General
General discussion about law schools or your applications.
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What to major in? What grades you need? What LSAT score is good? What schools you should apply to? What's a good personal statement or extra-curriculars? Whether you should study law abroad?
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How Big of An Effect Do Softs Have? Weak EC's and don't expect letters of rec to be anything special
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What's Happening
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6
Chance For 1L Summer Jobs/Upcoming 2L Recruit With 1L Grades? Any Hope For Big Law?
1. You send an email to the professor, introduce yourself, say that you don’t have a summer job lined up and express your interest in being an RA for them. Explain briefly why you want to be their RA (“I need a job” is honest but ideally you’ll have something else to say, e.g. “I have background in criminology and I really liked taking crim with you”, or “I know your next book involves a substantial quantitative analysis component, and I spent two summers doing quantitative analysis in my role at XYZ”). Finally, ask if they’re looking for an RA and thank them for their time. Keep it short. 2. “Applying broadly” here means two things. One, insofar as you’re applying to firms, applying to firms not listed on the recruit portal. Only a handful of firms participate in the formal recruit process, most of whom are big law firms. There are many other mid-size and smaller firms that may hire summer students. You need to seek them out, get in touch with them, find out if they’re hiring summer students, and apply. You may have to do cold calling, cold emails, knocking on doors etc. Two, “applying broadly” also means applying to in-house and government positions. I suspect the latter is fairly competitive though. You may find some of these positions listed on your school’s career development platform, but you may also need to do some of your own research. -
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Binding Bar Exam Materials?
Hole punching gives you the option of moving them around as you study and do practice exams. In the end, I plan to have 4-5 three-ring binders at each exam. -
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Reneging Hireback Offer Mid Summer
I echo what @Cool_name said about making sure Option #2 is a certainty before rejecting option # 1 (the Bay Street job). That being said, it would be courteous to inform the Bay Street firm of your intentions as soon as you are sure so that they can make an offer to someone else. And being courteous will minimize any bad feelings they might have about you changing your mind. -
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ON Bar Exam Indices
@Harvey18 - I think you are saying you will not know how to bind the materials until after you have the indices. You have a few options: Read the materials electronically Print them, but wait until later to bind them, or just three hole punch them so you can re-arrange the contents later. I do not suggest waiting too much longer before reading them since you will run out of time. A page of the LSO materials is quite dense. I used to read 100-200 pages of a standard textbook in a day without problem. But the LSO materials take longer to get through because of the amount of text on a page in small font, and the tendency of the LSO materials to cover a lot of content with very few words, then switch to a different topic. I wanted to add that it is unlikely you will see the best indices for a few weeks still (I could be wrong). -
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Access to Practice Exams
I would also appreciate practice exams. If there is nothing free, even directing me to ones I can purchase would be helpful. -
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How easy or hard is it to switch from a criminal practice to civil litigation?
You have not gotten a reply in 5 days, so I'll attempt an answer. You are a law student. Many law students summer in one field, article in another, and end up working in yet another. To take myself as an example, I summered after 1L and 2L in criminal and I feel this would not have held me back from getting an articling spot in "labour law, administrative regulatory/professional hearings type stuff, and employment." The "setback" can become slightly larger if you then article in criminal. The "setback" could become slightly larger still if you do not take those courses which would have prepared you for the field you end up wanting. (I.e. you decide after articling you want to be a Labour Lawyer, but you did not take any courses in that field). Transitioning is pretty easy as long as you do not have too many years experience. If a senior criminal lawyer of 10 years want to switch to Labour Law, or whatever, it might be hard for him to get the equivalent "senior" position in the new field. I should also add that the larger firms tend to hire from their own articling students. In other words, if you work in criminal a while (Let's say until you are done articling or until you are a 1-2 year call) you can still quite easily switch to civil (with a small or mid sized firm) but you may not be able to easily get your foot in the door with the biggest and most well known firms. DISCLAIMER: This answer would really vary depending on specifics including what city you are working in, what exactly the nature of your prior experience is, and the general reputation of your past firm in relation to the firm you wish to transfer to. TL;DR: it is easy for a law student to try out one area and then switch to another. -
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Utility of the LSO Materials
I have almost finished reading the LSO materials, and I found that it's good to identify the parts of the materials that seem new or difficult and study those areas more thoroughly. For me, these areas include tax implications of family law and the various bookkeeping required when managing trust accounts in a law office. My exam strategy is going to be to do about half the questions closed book (i.e. I will just write the answer without consulting any indices or written material). Then I can spend extra time on questions where I am unsure of the answer. -
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Chance For 1L Summer Jobs/Upcoming 2L Recruit With 1L Grades? Any Hope For Big Law?
