What I Learned in Law School

In law school, I obviously learned a tremendous amount of substantive law as well as analysis and argument techniques. In the process, however, I also learned a great deal of general "wisdom-type" life lessons.

Life Lessons (ongoing)

1. Get everything in writing.
2. There is indeed wheat under all that chaff.
3. No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be 2 sides.
4. A rational argument will make even absurdly preposterous facts sound plausible. Conversely, an irrational argument can eviscerate even the most favorable facts.
5. Know that everything you do can -- and often will -- be scrutinized and second-guessed 18 different ways from Sunday by people who not only (a) have the luxury of hindsight, but (b) have also never been in your shoes.
6. Very few things are hard if you just read the rules.
7. The necessity of fighting and the probability of success must be weighed against the cost in time, money, and opportunity of doing so.
8. Not guilty does not mean you were innocent

Law School Online (ongoing)

Thanks to the ABA, the core courses at accredited law schools are largely the same. This is one reason why I took as many and as varied a menu of elective courses as I possibly could because you don't make yourself valuable by only being able to do what others can do. If you carry this logic out, however, the first year of law school becomes increasingly meaningless because it is standardized.

To test this theory, I've listed below the courses I took in law school. Over the next several months -- less if I'm bored enough -- I will hyperlink the required Bar courses that I took and list an outline of what we covered in each course. If you're in law school somewhere, hopefully these will help you. If you've gone through law school, maybe this will show you even though you and I may have gone to different schools in different parts of the world and had different professors and used different books, we still learned the same material.

First year

• Torts
• Contracts
• Property
• Legal Analysis Research and Writing
• Criminal Law

Second year

• Civil Procedure
• Constitutional Law
• Mass Communication Broadband Seminar
• Evidence

Third year

• Patents
• Business Organizations
• Article 9 Commercial Finance
• Venture Capital Law
• E-discovery
• Negotiation
• Professional Responsibility

Fourth year

• Criminal Procedure
• Remedies
• Wills & Trusts
• Antitrust
• Copyright
• Managing Complex IP Litigation

Friday, April 22, 2011 03:35:22 PM

Originally authored: Saturday, December 12, 2009 09:35:34 AM