Across America, law students are starting their first year. Some are attending elite law schools on a traditional track; some are taking classes at night and working during the day. Many of them are freaked out right about now.
I have some words of encouragement.
1. Take all the clinics, practicums, and internships that you can. Nothing beats seeing how law is actually practiced. It helps you get a practical grip on what you might like to do, and helps you see how what you're learning applies to an actual legal career. Plus it's a crucial way to meet people and open doors.
2. Are you going to law school to become a professor? Good for you! Otherwise I strongly advise approaching it not as about academic excellence, but about training to be of service. Lawyers represent clients. Clients benefit from you knowing what you're doing. Clients benefit from practical excellence, not academic excellence. Academic excellence is a nice by-product of taking subjects seriously as you master them, but it's not an end in and of itself for a lawyer. You're training to do a good job for people who need help — whether you're going to be a civil litigator or a criminal lawyer or an in-house counsel guiding your company the right way. Some schools — particularly elite ones — encourage a contrived disdain for nuts and bolts of practice in favor of theory. Theory is nice — it's helpful to know the why, and to be conversant with theoretical arguments to back up your practical arguments — but a lawyer who can critique a rule of evidence, but not apply it, is not a lawyer who will be of service to a client.
3. Would you like to take some very specialized courses on some fun and esoteric issues? Fine. But don't neglect the building blocks, tedious as you may find them. I really didn't want to take Corporations and found it dull, but I use that knowledge all the time in civil and criminal litigation. I fled from Secured Transactions but soon learned that I would have benefited tremendously from it. Law and legal norms are everywhere and interdependent, and the theory that you can get by in your specialized area without all of the basics is usually wrong. ("But what are the basics?" is a subject for another post.)
4. Write every day — an assignment, a blog post, a substantive email. Speak every week — a debate, a podcast, an oral argument. Writing and speaking comfortably and effectively will always be useful no matter how you practice.
5. Resist excellence narratives that focus on the right background, the right school, the right job. The best lawyers are not the ones who went straight from Ivy to Ivy to Biglaw. The best lawyers are the ones who are serious, dedicated, and passionate about their craft. The best lawyers I've had the pleasure to work with have often been second-career lawyers, lawyers from schools that were not "top tier," lawyers who took a different path. But they were serious about being lawyers. Don't rest on your laurels just because you went Harvard to Yale, and don't sell yourself short just because you came to law after another career and you're going to a less "prestigious" law school. You can be excellent, but only if you work at it.
6. Law school culture often wants you to hate, resent, and fear your fellow students and see them as competitors. Resist. Make friends with, and be friendly with, different people. You'll learn from them. And you'll hate law school if you buy into the cutthroat narrative.
7. Some law schools also want to scare you. The "look to the left, look to the right, one of you will be gone at the end of the year" thing is theater. Don't buy into it. Work hard, care about your work, but don't envision yourself as in a struggle to survive. You're in a struggle to equip yourself to be a good lawyer.
8. Professors who use the Socratic Method — and other professors who interrogate you in class — do it for a variety of reasons. Some do it the reasons fraternities haze — it was done to them and it's tradition. Some of them are just assholes. Some do it to train you. It doesn't matter why they do it; you can't control that. It matters how you react. In a legal career, there will be a certain amount of unpleasantness. Whether you're a criminal lawyer or a civil litigator or an in-house counsel or a transactional lawyer or a public interest lawyer, you're going to have to live with it. The value of a Socratic professor — or a professor who's just an asshole — is that it helps teach you to stand up for your client. The key is confidence, and justified confidence comes from preparing and being serious about your job. You don't prepare meticulously for oral argument to avoid embarrassment; you prepare to serve the client. Prepare for Socratic professors like you're learning to serve a client — like you care about doing a good job for someone. It's not about you.
9. Outline concepts for the classes as you go along. Don't rely on other people's outlines, except to see a different perspective. The process of outlining forces you to figure out how things fit together. It's fine to do this together, but really do it all together — don't split it up.
