A New How to Do Well in Law School Guide--A Different Perspective Forum

[hollamcholla1]

OP -- was your goal here to get praise for your work, or was it to potentially help future students?

If your goal was to potentially help future students than your mission has been accomplished. You put your advice out there, and perhaps a future law student will read it and remember it as they are trying to navigate their way through law school. The fact that others disagree with you only means that they are sharing their own feedback on how to help future students. That will be the filter they view your advice through.

If your goal was to simply get praised for your work/guide than that is silly. You found a way to do things that worked for you and it resulted in great grades.

As someone else pointed out, it probably sucks that you spent a bunch of time writing out your thoughts and others don't agree with you, however, if all the other guides have advice A and are celebrated and lauded by the community and your guide has contradictory advice B it makes sense that people may rail against it.

Either way, congrats on doing great!

Of course my goal was to help future students. That will happen less frequently when people make negative comments since people will discount the advice.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Or future students will benefit from seeing a variety of perspectives on the subject.

[hollamcholla1]

Most guides I have read involve someone telling you to spend 14 hrs a day studying or someone telling you that you barely have to work hard and as long as you know how to take a law school exam you can get by with minimal effort. I think both pieces of advice are crap for the vast majority of people. Of course studying all day and night will likely get you good grades, or at least, will greatly improve your chances at getting them. That's not exactly groundbreaking. The reality is that working that hard is a SKILL. A skill that very very few people have. I always laugh when I read Xeoh's thread. I especially like the part where he sleeps 4 hrs a night and studies the rest of the time. He's either a great liar or a very special person with rare abilities. The advice he gives just won't be applicable to the average person. Advice on the other end of the spectrum is equally as useless. If you are unwilling to ever do work on a weekend in law school, you probably won't do well. If you manage to do well anyway, good for you, but realize that you are not average.

Here, you are attempting to argue that your guide is somehow superior to some of the other guides out there. It is not. When you come out saying that your guide is better, or seems to have hit on some unique silver bullet that everyone else has missed, you are going to get some skeptics. Those of us who have been through law school and done just as well, if not better than you, are a valuable filter.

You do 1Ls and 0Ls a great disservice by telling them to focus on cold calls instead of practice exams. No-one is taking away from your achievements, but you may have done even better in law school had you focused more on practice exams.

Finally - people are being very gentle with criticism here. You need to get a thicker skin.

Superior probably is not the right word. It certainly will not be superior for everyone. It may be superior for some. More applicable to the average person than guides suggesting to study 20 hours a day probably. Or maybe not. You saying it is not though--assuming you mean to say that it is worse as opposed to equal--begs the question, and we're right back to square 1.

I never said to focus on cold calls instead of practice exams. I said that cold calls are not as useless as people on here suggest, and practice exams not as important as people on here suggest. I will stand by that contention.

I may have done better in law school had I focused more on practice exams. Seems very unlikely though, as my grades offer much more room to do worse than better were I to do it again.

[cavalier1138]

Or future students will benefit from seeing a variety of perspectives on the subject.

Nonsense! If law school teaches you anything, it's that there is only one way to ever think about any problem ever.

Now there's some solid advice for everyone.

[NotMyRealName09]

OP -- was your goal here to get praise for your work, or was it to potentially help future students?

If your goal was to potentially help future students than your mission has been accomplished. You put your advice out there, and perhaps a future law student will read it and remember it as they are trying to navigate their way through law school. The fact that others disagree with you only means that they are sharing their own feedback on how to help future students. That will be the filter they view your advice through.

If your goal was to simply get praised for your work/guide than that is silly. You found a way to do things that worked for you and it resulted in great grades.

As someone else pointed out, it probably sucks that you spent a bunch of time writing out your thoughts and others don't agree with you, however, if all the other guides have advice A and are celebrated and lauded by the community and your guide has contradictory advice B it makes sense that people may rail against it.

Either way, congrats on doing great!

Of course my goal was to help future students. That will happen less frequently when people make negative comments since people will discount the advice.

This thread got weird. OP, if your advice is good it will rise on its own merits. It's not a dissertation that you need to defend. You put your thoughts out there into the ether, and whatever happens happens. I didn't study like most of these guides on here and I kicked as at my T2 / T3 (rankings changed I think) and I've thrown out my opinions over the years on advice I think is great and advice I think is not.

I think, at least for here, my methods might be a minority view, but who gives a shit? Maybe one kid read something I wrote and adopted it, which is all I wanted.

Something strange though about lamenting anonymous internet criticism as if your post deserves to be gilded and that now it will never get the respect it deserves.

Like someone else said, it's all about considering options and letting the young law student decide what path to follow. I put a lot of thought into how I planned to attack law school, saw that I seemed to be doing things differently than most, had no idea if it would pay off, and then bam, I killed it.

You've done a nice job putting out a thought provoking post. But I respectfully think the only thing in this thread undermining it's potential impact is how personal you seem to be taking people's comments.

[hollamcholla1]

Fair.

Hard not to respond to people lambasting my advice when they don't understand the advice though

[cavalier1138]

Fair.

Hard not to respond to people lambasting my advice when they don't understand the advice though

Hint: If everyone is saying the same thing, maybe the issue isn't with their understanding...