Posts Tagged ‘1L’

Last night, while reading a random case in a random casebook, anxiety struck. I stood up and walked to a mirror, and examined my pale face. Though I had shaved a few hours before, my facial hair follicles were visible through my transparent skin. More than my like of color, I felt as though I didn’t know the man looking back at me. And so began another 1L freakout:

Law school has ripped out my soul. I can’t pick out a single moment during law school when I was truly happy. I don’t like my classmates, I don’t like the work, I don’t care about any of it. In this moment, I realize that I would be a much better and happier person if I quit. Accept that it isn’t the job for me and find something I actually want to do. I could be a police man, a teacher, a car salesman, a corporate drone – anything would be better than spending a lifetime toiling away at something I hate. And for what? Five-to-ten million extra dollars over my lifetime?

Oh right. I went into this for the money and it’s the money that keeps me here. I will make more money my first year out of law school than I could in the three I miss, combined. Despite hating every part of this miserable, vapid profession, I want the money. And at this point, it’s the only reason I’m here.

The people who bother to make friends on campus are the same people I hate. I can’t sustain any decent hobbies because I spend all of my time either dealing with law school or coping with the depression it causes. I get up and watch TV, I go to school and hate my life, I come home and watch TV. It’s a terrible cycle. Occasionally, just as cobwebs form between my thighs and my shriveling manhood, I go to a bar and pick up a girl I would have spoken to as an undergrad. I thought about hiring a hooker the other day, I even browsed some local ads. I’m in a terrible place.

I know I shouldn’t enter the profession, this obviously isn’t for me, but I’m not a quitter and I want to live the life of a six-figure earner. I’ve lost fifteen pounds since starting HLS. I eat shit fast food all the time and I never workout. I have no motivation, no drive. Law school is crushing me.

And it’s not hard. Anyone could comprehend the material. It’s just that nobody wants to. Lawyers leach from the successful businesses and people of our country. We are the middle-men in a useless system that we created. We get to bill $300 an hour because nobody else wants to deal with the bullshit that lawyers encounter every day. There are no happy lawyers, only oblivious nincompoops. I can’t believe I’ve done this to myself.

But what am I complaining about? Nobody likes their job. At least, if I have to miserable, I’ll make a good amount of money. And besides, I can skip class tomorrow and it won’t even matter. I should call up Christina, she seemed pretty cool. Maybe we can go get some food and drinks. Yeah, I would like that.

I sometimes say that I will do something, and then later change my mind.  Big deal.  Who doesn’t?  Lately, though, whenever I change my mind about doing something I find myself wondering if the principle of promissory estoppel applies.  For instance, I tell a friend that I am going to the bar.  She then agrees to go to the bar also.  By evening I am looking at tomorrow’s readings and thinking the bar might have to wait.  I call my friend to tell her that I have changed my mind.  She is understandably bummed because she was super excited to take a study break, get trashed, and not hate life for a few hours.  Not only do I wholeheartedly empathize, I now also wonder if the emotional trauma I’ve caused by flaking could possibly constitute a reliance to her detriment that would make me liable to her in some way.

Aaah!  What is happening to me?

I know the above hypothetical is probably crap on a million different levels.  I’ve only been in law school for a couple weeks, and we just started talking about promissory estoppel in Contracts.  My point is simply that law and legal issues have started to creep into my incidental, fleeting thoughts about trivial, day-to-day matters.  I think this could be the beginning of the end…

Another sign of the apocalypse: approximately three weeks into life as a law student I have developed a caffeine dependency.  Meticulously reading a plethora of cases each night, and trying to decipher just what the hell they are driving at, requires a level of effort that I’m frankly not used to expending consistently.  It wasn’t long before I was seduced into buying an “Eco” mug from College Town Bagels–the local coffee shop that every law student patronizes religiously.  The magic mug gets me free refills on coffee, tea and soda for the remainder of the year.  If I feel listless, I pop over and replenish.  Then all is right in the world.  Yesterday, however, I left the trusty mug at home.  By 10AM I crashed.  I was distracted and cranky with no clue why.  Then I saw someone drinking a cup of coffee, and realized I must be experiencing withdrawal, so I hocked up the five bucks for a cup of my own.  I perked right up, but then I was depressed about my newly discovered “habit” for the rest of the day.

I feel like I am transforming into some ungodly, coffee-slurping, over-analytical THING.  I’m not a lost cause just yet though.  I have managed to stick with my daily running, and during those long runs when my mind drifts aimlessly I don’t think about cases, or law school.  I don’t think about anything.  It’s very peaceful.  The day that peace is disturbed is the day that I will really start worrying.

