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At the school I am transferring to the write on competition is from the 20-25. OCI is from the 22-25. Should I skip the writing competition or try to do OCI and the write on competition at the same time? I don’t care that much about law review, but I think having no journal probably looks bad.

I would skip

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missinglink wrote:

Helmholtz wrote:I would skip

Especially if you don't care to be on it.

Is there a secondary journal you might be able to sign up for w/o the write-on competition process?

No. There is one write on competition for all the journals.

,

Just guessing, are you transferring to WashU? I know most of the transfers were able to do both the competition and OCI at the same time last year. You should be able to do both without much of a problem.

lovelaw27 wrote:

missinglink wrote:

Helmholtz wrote:I would skip

Especially if you don't care to be on it.

Is there a secondary journal you might be able to sign up for w/o the write-on competition process?

No. There is one write on competition for all the journals.

Are the secondary journals competitive? If everyone gets one, just phone it in. Do the whole thing the 20th, take a shitty journal and move on.

Even if you got LR, you wouldn't know until after you did oci anyway. That minimizes a lot of the benefit it has.

Desert Fox wrote:

lovelaw27 wrote:

missinglink wrote:

Helmholtz wrote:I would skip

Especially if you don't care to be on it.

Is there a secondary journal you might be able to sign up for w/o the write-on competition process?

No. There is one write on competition for all the journals.

Are the secondary journals competitive? If everyone gets one, just phone it in. Do the whole thing the 20th, take a shitty journal and move on.

Even if you got LR, you wouldn't know until after you did oci anyway. That minimizes a lot of the benefit it has.

Exactly. I've been told that secondary journals at my transfer school just basically require an application.

For transfers, I see LR as being useful for two things: (1) you strike out at OCI and need to beef up the resume for the subsequent scramble or (2) you're gunning for a post-grad clerkship.

Journal membership is also important for the 3L hiring process, and transfer students should care much more about that process than other students (nearly half of my transfer class at Chicago switched firms via 3L hiring - a combination of firm upgrading and geographic changes).

Just do the competition. It does suck that you don't find out the results until after OCI (that's ridiculous, actually,) but you might have the results in-hand for callbacks, which would be very helpful.

What schools are these that just require an application?

At quite a few schools, secondary journals aren't super competitive. At NDLS for example, there are 85 journal spots for 175 people in the class.

I bet the people trashing LR membership are not on LR. I could enumerate all the reasons why LR has been a great experience for me, but I do not have the time.

Transfers generally do not fare well at OCI. You should take the long term view and try your best to get on LR.

Danteshek wrote:Transfers generally do not fare well at OCI.

Really?

Desert Fox wrote:

lovelaw27 wrote:

missinglink wrote:

Helmholtz wrote:I would skip

Especially if you don't care to be on it.

Is there a secondary journal you might be able to sign up for w/o the write-on competition process?

No. There is one write on competition for all the journals.

Are the secondary journals competitive? If everyone gets one, just phone it in. Do the whole thing the 20th, take a shitty journal and move on.

Even if you got LR, you wouldn't know until after you did oci anyway. That minimizes a lot of the benefit it has.

BOOM.

You can totally get away with doing the write-on in a day, too. Be prepared for a miserable day, though.