10. Watch out for meta-concepts. If you got into law school, you studied for the LSAT, and if you studied for the LSAT, you learned that becoming familiar with the structure of word and logic problems made it much easier to solve them. Once you see how the "who is sitting next to Wayne if Earl is sitting to the left of Carl" fits together, solving it becomes a breeze. Legal analysis can be like that — both in law school exams (where you can become familiar not just with substantive rules of law, but with how professors embed legal issues into questions) and in practice. Keep an eye on not just "what is the rule in this case," but on "what logical and rhetorical moves did the judges use to get there."
11. Learn to believe in things. If you're ever going to be an advocate, or an adviser, you need to be able to believe in things. When you get up and defend someone charged with a crime, you need to believe in something, or the judge and jury sees you're just going through the motions and nails your client. You don't have to believe your client is good or innocent, but you have to believe passionately in something – that the system or the charges are unjust, that the punishment is disproportionate, or that the system is right to give every accused person an advocate and by God you are that advocate and you believe in your duty. It's the same with a civil client. You don't have to believe they're right, but you have to get up there and believe that we resolve disputes through zealous advocates, and believe in being that advocate. You have to believe in your advice as an in-house counsel, or public interest lawyer, or transactional lawyer. Cultivate believing in what you do.
Good luck.
Last 5 posts by Ken White
- Now Posting At Substack - August 27th, 2020
- The Fourth of July [rerun] - July 4th, 2020
- All The President's Lawyers: No Bill Thrill? - September 19th, 2019
- Over At Crime Story, A Post About the College Bribery Scandal - September 13th, 2019
- All The President's Lawyers: - September 11th, 2019
First year grades really matter. And maybe you haven't been graded on a curve much. First year exams are graded on a curve. After that, not all grades on a curve and grades don't matter so much. You should then do that stuff in #1.
Most of the advice is spot on (and I love the podcast) but the above advice is dated. Nowadays, it's "Look to the left, look to the right, as long as your tuition checks clear, all three of you will be here til graduation. Whether you pass the bar after that or can find a job is not our problem."
@ Readering
True. I had a law professor put the fear of god into us by pointing out that most of us probably breezed our way through high school and college and that for approximately half the class, the end of our first semester would be the first time we ever found ourselves in the bottom half of our class.
One thing I always recommend to 1Ls in their first semester is to not only study the material but to practice writing it. If your professor has a model exam answer from years past, practice typing out that answer. When you take your first Torts exam, writing out the elements of negligence should not only be at the forefront of your mind, but it should literally be muscle memory to type it out. It gives you a huge advantage to already be cranking out the basic stuff while your classmates are trying to translate into an essay what they remember from their outlines and flashcards.
This is good advice, but it seems to be geared toward defenders. Would the advice be the same in a prosecution context I wonder?
I was a client at a large financial institution – we used lots of top tier law firms – over 30 years it became clear to me that the best lawyers I worked with did not come from Yale or Harvard – they were lawyers who grew up poor, often immigrants and went to 2nd and 3rd tier law schools – but they worked hard, cared deeply about their work and made me feel ashamed when I did not deliver at their level – hard working good lawyers make their clients better.
@PuddinTame
I can't speak to what's good advice for prosecutors or criminal defenders, but as a coverage attorney who's spent his career representing insurance companies, the best advice I can give is to develop a complete and utter contempt for policyholders as early as possible. If you're not physically aroused by the thought of denying coverage to someone, you're not cut out for the work.
"Good . . . Good . . . Let the hate flow through you."
Here is what I wish someone told me: the benefits of a law school education go disproportionately to the top 10% of the class (and law review editors), and even those benefits are disproportionately stacked for the top several students. This is even more pronounced in non-top 20 law schools. So study up.