There seems to be a general consensus among the faculty here that 1Ls are bound to look and sound like complete idiots from time to time, or even most of the time, which I find comforting.  Moreover, my fellow classmates are generally laid back – with interesting life experiences to share if you’re in the mood to listen.

I spent a good deal of orientation wandering around the law building thrusting my uninvited hand into people’s personal space bubbles and announcing myself.  Most were happy to be approached, and turned out to be just as nervous and excited as me.  Together we speculated about what tortures might await us on this perilous journey to 2L (the usual: getting called on, looking like a fool, failing miserably), and why we each felt it would be worth it in the end (to be in a better position to fight for certain beliefs, to make lots of $$$, etc).  Of course, some of my peers preferred not to be engaged.  No big.  I’m sure we were all warned in kindergarten about the consequences of talking to strangers…and I am pretty, er, strange.  The law student association hosted a few bar tabs around town hoping to help us baby 1Ls mingle and shed our kindergarten fears, which was a nice gesture, but the tab ran out almost immediately at each place.

Law school itself is…frustrating.  Even though I consider myself to be extremely open-minded, I cannot shake this feeling that–after all of the back-and-forth and crazy hypos that spin out of an hour worth of class–I want one right answer.  I want the clouds to part, the sun to shine through, and the professor to say: “well, it’s been fun, but all things considered the only truly viable solution is X.”  However, apparently, an important aspect of becoming a good attorney is the ability to deal effectively with ambiguity.  So I hope to become more comfortable with the lack of one incontestably “right” answer as the weeks progress.  More than anything, I wish I would stop being so tired all the time.  I take naps, drink coffee, and go to bed as early as possible on weekdays, but still I feel like a zombie by the time class ends—not the best state to be in when trying to digest tomorrow’s cases.  I hope my mind/body adjust to my new routine soon.

In other news, I just finished reading Mussivand v. David (passion, betrayal, genital warts (?)…and the resulting litigation), and I think I’ve fallen in love with Torts.

<3

Everyone keeps talking about the doomsday economy were are currently in and how terrible OCIs (on-campus interviews) have been going. I hear all these law students say that they haven’t received any call-backs on their interviews, or summer associates not getting offered positions at their firms whereas in previous years that particular firm always hired all of their students, or even lawyers who were laid off from their firms detailing their experiences and how they might perceive that their law degree is now worthless (or not worth the money put into its acquisition). Even students attending schools like U of Chicago (and perhaps even Harvard) report less than optimistic viewpoints regarding their chances of landing the kind of employment they were looking for in going to law school or the kind of employment options that might have been available for someone in their position just a couple years ago.

In my case, I try to take control of as many variables as I can. That is, I try to leave nothing to chance. Even my pre-law advisor referred to me as a very “calculating” individual (I’m not sure if that was meant as a compliment). I suppose she is kind of right as I “calculated” my way to one of the best law schools in the country in taking a course load I thought I could successfully manage (i.e. get good grades during any particular term), applying to and accepting employment or volunteer roles I could put on my resume to make myself more marketable for schools (and perhaps firms later down the road), and studying my butt off for the LSAT, thank goodness I only took it once because I absolutely hated that dreadful test. Similarly, I plan to calculate my way toward a successful career. To me that means I need a combination of good grades from a reputable institution while establishing a strong network of contacts within, and even outside of, the legal industry. After all, as they say, it’s not what you know, but who you know (as an aside, I HATE it when people say that. It seems like something uneducated people say to reassure themselves. That and, “It’s not how hard you work, but how smart you work.”). Essentially, I figure I can at worst make decent grades with my work ethic. If I don’t make Law Review, no big deal, as long as I have this network of contacts to help me secure some career options. One of my friends who will be a 3L this year at UChicago even told me that the only reason she got the job she had this past summer was because she knew someone or had a friend of a friend or something in the firm.

Anyway, as of now, my contact list includes: fraternity brothers who are either lawyers or in law school, other contacts I have through my fraternity who are lawyers (friends of friends, people I have met at conventions, etc.), even one fraternity brother not affiliated within the legal arena (he’s a businessman) but who is WAY too smart and will most likely become much too powerful to not include on the list, family and friends of family who are lawyers, a few local attorneys and friends’ parents who are lawyers, lawyers in firms and offices in which I formerly worked (or the ones that might remember me), incoming 1Ls I have met at Admitted Students Weekends, and even the lawyer who interviewed me as a part of my Northwestern application.

Hopefully with some decently hard work put forth in studying and in adding to this list of people who might be able to help me secure employment, even if the economy is in as bad a shape as it currently is when it comes time for me to find work, I will be set to go.