First Year Lawyering

No law students I know (at my school and other schools) likes their first year lawyering class. My school officially overhauled and revamped its lawyering program this year, and 1Ls still hate it.

Maybe it's the sense that you work your ass off and still only get a pass/fail grade. Supposedly, you can get an "honors" in my school, but people are skeptical about how often they actually give it out, and whether it's actually worth the effort).

Maybe it's the minimal feedback they give us. The second research assignment is due tomorrow, but we haven't even gotten our first research assignment back yet. So whatever mistakes we made the first time around are likely to show up again the second time around.

Also, research is not easy. There are so many freakin' cases! Whenever I go on Lexis or Westlaw I feel like I'm drowning in the ocean of cases, and they haven't really explained that well how to swim. So researching is this huge blackhole that sucks all my time in, while I read through every single one of the 82 or so cases that showed up in my search to determine which 5 is the most relevant.

Everyone likes to bitch about our lawyering professor, too, who is not really a professor but a "fellow" who graduated from my school in 2001. She's a youngish looking plump woman whom for some reason no one likes. It's not as much her fault as the material she has to teach. Unlike torts or crim law or civ pro, where there are real intellectual issues that you can think over and debate about, researching and writing memos are just mechanical, stratified processes with no intellectual challenges whatsoever and very little creativity or analysis involved. It mostly just involves grunt work.

I think people hate it because it reminds them that although law school is interesting and fun, life as a real lawyer is dull and mechanial. It's ironic that while we are wrestling with thought-provoking and fascinating issues in our substantive law classes, 99.9% of our career as lawyers will be spent doing what we do in first-year lawyering. And most likely, our partners and supervisers wont' be even half as nice as our lawyering prof. Sad... and people don't like to be reminded of this fact.

Still, we should start getting used to this now.