Thanks Turtles for your update as well! 1. I have heard about RA roles with professors but I don't know how you approach them and what’s the process to get accepted. Great if you can describe how it would work similar to my profile. 2. Can you also explain a bit by applying broadly (as also mentioned by GoatDuck)? The thing is that I applied to almost all firms in the 1L recruit for both places and also got to go on coffee/virtual chats with associates, articling students, and summer students but still didn’t get a response. But also the 1L recruit is different from 2L so what would this method of applying broadly entail now and what pointers I should keep in mind? Thanks once again! -
11
Barrister - 20 Day Study Plan
Yes I am! And I’ve found the same. Civ lit was a lotttt of material. I’m making it through crim with much more ease (especially as I’ve worked in crim so it’s more familiar - civil stuff is frankly a mystery to me lol). -
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September 2022 - Big Law Salaries?
It is typically more like you won't be eligible for partnership until X year rather than billing out at a lower rate or getting less comp. But there aren't a ton of super senior US laterals these days to begin with.- 1
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3L Grades
Does anyone know when grades / awards / prize notifications will be released for 3Ls graduating this June? I'm assuming they have to be posted earlier than for 1Ls and 2Ls (since we need to know whether we passed to attend convocation), but does anyone know how the school has gone about this re: timelines in previous years? Thanks! 🙂 -
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Barrister - 20 Day Study Plan
Are you using the Beat the Bar questions for practice here? I wasn't sure if there's other companies that have practice questions for this section as well that you may recommend! So far I found civil litigation to be the most dense so far (I'm also into the criminal law section now, and I'm finding crim to be less stressful/dense). -
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Barrister - 20 Day Study Plan
I’m now into criminal law, but, upon reflection, would encourage folks to take extra time for the initial civil litigation practice. This section is long and one day of practice was not enough for me to be as familiar with the materials as I had hoped.- 1
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Are New York "MidLaw" firms as competitive as New York BigLaw firms?
CB2021's post is spot on. Another point to add: as a general rule, the smaller a firm gets, the more important networking becomes. While applying through the general recruit may not be very successful due to Canadian schools being less recognized, it may be worthwhile to heavily network with a few select firms and then apply through referral (referrals are a lot more important in NY than Canada). Your grades will probably not hold you back with these firms as most firms outside the V20 regularly hire B average students. Your biggest hurdle will be showing that you are at a reputable law school which is where networking will be vital. -
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Are New York "MidLaw" firms as competitive as New York BigLaw firms?
Based on personal exp (and what I have heard from my peers), in general, the lower you go on the V100 the less likely a firm will even have heard of your school. Even if a firm is aware of your school's reputation, which is what US firms really care about, the lower ranked firms don't seem to want to hire students from Canadian schools for several reasons. One, they are likely not familiar with the immigration process and do not want to bother (if you are a Canadian, you will need a J1 for the summer). Two, the lower ranked firms generally have either smaller headcounts or tend to focus on a few target schools they hire from, whether strong local schools or top ranked national schools outside of T14. As a result, it is surprisingly difficult to find graduates from Canadian schools at V70-100 (I have personally collected data for all V100 firms and found Canadian grads based on LinkedIn and firm websites). I imagine this will likely hold true for MidLaw for the same reasons I have mentioned above. There are many law schools in NY and many of them have fairly strong alum base at most of the large firms in NY, so I think MidLaw in NY will probs be the same as well. Nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to apply as most firms will at most require you to submit a cover letter on top of law transcript and resume.- 2
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