Dear 1L (Rising 2L?),

It seems cruel. Your “reward” for finishing the hardest year of law school is staying around to do an onerous Bluebook test and—yet another—big legal-writing project.

I would be SO tempted to skip the whole thing.

Mother’s Day

I’m starting a list of tips for students and new graduates who’ll be starting their first “lawyer” jobs at law firms soon.

I hope you can help me add to and improve the list.

There have been times in my life that were very, very serious.

20 yrs. BigLaw. So, so serious.

When a daughter would say,

Mommy, come play—

I would say no,

When my LinkedIn notifications stopped being reliable, I looked for another way to make sure I kept up with my friends’ and fellow creators’ posts.

First I tried looking up all the names that I could think of off the top of my head, and I checked their profiles. Sure enough, they had posts I’d never seen.

I once had a debate with a BigLaw partner over the expression, “The game is not worth the candle.” He wanted to include it in our federal, 4th Circuit brief.

I had never heard the saying before, and, after looking it up, I was even more sure it was too obscure for a brief. We didn’t want to sound pedantic (~snooty in a scholarly way), I pleaded with this partner.

Sometimes, when a final (or a bar exam) was just days away, I would still be trying to master a lot of concepts and memorize rules. I just didn’t have it in me to take practice tests.

So I didn’t try.

I just read a lot of model essay answers.

Dear 1L,

Don’t forget to answer these questions to earn extra points in your exam essays:

1. Is there a fact that, if different, would change your conclusion?

2. Would your conclusion differ if the case were judged at another time in history?

Dear 1L,

Create an exam ritual to stamp out nerves on test day.

Here’s what worked for me.

Quickly, but methodically, I skimmed the entire exam to assess:

I hope you start!

Giving a TL to someone means relaying a compliment about them that came from another person (i.e., from a complimenter you heard or overheard.)

Here’s an example:

I hear a senior partner say that your brief was particularly well-written.

1️⃣ Brainstorm and outline your answer before you start to write.

If I had allotted 1 hr. for a question, I’d typically spend at least 15 minutes thinking about, planning, and organizing my essay before starting to write.

The more disciplined you can be about this pre-writing work, the more organized and thorough your final product will be.

Here are book recommendations contributed by hundreds of lawyers & law students for pre-law summer.

🗳️ If you could pick only 1 or 2, which would you choose & why?

1. 1L of A Ride (Andrew McClung)

2. Getting to Maybe (Richard Fishl)

Dear 1L, I was an associate at two firms. Both were BigLaw.

♦️ FIRM A

Associates were not allowed to send department-wide emails, such as emails seeking models or asking if anyone had faced an issue before.

I believe the theory was that receiving associate emails was annoying for partners; it wasted their valuable time.

I had to take the NY-state bar exam lying on the floor of a private office, about a mile from the main test site. Here’s the backstory.

Things all started going downhill for me during 3L spring. On the outside, it looked like I had it all together:

—grades that put me atop the class;
—a BigLaw job set for fall; and
—a law-review Note ready to publish.