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 Legal Writer: Welcome! I’m starting #dearlegalwriter to collect my writing posts and offer a space for newer legal writers to ask questions and learn.

🔹 I write from the perspective of a former 20-year BigLaw litigator, law-firm blog editor, and Fortune 500 in-house counsel.

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:

Dear Followers,

This post is for those who follow me for a non- #Dear1L reason.
Maybe you follow me bc I write posts about legal writing.
Or bc I’m a LinkedIn-lawyer/“Content Creator.”
Or bc I contribute so many comments.
Whatever your reason, thank you.
In 2023, I’ll write more.
More for you.

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.”