Learn how to get a good grade on a law school exam. It is a special skill unlike anything that you've likely seen before. Practice makes perfect, and never stop practicing. Sometimes the top answers look a little simplistic or spare. But if you ever start thinking that your answers are better than the model ones, stop and take a hard look at yourself. You might just be the tourist at MOMA who looks on the wall and says "anybody could do that." Trust me, it's not that simple.
Grades are very important–I would caution against emphasizing "training to be of service" over "academic excellence," lest that become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the "service" to be rendered at a local Starbucks or Chipotle. And good grades will be your ticket to the internships and opportunities that will let you showcase your writing ability, passion and service skills. But you have to get in the door. It is a very challenging marketplace.
Good luck!
I'm about to enter my third year of a four-year evening program and this advice is spot on. I regret that I simply don't have time to do more than one clinic before I graduate and I'd have to lose my current job and take out loans to handle an internship. C'est la vie.
@ RC Jennings
Working for insurance companies, I've seen a large cross section of counsel, and one of the most eye-opening experiences for me was an arbitration in which the Insured had been entitled to independent counsel and wanted "the best" and we had an arbitration over what this $1,000 an hour firm contributed that couldn't have been done by a less "elite" firm. It very soon became clear that the answer was "not much."
The elite firm touted their Ivy league degrees and clerkships, but really didn't do anything beyond sign off on work performed by their (less-elite) partners in the Joint Defense Agreement. They weren't bad, but they didn't do anything that any competent attorney wouldn't have, and they were far freer in billing extra hours without explaining why. Reading between the lines, it was clear that the GC insisted upon them because no one ever got fired for buying IBM.
@Fr0zt,
As the schmuck that handles her company's myriad insurance claims, I can already feel my blood boiling. I KNEW IT! I KNEW you guys were maliciously denying our claims! GRRRRRRRR
Wonderful and broadly covers many fields other than the law.
@ Been There-Done That
I agree with both you and Ken and would say that grades are absolutely critical to getting you in the door and them immediately stop being important. If you have the highest GPA in your class but you got it by taking all easy classes without a lot of substance (The First Amendment Implications of Underwater Basket Weaving), you may land the job of your dreams and then discover that you're completely untrained for it. Conversely, if you let your grades suffer because you take all practical courses, you may be trained to be the perfect fit for your dream job but find yourself unable to get hired due to your grades.
So I'd say take all those practical courses and seminars and do your best, but don't slack on the substantive classes you take and when exams come up, study hard because there is no do over. If all that seems like too much to juggle, then drop out, because it doesn't get any easier once you graduate.
@Elyce
Not to reveal too much, but when asked what is best in life, I always answer, "To crush your policyholders. See them driven before you into bankruptcy. And to hear the lamentations of their Additional Insureds."
5 is spot on.
I've a lawyer friend who basically got a promotion last year, and went from Geneva to Kuala Lumpur for his job (that's all the details I'll give, but its a big promotion for a big job). We were at school together, he screwed up and had to redo what youd call his 11th grade year.
I've another friend who's a barrister. He went to school with me too, but then he didnt go to college, he spent 4 years playing in a rock band before deciding to go to uni, so he went through clearing (in the UK system, clearing is what you go to if you dont get the grades for your 2 accepted offers, also where the unfilled degree openings go, anyone can then negotiate with that schools admissions office.) He picked law on a whim, and hes very good at it, despite his school grades never being the best (btw, law is an undergraduate degree in the UK)
You can open a lot of doors by focusing on item 1. If you do it right, you end up by osmosis also generally doing well in grades. On top of that, you generally also end up enjoying your stay in Law School more than others who focus on grades and law review.
The risk is that your grades might not be stellar and your first job out of law school won't be at Cravath… and that's a legitimate concern if your school debt is going to overshadow your entry level pay no matter where you work… but the reward is that you'll be a better practicing attorney earlier in your career. That can pretty easily catch up on the Cravaths if leveraged properly, and hiring partners recognize that in a resume.
