Waking Up and Saying, "I Think I'll Go to Law School Today!"

I found this article entitled The Mighty Esquire: 12 Step Program to Law School on the website www.twixtmagazine.com and I thought it was really funny and often sounded like the steps I took last year (some of which I will need to take again this year) in my pursuit of a legal education. If you've been there, you will totally appreciate this.

by Erin Spradlin
© 2005 twixtmagazine.com

1.) Age 18: After years of coddling by your parents who pay your bills, make your bed and do your dishes, stumble into college advisor’s office. Think about fact that even if it is archaic and fucked up, you hope that an inheritance or “marrying well” is in your future. Lost in this dream, spit out “Anthropology” or something arbitrary when asked what you want your major to be. Ignore the next four years worth of signs that say your only future is in your parents’ basement.

2.) Age 24: Although you are not adverse to your parents’ cable package or the free meals, start to feel slight embarrassment at direction of life. Perturbed that the Level II Customer Service Technician with the Ferrari poster in his cubicle keeps insisting that you remind him of him in his youth, you start to consider post graduate degrees.

3.) Watch last ten minutes of Law & Order and feel self over come with deluded fantasies of how the American legal system works. Law school it is!

4.) Lose law school inspiration during brief romantic stint that is curbed by your parents’ constant presence and knowing eyes. Find inspiration again upon reading the family Christmas letter and discovering you are by far the worst, most disappointing part about it.

5.) Sign up for pre-LSAT class (offered by Kaplan or the Princeton Review). Feel nausea as you experience first departure of $1000 allotment on glorious legal path. Feel more sick upon realizing it’s actually $1300 (without tax!) Attend class once a week for fourteen weeks leading up to LSAT date. Focus on dumbest person in class to bring self esteem back where it should be.

6.) Register for the worst test you will ever take in your whole life, (worse even than that test you took on your campus’s HIV awareness day) the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT.) Feel annoyance at discovery that before you can actually register for the LSAT, you must get to know the Law School Admissions Counsel (LSAC)- which is an online database that does legal “stuff.” (www.lsac.org.)

Within the LSAC site, there is something called the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS) which will send a report (when the time comes) to your schools of choice that contains the following information: an undergraduate academic summary, copies of undergraduate transcripts, LSAT scores, and letters of recommendation.

You know this is going to cost you or your parents money, and your right – it is! $113 dollars to be exact. However, if you are truly serious about law school, there is no way around the LSAC or the LSDAS- unless, of course, you live in Canada.

7.) Sheepishly ask your parents for an additional $123.00 (the cost of registering for the LSAT.) If they seem disgruntled, explain to them that you’ll make it up to them in the future by suing wealthy people, regardless of their guilt.

If you decide you want to switch test dates after you register, well, surprise, surprise- it’ll cost you $32. If you decide you are, in fact, too dumb to attend law school and decline to take the test all together, you will be penalized $79.00 for your efforts.

8.) You will be very, very sad if you arrive at the test center sans your admission ticket, because you will be disqualified from taking the LSAT. Assuming you want to go forward with the “soul crusher” though, make sure you show up with your admissions ticket and a current ID. Number two pencils would also be helpful.

If you sense that you did very, very poorly –Connie Chung singing on a piano- poorly, you can take your test to the administrator at the end and tell said person that you don’t want it counted. You will never know the score or see the test again.

If you do get your score, and are displeased with it, you can take the test up to three times in two years. Likewise, LSAT scores stay valid for five years.

9) After waiting 3-6 weeks for results, decide if you want to proceed or if you want to get a Ferrari poster for your cubicle.

Assuming you want to proceed, start collecting transcripts and letters of recommendation.

Schools may vary in their requirements, but the LSDAS wants two letters of recommendation. For reasons unbeknownst to me, if you have been in the work force for less than five years, they want your letters of recommendation to be from professors- even if an employer/supervisor/etc. would be far more qualified to attest to where you are in life and how serious you take your work product.

10.) And, finally, it is time to search deep, deep inside your soul and come up with two double spaced pages on why you want to pursue law. It is unacceptable to state that you a.) want to make a lot of money or b.) are very, very stupid at picking out undergraduate degrees and feel that you have no other choice. They don’t want a full scale explanation of your academic record, nor do they necessarily want a sappy tale on the saddest thing that ever happened to you that transformed you into a moral super hero.

There is room for humor, if you are funny. Mostly though, it should be akin to a cover letter. These two pages should expand on the qualities that are best about you that you cannot appropriately put down on a resume and which would be a good qualities in a lawyer. Are you a good listener? Are you anal as hell? Do you like to designate photocopying to other people? And, it needs to read well- like a well crafted essay (because that’s what it's supposed to be). They are reading a lot of these things, and it wouldn’t hurt if yours was memorable (in a good way, not a Connie Chung/pianos way) for its content.

11.) Once your LSDAS file is complete- which if you have followed all of the above steps it is now- you should pick your schools. These schools will then have an online application (most likely) for you to fill out and want a copy of your LSDAS report.

You should apply to a minimum of three schools. The first school should be a school where much smarter, better looking people will actually go and hope that something has gone horribly wrong within their system and they let you in. This probably won’t happen, but what probably will happen is that they will send you an unforgivably thin envelope and tears will commence. You should apply to a school where people with a similar LSAT/GPA attend. You will most likely get into this school as long as your essay and recommendations are solid. On the mere chance that they are not, you should apply to a lesser school, so that you can either go to law school or say, snidely, later in life, “I was accepted to law school- I just chose not to go.”

The one factor all three of these schools should share is a good bar pass rate. That is far and away more important than their “tier” status. There are four tiers for law schools, but bar pass rate is really what counts. 80% and higher is a feasible percentage.

Prepare to give all three of these schools, the one you’ll never get into, the one you’ll probably get into and the one you don’t want to go to, $50.00 a piece. That’s how much they charge to read your Wonderful Me Essay.

12.) Once you get the “thicker” envelope, you know the envelope that makes you a decent dinner party topic again for your parents and not a change of subject, accept their admissions offer with a significant check addressed to their school. Stop spending money on yourself immediately. Fill out your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) immediately. Do everything that you thought might be fun before the worst three years of your life begins. And, last but not least, congratulate yourself.