Acing Your First Year of Law School: The Ten Steps to Success You Won't Learn in Class

Customer Rating:
Summary: Very useful
Comment: One of the blogs I read in anticipation of my first year was authored by an obviously succesfull student and he recommended this book. Shame he is a commie. An outline on your first year with a solid emphasis on legal writing, outlining and exams. I found the legal writing section to be very useful because I didn't have a very good legal writing professor. Some cold hearted conservatives argue that academia is where professionals who couldn't hack it in the big times end up earning their bread. If law school professorships are where dejected high power attorneys get banished, then the dregs of this barrel of dejection are inhabited by your legal writing professor and probably your career placement director. The greatest academic surprise I encountered my first semester of law school was how much effort and time learning legal writing would take on my own. This book will help you learn the formula your whacky and/or drunk legal writing professor is looking for. Unfortunately, legal writing professors are zany and ineffective in their own individual ways so the help this book provides will be minimal. Legal writing's importance cannot be overrated, any help is good help. The glossary found at the end of this 130 page outline should supplement any need for a copy of Black's Law Dictionary but waste your money if you want; Westlaw has a copy online.
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Just get it - great intro!
Comment: This book is great for someone who is just learning how to think while in law school. While some of the reviews claim that it lacks substance, this book is not trying to lay out for you everything you should do in law school. It is sensitive to the fact that different people learn differently and so some things are going to be different. However, the basic tools it is laying out for you are the necessary tools to have a head start. I found that each page was jammed packed with tid bits on what not to worry about, what to focus on, what little things mean that will just make it easier when you get your books and feel overwhelmed... basically, it is not a step-by-step guide on how to be the best law student possible - that is up to you, but it gives you the tools to understand what you are supposed to be looking for and what not to stress about.

Get it, if you are a worrisome person like me who likes to plan ahead, this book will help you create a clear vision of the basics, tell what not to worry about, and one of the most important things, show you how to write a brief. I found it very useful and am glad I read it!

p.s. I am only giving it 4 and not 5 because I would have liked for them to come up with more examples than they did, but if you are an intelligent person (and you obviously are if you are going to law school) then you will be able to figure these things out and remember them for yourself.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, but consider 'Law School Confidential' instead
Comment: This is a good book --- but as a current law student, the best book I've found was "Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students," written by Robert H. Miller; ISBN: 0312318812. That book covers every stage of law school. It is organized so students can read relevant topics at the precise period a student needs to know the information. For example, the middle of "Law School Confidential" addresses issues faced by readers in the second-year of their law school career.

Law school tips and advice can also be found numerous places on the web, including www.toplawstudent.com.

That said, this book has some great advice and is easy to read. As a gift to an incoming law student, it certainly wouldn't disappoint.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Lots of fluff and little substance.
Comment: This book is written on the level of People magazine and has a very trendy feel to it. I used this book at a top 25 law school and found it to be largely useless, if not detrimental.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not worth it
Comment: At BEST this book will give you some idea as to what law school work will sorta maybe look like. Otherwise, I think there's absolutely nothing good in this thin volume that you can't get in more detail in a ten minute conversation with someone who's already in law school.