In any event, any kind of list like this should always be tweaked to match your particular circumstances and desires. That said, I would say the vast majority of younger, direct to law school students missed out on a lot of learning experiences identified in item 1, and really the only reason for it was that someone told them they had to get on law review. A few did ok, but they didn't have anything to point to in their resume when they weren't top 3-5% (that was a very bad thing in 2009). At the same time, the vast majority of second-career law students (in the 2000s) tended to take advantage of the stuff in item 1, and the ones that did tended to be happier and more successful during law school and after graduation than the second-career law students who didn't.
It’s okay if this isn’t for you. You will find a lot of people in law school that are poorly suited for law school for a variety of reasons. As a crueler joke, you will find that some of these people who are ill-suited for law school make good lawyers and a frighteningly high amount of people who excelled in law school that are terrible lawyers. It takes a special kind of mental defect to enjoy being an attorney and doing so at a high level. It’s okay if it’s not for you.
My advice would be to think really hard about whether there's anything else you might rather do, and if there's even a slight chance that the answer is "yes," do that instead. 'Cause once you're in, it's really hard to get out. The sunk cost fallacy may be a fallacy, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
"Law school culture often wants you to hate, resent, and fear your fellow students and see them as competitors."
This is an urban legend. I never saw any of this behavior nor anything close to it. I was warned before starting LS about students ripping out pages of library books etc. Calling BS on this
Remember, the person who said ""It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement," is a lawyer.
The person who said, ""If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too," is a lawyer to.
The same person who also said, I've now been in 57 states, I think — one left to go," is also a lawyer.
Having more letters behind your name doesn't make you smarter. It makes you easier for ridicule.
Assuming Canadian law school and Canadian legal practice is comparable to the US:
Definitely take clinics, practicums etc. Being able to research and learn and know the law is one skillset. Being able to convey that knowledge to a client in a way that is useful for them and to help them apply it in a way that achieves their goals, (whether that goal is "minimize my tax burden" or "help me stay out of jail") is another skillset. Law school classes focus heavily on developing the first set of skills but they don't do a very good of developing the second. And that second set is very important in practice. Reciting legislation or court rules to a client is not helpful to them. You need to learn how to turn that knowledge in to useful advice.
One course that I would suggest, if your school offers it, is Remedies. It is wonderful to know the theory but even nicer to know when you can get, and what you have to show to get an injunction, TRO, an equitable lien, the different types of damages and how to calculate them. Very useful, practical, course. Not very sexy but very useful. I still use stuff I learned 20 years ago.
Iowa State Engineering freshman orientation – look left, look right, two of you won't be here to graduate. Started with about 600, graduated 175 or so. Graduation included those who switched to Industrial Engineering (IE or Imaginary Engineering) when they couldn't cut the math courses.
@Brian Jones
Same speech, different school. Sometime during Calculus III I decided I didn't really want to be an engineer. I've been regretting that for about thirty years now. If only I'd worked as hard as an undergraduate as I did in law school,…
I wonder if those 425 guys from Iowa State ended up going to law school too.
Fr0zt says
You. I like you.
My biggest complaint about law school is that there is no meaningful feedback before the final exam. Sure, you can tell who's done the reading by the answers given during class, but understanding the nightly reading is a very different skill from writing the exam. Even worse, the class time spent on a topic often bore little or no relation to the importance of the topic as reflected on the exam. In CivPro we spent something like four hours on the dissent in Adickes, plus maybe half an hour on the majority, and I'm pretty sure Adickes didn't show up on the exam at all.
(I remember Adickes because I initially read it without realizing that "burden of proof" and "burden of production" weren't synonyms. The professor was a bit shocked but genuinely curious about whether that interpretation could be internally consistent. Whereas I had already seen enough Supreme Court opinions to conclude that looking for consistency was a fool's errand. I mean, this was a case about affirmatively demonstrating the absence of a dispute. )
"…is that it helps teach you to stand up for your client. The key is confidence, and justified confidence comes from preparing and being serious about your job."
