After much worrying and fretting, in the end, I really had nothing to worry about.  To Anonymous Boyfriend and Anonymous Parents:  You were right.  There, I said it.

Anyway, off to celebrate!  I already did my celebration dance to “Eye of the Tiger (Esq.)”  Who knows what the night has in store…

Instead of staying at the conference center, I stayed with BeadFreak so that I could take the Boston Terrorists with me. Our evenings were much tamer, and involved lots of red wine, giggling, wedding talk and Grey’s Anatomy. Oh, and pillow fights in our underwear. Because that is what we girls — even ones with professional degrees — do anytime we spend the night together (Note: Anonymous Boyfriend contends that if there are no photos or videos, it didn’t happen. I tried to explain that we law-types are risk averse and therefore wouldn’t record it, but he remains unconvinced).

The first day Judge D. gave one of the conference lectures. During his talk, he couldn’t resist singling me out: “My law clerk, LST, does this all day long. LST, where are you? Raise your hand!” This, of course, was a personal nightmare; those of you who know me know that I hate being the center of attention, whether at a professional conference or at a hibachi table. And of course for the rest of the week, people kept coming up to me and asking, “You’re Judge D.’s clerk, right?” Shoot. Me. Now.

At some point I also realized that gunners will always be gunners, even after law school is but a fleeting and distant memory. One of the Career Law Clerks they couldn’t resist getting into a heated argument with a judge about whether or not a conference is necessary before a party files a motion to compel discovery. Not only was CLC an obnoxious know-it-all, she was flat out wrong. It takes a lot of balls to fight with a judge, and even bigger balls to continue the fight even when you’re wrong and the rest of the room is fed up with you.

As if that weren’t punishment enough, I got my very own one-on-one time with CLC as she ambushed me on my way to the bathroom.

CLC: You’re Judge D.’s clerk, right?

Me: That depends on who is asking.

CLC: Can I ask you a question?

Me: I suppose that was rhetorical.

CLC: On the materials Judge D. handed out about adoption, it says that a criminal background check is required for all adoptions.

Me: Yes.

CLC: Is that just your circuit’s policy?

Me, dumbfounded: [long pause] It’s the law.

CLC: Is that a new law?

Me, trying to make a hasty escape: No. You’ve always had to get a state background check. Now, as of July 1, you have to get an FBI check too.

CLC: Does that apply to adult adoptions as well?

Me, incredulous: … No. There’s a whole statute about adoption. I hear it’s pretty informative.

She then proceeded to violate my aural canal with thisthatandtheother about the sheriff’s office and fingerprinting and the clerk of court blah blah blah.

It had to have been divine retribution for some horrible offense I’d committed, like replying to jail mail with random photocopied pages from the encyclopedia, or telling a petitioner that the statute of limitations on divorce had run so he’d have to just learn to live with his wife.

It’s a tough job getting paid to enjoy the gorgeous fall weather and play with your girlfriends and eat out every night on the state’s dime. Oh and learn. A lot. But, somebody’s gotta do it.

People transfer for a variety of reasons. I personally did not get a fantastic LSAT score and couldn’t get into my top choice law schools on the first go around. I attended a safety school that I’d been accepted to and immediately made plans to transfer after my first year.

Knowing right off the bat that I wanted to transfer helped me do well in my classes because I had a lot of motivation with a very clear goal in mind. It also helped me to craft a strategy and develop a timeline to get things accomplished in an orderly manner.

Hopefully this timeline will be helpful to those of you who have decided to transfer or are actively considering it as an option.

September:

• Find a study group, if you haven’t already. Carefully select bright and disciplined people who you can get along with for long periods of time, and who will be able to really help you master the material for the exam.
• Stay caught up with your reading. Try to stay ahead if you can, but definitely do not get behind. If you are currently behind, catch up now.

October:

• Begin outlining your classes. Outlining is an iterative process and thus you should start early because your outlines will change and go through several versions as you refine them.
• Develop relationships. Once you have settled into the school routine, begin developing relationships with professors who you might want to provide you with recommendations. It’s okay to demonstrate genuine interest in a class, but do not become a gunner.

November:

• Start studying for finals. This process should begin about six weeks before your first exam. Aim to master one subject per week and do practice questions. Iron out the kinks in your outlines; meeting with your study group is helpful in accomplishing this goal.
• Finish your outlines. Have all of your outlines up to date for the most recent class session by the time you break for Thanksgiving. Enjoy some turkey and stuffing as a reward!

