedIn address to remove all the extraneous numbers & letters that come with your default .url?

Dear 1L, I’ve seen 100s of 1L resumes over the years. I typically see them after an office-of-career-services (OCS) review, and after you think the resume is “final.” Here’s the problem:

I still catch nits & formatting errors.

PLEASE, before sending to any prospective employer, run these 4 tests:

Thank you, Renée A.

Wow.

💌 Amanda

Here is my return thank-you, which I shared earlier with Renee when requesting permission for this post.

***

Also, we’re in limbo this week. It is still a holiday week, but

-Christmas is over,

-there is no schedule to any day, and

-January starts this weekend.

So we are “supposed” to be relaxing, but the specter of everything that we have to do looms.

1: Sleep.

2: Play.

3: Veg.

4: Repeat!!

Sending huge kudos to all.

🔹 1: “Tsundoku” is a Japanese term for the practice of acquiring many books & “shelving” them, unread.

—While I work on limiting my book-buying habit, I’m comforted to know both that there’s a name for it & that I’m not the only one prone to it!

🔹 2: Don’t fall victim to “the sunk cost fallacy.”

These are 10 things I learned about in 2022 via LinkedIn (Part 1):

1️⃣ Be careful when “building on rented land.”

If you build up a following on a social media platform, remember that you don’t own it. Everything could be stripped from you in the blink of an eye. Even if you did nothing wrong.

1:  WORK THE PROBLEM.

    Don’t rush to try to figure out the conclusion to an essay question. You need to “work the problem” first.

    When you’re brainstorming and outlining before you start writing, go through each claim element (or legal-test factor) one-by-one; consider all hypo facts that favor each side BEFORE reaching any conclusions about anything.