IANAL, but I can't emphasise this enough. If you don't learn this skill you become a worthless yes-person shill. You may be financially successful, but decent people and lawyers will think less of you and those with real ethics will not use you. In short, life may or may not glitter, but it will be shallow and hollow. Maybe that will not bother you…
On the other hand, justified confidence takes skill and dedication to develop and hone. Unjustified confidence is a terrible and destructive thing to behold.
Also: you can hope your law school is as awesome as the NYU School of Medicine, which in a beautifully understated way announced today to it's new class that… it would not be charging them tuition.
Sort of a "Hi, here's a white coat and $55K. Have fun" thing.
I suspect this is so they can return to the time-honored tradition of doing that "look to your left, look to your right…" thing, without having to worry about the drop in income when they boot the under-performing class members!
I am merely a client, and I hope that I won’t be viewed as deliberately offensive. The best lawyer that I ever used was all Ivy, undergrad and law school. He was from a prominent family, good-looking, polished, and gracious. I hated him. Would definitely hire again, of course.
What do you think about this article? Is it unfair or inaccurate?
http://tuckermax.me/why-you-should-not-go-to-law-school-3/
Not law school, but some life experience that happens to come to quite a few similar guidelines, and reflects many of the values that I agreed with (in my opinion) an excellent blog post.
I have worked in scientific/technical computer programming, in high school in the late 1970s (Z80!), an undergraduate degree in the early 1980s, and did some small and large work on a number of systems, especially helping maintain or enhance embedded systems implementing patented research — at least thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of lines of code in C, along with a smorgasbord of assembly language, from 8-bit (Z80, Hitachi H8) through to embedded DSPs.
Ever since about 2006, I have been unable to find any work, and am on the disability support pension.
The problem is Epilepsy — I wrote off my car, smashing head-on into a tree at an estimated speed of 80km/h, while I was completely not in control of the car because of having a grand-mal seizure.
It took nearly 4 years to find a cocktail of drugs that controlled my seizure, and until they were controlled, I was not allowed to drive. So, when my last contract after the accident ended, I was using public transport, or even riding a pushbike, to get to job interviews.
The side-effects of the medication, especially disrupting my sleeping patterns, and making it hard for me to concentrate, meant that I was very poor at job interviews, and became paranoid about looking for work, on the basis that I would "poison" my prospects as a result of the medical condition and/or the treating medications making me interview so poorly.
Where this links back into the blog post is what I learned during that time, a tenet that I strongly encouraged my kids to adopt:
*** Given a choice between being a "high-performance but unreliable" person within a certain employment field, or being a "medium-performance but rock-solid reliable/dependable delivery" person, choose the "medium+reliability" as the basis of your study and work. ***
Note that "reliability" in my definition here is in relation to the desires of the employer/client, and this correlates quite well with the "start from the client, and work backwards to provide excellent service" of Ken's post.
Some thoughts from a biglaw transactional lawyer who finished near the top of a "top" law school:
1. Law school teaches essentially nothing that is useful to the practice of law, at least transactional law. Some of the classes, primarily those taught by practitioners rather than professors, are the exception, but even those teach nothing that cannot be learned in short order on the job.
2. Law school grades matter a lot, especially 1L grades, if you want a job in biglaw (i.e., if you want to be able to pay off that law school debt without struggling to make ends meet). Also, lawyers are snobs and care about what law school you went to. I think this is ridiculous as (1) pretty much all law schools teach the same things (which are not that useful anyway) and (2) learning these things from a respected academic is of no advantage whatsoever. Nonetheless, it matters a lot in finding a job.