December:

• Ace your final exams! With well-prepared outlines and a disciplined study schedule, you should be able to kick some ass on your first semester final exams.
• Take time to reflect. With your first semester finals behind you, take this opportunity to decide whether or not you really want to transfer. Think about the qualities you are seeking in your ideal law school environment, both academically and environmentally.
• Research. You have two weeks off for the holidays; make them productive. Using the criteria that you have determined are important in a prospective law school, select several schools that you want to apply to. Look at their transfer criteria, application requirements, tuition costs, etc.

January:

• Evaluate your fall semester grades. Once your fall grades are posted, evaluate your performance and determine which schools from your list you actually have a realistic shot at being accepted to. You might need to revisit your list and add some schools and delete others.

February:

• Stay caught up. Just like fall semester, you need to stay caught up with your reading during the spring. This can be particularly challenging if your law school adds an additional class for spring semester, but is nonetheless imperative.

March:

• Begin outlining. Again, you’ll want to begin outlining during the middle of the semester or so.
• Start crafting your personal statement. For me, this was the most challenging part of the transfer application. Start early so that you can have several people read over it before you have to submit it with your applications. You may need to write more than one statement if the schools you are applying to give different essay prompts. Spring break is a good time to start your personal statement.

April:

• Take care of administrative issues. Finalize the list of schools you’ll be applying to. Register for LSAC. If your LSAC subscription has lapsed, you’ll need to register again. Make sure you have transcripts from your previous degree-granting institutions sent to LSAC. Begin filling out the individual applications. Budget for application fees. Write down due dates.
• Approach your selected professors for recommendations. This can be intimidating and nervewracking. I was afraid that my professors would be insulted that I was leaving their school. To the contrary, they were supportive and more than willing to write me excellent recommendations to my schools of choice. One professor asked me why I was transferring, another said that it wasn’t her business to ask. Be prepared for either reaction. Have all forms ready to give them, with postage-paid envelopes attached and a post-it with due dates on each one.
• Begin studying for spring finals. As with last semester, you’ll want to give yourself plenty of time to study, beginning about six weeks before your first exam.

May:

• Submit your applications. Have you applications submitted before finals begin so that you only have to tackle one hurdle at a time.
• Finish the year with a bang! You’ve almost made it – do great on your finals so that you will place high in your 1L class and optimize your chances of getting into the law school of your dreams.

June:

• Request transcripts. As soon as your law school releases first year grades, request official transcripts be sent directly to each of the schools you’ve applied to. Some schools may want your 1L transcripts to go through LSAC, but that usually takes too long considering the admissions directors’ short deadline.
• Sit back and wait. Although it’s difficult to do, you just have to be patient. Many schools don’t make their transfer decisions until sometime in July.

July:

• Select a law school! With a little determination and a lot of hard work, you’ll have a very difficult, but great decision to make – which law school will you attend?
• Get in touch with career services at your new law school. You don’t want to miss the early interview process, as this is when many firms start their hiring process for the following summer.
• Withdraw from your old school. Contact the registrar and any other administrators you need to in order to make sure that you are withdrawn from your classes and that you won’t receive a tuition bill from your old school.
• Notify your friends. It’s a hard thing to do, but make sure you let your friends at your old school know that you’re leaving.

August:

• Start classes at your new law school! Congratulations, you did it! You’ve worked hard, so enjoy your final two years of law school at your new law school.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more detailed articles about some of the action items listed in the timeline. But for now, this will hopefully provide a helpful perspective of the big picture for those of you already considering transferring. Best of luck, and check back for future transfer articles!

Don’t ever brief a case. Yes, you read that right. My entire law school career, I never once briefed a single case. To me, the idea seems tedious, boring and unnecessarily duplicitous. These opinions were written by people who are way smarter than you and can phrase things far more eloquently and intelligently than you can. I found book briefing to be a much better way of pulling out the key information in a usable format.

The key concept behind book briefing is to use different colored highlighters for different parts of the decision so they jump off the page when you’re on the spot and your professor is on the warpath. For instance, I used pink to highlight the court, issue, procedural posture, holding and judge; green for pertinent facts; yellow for key legal analysis and reasoning; blue for important cited precedent; and orange for key points in the dissenting opinion. But, of course, you’re free to develop your own system.

In addition to highlighting, I always made numerous notations in the margins of my casebooks so that I could jump to them quickly when called on. For example, “P’s arg.,” “D’s defense,” or “Test: 1) Compelling state interest, 2) Necessary to achieve that interest, 3) Least restrictive alternative.” Also, when a court breaks up its analysis into sections, number them (courts are not original, they will often state that they reached their decision for the following x reasons).

