Why Most Students Think Law School is Hard (and How to Make it Easier)
If you're getting ready for law school check this out: we put together a free e-book called the “Ultimate Pre-Law Checklist.” Just click the link below to download it. It's some of our best tips and strategies for getting ahead before you start law school, and it will put you miles ahead of your classmates, just click here.
Today I’d like to talk about why law school is hard and how to make it easy and fun – believe it or not, it can be fun!
I remember in high school, everyone said college was going to be twice the work of high school. And when I got there, I found that it wasn't so much harder than it was just different. Law school is the same way. It is very different from college. And while most people think it's harder, a lot of that is just a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's more accurate to say law school is different.
Now everyone would, of course, agree that in law school, you'll read more.
The reading is challenging, the subjects are unlike anything you've seen before, and you won't really have a frame of reference for those subjects. It's incredibly stressful and oh yeah, your entire professional career as a lawyer rests on getting good grades. So there's that.
But most would say that law school is hard mainly because of the lack of feedback. The lack of feedback makes people insane. They study constantly, but because there is so little feedback, they don't know if they're doing the right thing. You work for an entire semester studying complex systems of law and it all comes down to a single final exam.
And here's the real issue. The final exam is a test that is nothing like anything in undergrad. Hell, it's nothing like the LSAT. As a result, many people study the wrong things. And what's worse than that, they study the wrong things for a long time. They spend hundreds of hours studying things that won't help them on the final.
When you get to law school, you have to think about the end game, the end result. And then work backwards from there. We have a ton of blog posts and videos on how to succeed in law school, we'll put them in the links down below. But suffice to say, there are a lot of ways to create feedback during the regular semester, and to figure out what's going on before you take the test. Most importantly, you can improve your law school test-taking skills before you get to the final. This is probably the single biggest missed opportunity in all of law school: not learning how to write law school essays.
It's just like the LSAT. You'll still have to study, but you'll have to learn the strategies and improve your score over time, and you do that by practicing. But most people don't do that. Why? Because if they did, they might confirm their worst fear that they are no longer at the top of their class. But it's coming anyway, whether they avoid it or not. And by avoiding the necessary practice, it again becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One of the biggest problems in law school is that it's a game that nobody tells you the rules. Think of it like this: if you wanted to play chess, but your partner refused to explain how the pieces moved, you'd be in big trouble. It's the same with law school. Once you know how the pieces move, you can learn strategies that will tell you how to move those pieces, and why you're doing it. And when you know what you're doing, you can start crushing your opponents. Once you learn how to take a law school essay exam, you can then start crushing those, too.
Law school takes hard work, and there's no getting around that. But most people work harder than they need to, and they make it harder on themselves. Trust me, once you start taking practice exams, you'll understand how the law works. You'll understand how to apply it. And that will make your studying so much easier.
Don't be one of those students who works too hard for too long on the wrong things. Learn the strategies, get an edge, and like anything, when you get good at something, you start having fun. When you get A's in law school, you'll start having a lot of fun.
If you're getting ready for law school check this out: we put together a free guide called "Legal Eagle's checklist for crushing finals." Just click the link below to download it. It's some of our best tips and strategies for getting ahead before you start law school, and it will put you miles ahead of your classmates, just click here.
