AND it’s got helpful advice on interview prep for you!

Start in the comments.
Practice post ideas in comments.
You can warm up to it.

But START!!

I don’t care: whatever your class rank, your post-law-school-job plan, or the numbers in your GPA. If you’re prone to anxiety & depression like me, the specter of law school ending may seem NOT A-OK.

As I’ve written about before, my anxiety got so debilitating during my 3L spring that I ended up lying flat on my back at home.

Dear 1L, Justice Elena Kagan apparently didn’t rush to “write home about” her 1L fall grades, either. She only received two, according to reports, and they came as a shock:

a B in Crim;
a B- in Torts.

What’s your first move?

Try my P-E-N approach. It kills the culprits behind 3 biggies behind empty words:

— A handful of top schools are entirely pass/fail, and at the T14s I’m aware of, no one really gets below a B.

— Yet at many other schools, a large % of students fail or lose scholarships after 1L fall. The “average” is B- or even a C.

If you didn’t get what you’d hoped for, please know there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not some sort of screw up.

—> What happened is you got screwed by a brutal curve.

—Did YOUR middle-school teacher try to sell you that “rule,” too?

And did she also teach you, “It’s wrong grammatically” to use a preposition that way?

Well, she sold you 2 heaps of crap.

Below is some info I’ve gathered for 2024. I hope you’ll help out by adding what you’ve been seeing and hearing in your location.

🔷 Some perspective:

We’ve been enjoying family time with the girls at home, playing lots of games by the fire and indulging in Matt's delicious dinners. I will be back to posting again next week.

Dear Legal Writer, A recent remark by a BigLaw partner stopped me dead in my tracks.

On a post about legal writing (not mine), he commented,

What should your tone be with so many potential, diverse readers?

Try this:

Have ONE specific person in mind you’re writing to and write your post as if you are speaking ONLY to them.

People in the go-go, law-firm-corporate-legal world are busy.

I’d fallen out of the loop. I didn’t have anything interesting to say anymore, I suppose, so they just stopped calling. I get it.

See if you know which of these 3 sentences is correct:

A: The cake comprised 6 ingredients.
B: The cake was comprised by 6 ingredients.
C: The cake was comprised of 6 ingredients.

Here’s the “how-to”:

For any writing project, cut your process into 4 stages. It helps to think of the stages building a house:

This is for all law students about final exams. I’ve been working really hard on something for you.

It’s a template for an IRAC essay.

It shows my mental process and how I OUTLINED my analysis of each issue--BEFORE I wrote a single word.