Fair warning: Many professors loathe book briefing. That just goes to show how much smarter you are. And when you’re put on the spot, rather than shuffling through a veritable forest of paper or frantically searching for files only to have Word crash on you at a critical moment, you’ll be able to answer the professor’s questions in a calm, collected manner. Except there’s really never anything calm or collected about 1L’s — y’all generally maintain that deer-in-headlights look all year long.

Robert Miller’s Law School Confidential has some excellent information about book briefing as well as other tips and tricks for surviving the law school, job hunting and bar exam experiences. I highly recommend it.

Sleep a whole lot. I’m really not kidding. So many people told me they never slept their first year of law school because they spent so much time studying. The truth of the matter is that they were probably spending countless futile hours typing up case briefs (see above). I, on the other hand, took a two-hour nap every single day of my 1L year and still managed to finish near the top of the class. As Anonymous Boyfriend would say, it was all about working smarter, not harder. I could not agree more.

For the record, I often fell asleep on my casebooks while attempting to study. While I cannot confirm the scientific basis for learning through osmosis, you may or may not want to give it a try. However, be careful with this, as you may end up waking up with pen and/or highlighter on your face, couch and dog.

Don’t sleep with your classmates. While I did just tell you to sleep a whole lot, I strongly suggest you avoid sleeping with anyone in your law school class. I don’t have any personal experience in the matter, but from observing the experiences of others, law school romance/drunkenness/horniness/idiocy can make for some very awkward situations in class and social settings. Just think, you’re stuck with these people for the next three years, and law school classes aren’t that big. News travels fast, and people don’t forget — law school gossip is as close as most law students have to a life.

I would personally advice against consorting with other lawyers or individuals in the legal profession altogether, but that is just my preference. AB is as far from a lawyer as you can get, which I like, because there’s no shop talk and I like talking about non-law-related stuff. However, several good friends of mine from law school are happily married to, engaged to or cavorting with other lawyers, case clerks and copyboys, so it can work out if you approach the situation carefully.

Use commercial supplements and upper-class students’ old outlines. Unless your law school’s honor code makes it a violation, there is absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel. While I am absolutely an advocate of making your own outlines from your class notes and materials, it is a fantastic idea to cross-reference your outlines with other students’ outlines and commercial supplements. You might have missed something, or you may discover a more clever way to organize your thoughts.

Do not just copy others’ outlines. This is where AB’s “work smarter, not harder” concept comes into play — taking the time to craft your own outlines with the assistance of outside materials will save you a lot of work later. You’ll actually learn the material while you’re making your outlines and you’ll spend less time re-learning when exam time comes around.

Besides, many a law professor has been known to snatch exam questions directly from sample questions provided by Mr. Gilbert, Mr. Emanuel, and Mr. Glannon.

I hope some of you have found my advice, though perhaps a bit unorthodox, to be helpful or at the very least, thought-provoking. In the near future I’ll post some more articles dealing with topics such as note-taking, study habits and exam-taking skills, so stay tuned!

I got to work early (!) this morning, but still had to park across the street from the courthouse.   Even though I work for the judiciary, I often have little regard for the law, particularly stupid laws.  Because I didn’t feel like walking the rest of the way down the block to the crosswalk, I just waited for traffic to clear and jaywalked my happy ass across the street.

There was one car approaching, but I had plenty of time to get across the street.  But as it got closer, I saw it was a cop.  “No one gets in trouble for jaywalking,” I thought.  Well, no one except for me.

The cop car began flashing its sirens and honked the horn at me.  “Fuck me,” I thought.  “I’m about to get a massive ticket and lecture for jaywalking, and my judges will certainly leave me to my devices on this one.”  While I am fond of both of them and know they have my best interests in mind, I am relatively sure that neither of them would take to kindly to me pulling the whole, “Do you know who I work for?” line.  A previous clerk tried that and he is now in jail for DUI and assault on a police officer.

As I was preparing a (very poor) excuse for why I didn’t use the crosswalk, the cop car slowed down and rolled down its window.   As I was stammering out a “G-g-g-ood morning, officer,” I realized that the cop was none other than one of the bailiffs from my floor, just trying to fuck with my head and give me a good scare.

When he told me he wished he’d turned on the siren, I informed him that he would have received my dry cleaning bill after I’d gone home to change my pants.

I can safely say, so far, there’s yet to be a boring day at the office.