3. While it seems hard to reconcile 1 and 2 above (why focus on grades if the subject matter is not relevant to practice?), the missing link is that the most important ingredient to doing well in law school is putting in the effort. I was shocked at how many students didn't even consistently do the basics, e.g., read the assignments, go to class, review their notes after class, take practice tests before the exam that is the sole determiner of their grade. (I always laugh when non-lawyers ask about whether the sabotage portrayed in movies like The Paper Chase is real; many students cannot even be bothered to regularly go to class never mind go to the effort to sabotage one another.) Biglaw's focus on grades makes sense in this light; Biglaw sells associate hours so they want associates who will put in those hours even though the work is often boring. This is also why I think working on the law review or other journal is important. Biglaw wants to know that you are ready and willing to perform work that is sometimes boring, menial and thankless–a perfect description of working on law reviwew.
4. Being a biglaw lawyer is a pretty good deal. Yes, it often involves long hours and client service businesses are often difficult. But where else can a 25-year old who doesn't really know how to do anything useful make $200,000 a year? Some biglaw lawyers like to talk about how their jobs are unbelievably hard or "soul crushing," but in my opinion, this is more a result of lawyers possessing an unusual capacity for self pity than of the job being that much worse than any other client-service job–accountants, bankers, IT support professionals and plenty of others have it just as tough and, with the exception of some bankers, generally get paid a lot less.
5. Transactional law is often quite interesting, at least relative to other sorts of customer service jobs. The first few years can be less so as junior associates often end up doing menial work, but it definitely gets better.
So my friendly advice to new law students is to actually do the work every day, even when you would much rather do something else. This more than anything will help you get a job after law school so you can pay off those debts and will best gauge your capacity and willingness to do that work.
An off topic question:
According to the "about" page,"The name "Popehat" arises from an inside joke, and isn't a religious reference of any sort."
This blog appears to have started in 2004. The movie Eurotrip came out in 2004. In Eurotrip, there is much hilarity, including a scene in the Vatican where the "Popehat" catches fire. Is the "private joke" a Eurotrip reference?
Does this mean that having a total meltdown at Skadden at 3 a.m. is a bad idea? (I was just the proofreader and talker-downer. Got to be the associate's para-paralegal, thougb.)
Off topic, but…
For those who came for the Prenda, but stayed for the ponies…
Paul Hansmeier has admitted guilt in a plea agreement [yeah, it's the Reg. So?]
Professors who use the Socratic Method…
I, for one, am grateful to them. Having to stand and present a case (or make one's argument or whatever) is good practice. I had a 1L Crim professor who was pretty hardcore about this. Once, when I was presenting, I'd gone through the essentials and answered a few additional questions (and, thus, had clearly demonstrated that I was prepared) but got completely stumped by one question he was asking me. I looked down at my notes, looked at my open casebook, wracked my brain, but nothing was coming. I simply could not come up with the answer. So he relieved me of duty and called on someone else. As soon as I sat down, I looked at the open pages of my casebook and found the answer written in the margin. In *my* handwriting.
The point of all of which is to say, that kind of thing doesn't happen to me any more. And having made it through the gauntlet of doing it over and over in law school is a big part of the reason.
An expansion on #1 and #2 – if one is going to law school to be a lawyer, it is essential to start making concrete steps toward that post-graduation legal career from day 1. You can't put in a resume the week before graduation and expect to have a job – you need to be making inroads, getting involved, and actually working toward getting that job the entire time. Clerkships can grow out of internships; summer associate positions or even paralegal staffing gigs can turn into entry level jobs. And if you don't have a post-graduation job in sight, you may want to hit the pause button and figure that out before your first year.
On #6 – With small class sizes and a good number of vicious career / political / social climbers in the mix, it can feel a lot like going back to high school. You need to associate with folks who are good to be around, or get used to wrestling with vipers. I found the older or evening students were usually much more sane and focused.
@Pearly: I agree, with the amplification that any lawyer who complains that his $200,000+ a year job and all that goes with it is "soul-crushing" has never worked or known anyone who worked a retail customer service position for minimum or near-minimum wage. If you're making top lawyer money, you have options–you can change your employer or even your whole career. If you're scraping along on minimum wage, you generally don't have the options to change your situation.
