Life as a Law Student: 4 Things to Know

You’ve managed to get a good score on your LSAT, you’ve been accepted into your preferred choice of law school, and you are packing your possessions to go back to college to do a law degree. Overwhelmed yet? That’s totally normal. Here are some tips to help you on your way.

Get Your Finances Sorted Out

Law school is widely known to be expensive and you don’t want to start getting into financial trouble early on. One way to find extra savings is to see if you can refinance your original student loans by speaking to private lenders. This option is ideal if you want to free up a bit of extra cash and keep your debts manageable. Talk to a financial expert to see if this is possible in your situation.

Attend Networking Events

You know those mixers that you went to when you were first at college and you wanted to have a cheap night out and meet new people – well now there is a business element to it. Networking at these, and other, events is really useful in law school because of the fact that everyone goes on to specialize in different fields of practice. From litigation to conveyance and family law, making friends and connections at law school means that ten or fifteen years down the track when your client is asking if you can help with family law, you can reply that you do know someone, and vice versa – you can be recommended too.

Attend Lectures

Unlike undergraduate degrees, missing a lecture can mean missing out on vital information that is important to your course, your relationship with your lecturer, and indeed your future. Because the people who teach your courses are the ones who are going to be recommending you for jobs in the future, it is well worth making sure you take the time to get to know them and their material. Plus, not all teachers are fair, and some get their exam questions from the questions that are asked in the room – i.e., they are trying to trip people up who only got the notes from study groups rather than attend the sessions. It’s a smart trick that works against those not prepared.

Experiment with Different Learning Techniques

You can do all sorts of tests online that determine how you learn best, via what method, and whether it’s solo or in a group situation, but that’s completely different from putting it into practice. Sometimes, talking through an imaginary scenario gets something stuck in your head a lot easier than if you were to just read the same scenario in a book. Experiment with learning on your own and with study groups; try different color-coding to see if that helps make things stick; and, there are plenty of tricks to learning the lists of names and dates that are needed for studying law. Our favorite is the association game, where you take a mental snapshot of an area and associate different items to different dates – but that may not work for you. Don’t be afraid to try new techniques to up your memory game.