The boring witnesses testified yesterday. Like the coroner: “Yup, he’s dead. Cause of death is shooting.” I mean, even Fiddy wouldn’t survive 17 gunshots, I don’t think. So I wasn’t too disappointed to have missed out on graphic photographs of a drug-dealer-turned-swiss-cheese.

The more interesting witnesses took the stand today. Of note was a prosecution witness who was also a former drug dealer and good friend of the victim. Now, maybe I’m naive, but it seems like preparing a witness is a key tenet of good trial practice. It doesn’t seem too great to put someone on the stand who (1) testifies in open court that if you come into his “hood” and leave your door unlocked, he will have no qualms about stealing your shit, and (2) admits to pistol-whipping and robbing the unarmed defendant, again with no qualms.

I did, in fact, learn a great deal today. Mostly about the vocabulary and culture of the drug trade. To wit:

Trap (n.): A house (usually rented) where drug transactions take place. While people may “chill” at the trap, they generally do not stay overnight regularly.

Cop deuces (v. phr.): To concede a point or an argument in order to avoid a violent confrontation.

Heat (n.): Gun, firearm. Synonym: piece.

Bring it (v.): To carry a gun. See also: heat.

Slip (v.): To make a mistake, specifically a mistake that makes one susceptible to being robbed or otherwise victimized by crime. For example, leaving one’s car unlocked in the “hood” is a slip that makes robbery of said car fully justified.

Deal (n.): A drug transaction entered into after negotiation between the parties. The “deal” often depends on the parties’ relationship, i.e. whether the parties are strangers to one another, friends, or family. Prices vary accordingly. For instance, while the witness would be willing to sell drugs to the defense attorney for $12, he would charge the prosecutor $20, but a family member would only have to pay $4.

Connection (n.): One who introduces a drug dealer to a supplier or customer; also, one who provides drugs on a wholesale basis to a drug dealer. According to this witness, “You have to plug in a lamp before it turns on. The connection is the plug.” Makes perfect sense to me.

Straight (adj.): Having a lot of money, especially in the form of cash.

Trial practice lesson of the day: It’s always good to speak the language of your witnesses.

In trying to look on the bright side of being 2+ hours away from AB, my friends and family for a year in a city that is hotter than hell and slower than molasses, I needed to look no further than across the bridge into a neighboring state, where I can get Yuengling Lager, also known as Sweet Sweet Nectar of the Gods, or Where Am I And What On Earth Happened Last Night?

Seriously, this stuff is worth crossing state lines and venturing into uncharted redneck-ville for. Way back when I was but a wee undergrad, Yuengling was only distributed in Pennsylvania. So every time a PA native headed home, we sent them on their merry way with cash and orders to bring back lots of Yuengling and Utz Party Mix.

While I was happy to resume saying “y’all” and shed any vestiges of Yankee-ness that I inadvertently acquired while living north of the Mason-Dixon, I was sad to leave behind my favorite beer. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I learned it was being distributed along the entire East Coast. Except for my Great State, that is (probably due to our odd and archaic distribution laws). Nevertheless, being a stone’s throw away from a state where I can get it is pretty sweet indeed.

The temperature reportedly topped out at 106 degrees today.  Though I don’t always never carry a thermometer with me, I can say that walking across the parking lot after work today, I nearly spontaneously combusted.  I am also relatively certain that I will have to sell one of my kidneys in order to pay my power bill next month.

The city is probably a good two hours away from the coast, but is situated on a big, soggy river that makes the air thick enough to chew.  I didn’t even know where this place was when I interviewed for the job (cut me some slack, I never took Geography as a kid!), and it’s a good thing I didn’t, otherwise I might have run screaming.

After giving it some serious thought, I might be better off practicing law in Afghanistan.  Or Antarctica.  Or anywhere that is (a) 30 degrees cooler, and (b) won’t make me take the bar exam again.

None of these classes are on the bar exam. But, they might come in handy if you need an outline for that schedule-filler class you signed up for, but don’t want to attend. Yes, I’m talking to you, 3L’s.

Note: These outlines are all in Word 2007 format.

Copyright

Intellectual Property Survey (Trade Secrets, Patent, Trademark, Copyright and Unfair Competition)

Media Law

Natural Resources

I hope some of y’all found these outlines helpful. That would make one of us.

These are from those not-required-yet-highly-recommended classes (read: Bar exam subjects). As you can see, I was a much less prolific outliner after first year, as I took far more classes than I actually have outlines for.

Note: These outlines are all in Word 2007 format.

Constitutional Law II

Evidence

Trusts & Estates I

U.C.C. Article 9 (Secured Transactions)

Forthcoming: Outlines for non-bar exam classes and other electives.