Disclaimer: I am myself a decently well-off software engineer, but I know people "without options", and have worked in such jobs once or twice.
While I agree whole heartedly with much of what you say in the post, I've long been on record that the advice to students to "take as many clinics, practicums, and internships as you can” is very bad, at least for those who eventually want to practice transactional law. See, What Law Schools Should Teach Future Transactional Lawyers: Perspectives from Practice.(https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1430087).
I read on the internet once that it was (in times past) prohibited for Jewish men under the age of 40 to study for the rabbinate, on the theory that those who had not achieved their material peak (married, kids, wealth, etc.) would be unable to devote themselves seriously to the study of their faith (which is in form much like common law legal studies, as I understand it). I think that a similar rule ought to be considered for lawyers, as the lawyers and law students who tend to do best as practicing lawyers (in my experience) are those who have had a career/military service/some kind of "real world" experience prior to going to law school, rather than those who leave their education pipeline with a degree, a bar license, and a dream.
I was thinking of commenting here, and was reading through the prior comments, and when I got to the last one from "Plaid and Proud", I was like "whoa." I'm a 40-year-old guy with a wife and kids who is considering going to law school. However, I can't claim to have ever visited this "real world" place you speak of. I am a philosophy professor.
If I do go to law school, it won't be to join BigLaw. I actually don't know what that term means, but I assume it's a reference to large, expensive, legal partnerships. I would probably like being a law professor, but that's a long shot (since I don't want to move out of state to attend law school, and I don't currently live in New England). But another thing I'm attracted to is public defense, or criminal defense more generally. I think I would burn out after two years of it, but I also think I could be proud of those two years, if you get my meaning.
So Ken's point (2) cuts both ways for me. I genuinely love the academic side of law–the part that's like philosophy. But I have an idealistic attraction to the service-side of things.
That said, anybody have any advice for a potential 40-something law student?
I went to Michael Cohen’s law school, a fact which I was never embarrassed by until I learned of his existence. Dear old Resume Stain Law School is actually a fine school in the sense it teaching you what other law schools teach — I have practiced with and across from many lawyers from more esteemed schools (a/k/a/ all of them) and haven’t been put to shame by the comparison. I’ve not yet had an actual client know or care where I went to school.
But the problem with Cooley and all other law schools is that law school is an invented exercise that was created to maintain the status and wealth of the profession as the domain of the white elites, not to provide better anything to anyone else. I started law school at age 41 after having served in the military and having been an engineer and then consultant — after all that highly practical experience, I was astonished that the law had had apprenticeships (clerking) for centuries, and had got rid of that eminently sensible system in favor of the classroom model, which only serves to crank out revenue and keep minorities out.
"That said, anybody have any advice for a potential 40-something law student?"
Don't.
Don't don't don't.
Do you have any concept of how much it costs? And you don't think you'd like the parts that make money? Unless you're living off a massive trust fund, what you're proposing sounds disastrous.
That being said, I come from a rich family and got to go to law school for free due to my military experience and have quite enjoyed the practice of law. Most people don't share my privilege though.
Look left, look right, the student in your class who will make the most money in their career will be the one selling smart contracts, and you don't have any classes in that!
Also, when somebody is going Socratic on you, remember the context of Socrates' interrogations! Don't be mislead by that lout Plato, and his fake Socrates. The reason that Socrates was interrogating everybody is that he had been accused of being Wise by the Oracle at Delphi, and knowing himself to be completely ignorant, he was interrogating all the important people to discover if any of them actually had any wisdom either. In the end he discovered none are wise, but he didn't find anybody other than himself who would endorse his own ignorance! So that asshole standing over you, just remember: if he was wise, he wouldn't be asking for your wisdom, and he sees you as ignorant because he knows himself to be so!