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Finding my flow: how I developed an exam preparation strategy that worked for me —guest post by Katie Clarke

Today, we’re excited to bring you our first guest post written by a current law student! Katie Clarke is a rising 3L at Carolina Law, and Rachel was lucky enough to teach her during Katie’s very first semester at Carolina. Additional biographical details appear below.

Growing up, I excelled in school because I tried harder than most and had figured out the best way to study to perform well on exams: rote memorization. That changed when I started law school. During the first semester of my 1L year, I spent hours each night reading and briefing cases, ensuring I memorized every last detail. To my dismay, I soon learned that those exact details, like whether a car was red or blue, really didn’t matter to the professor. As a very detail-oriented person (in fact, one of my law school professors gave me the superlative of “most detail-oriented”), I struggled to grasp the idea that the details didn’t matter as much as understanding the big picture (i.e., the holding) and the ability to apply the law moving forward.

In October, with midterms around the corner, most students had already begun outlining, or at least familiarizing themselves with outlines provided by 2Ls and 3Ls. I saw classmates with 100+ page outlines and heard about how they had spent hours outlining, but weren’t even halfway through the material. Needless to say, this was overwhelming. Although I appreciate details, I am also aware I can get bogged down by them and was fearful that I would freeze up during an exam if I tried to using a 100+ page outline. This led me to decide that the “traditional” Microsoft Word, bulleted, Times-New-Roman outline would not be for me. Continue reading “Finding my flow: how I developed an exam preparation strategy that worked for me —guest post by Katie Clarke”

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Want to Give Better Writing Feedback? Watch Your Tone. (Guest Post by Joe Fore)

Today, we’re proud to present a guest post by Joe Fore (@Joe_Fore), Co-Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program at the University of Virginia School of Law.

A few weeks ago, Legal Writing Pro Ross Guberman (@legalwritingpro) shared a LinkedIn article posted back in April 2017 about an attempt to give writing advice that turned sour. It’s a tale that can provide some important lessons about giving effective feedback in the legal writing context. Here’s the story: Continue reading “Want to Give Better Writing Feedback? Watch Your Tone. (Guest Post by Joe Fore)”

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Telling Yourself What to Do (Guest post by Jennifer Murphy Romig)

Today, we’re proud to bring you this guest post by Jennifer Murphy Romig, Professor of Practice at Emory Law School.

“A true scientist doesn’t perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you’re told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs.”

—Hope Jahren, Lab Girl, Chapter 8

When—if ever—does a lawyer transition from “doing what she’s told” to “telling herself what to do”?

In one way, never. The client reigns supreme, right?

The lawyer cannot “generate wholly new knowledge” for the sake of contributing to civilization like a scientist. This is one essential difference between practicing lawyers and law professors: law professors can identify an issue, explore it, and write scholarship, advocacy, blogs, op-eds, and so on—even if no client would ever pay them to do that.

The lawyer, however, takes clients as they are and does what they need. Continue reading “Telling Yourself What to Do (Guest post by Jennifer Murphy Romig)”

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Organizational Tools for the Disorganized Lawyer (Guest post by Lauren Clark Rad)

Today, we’re delighted to bring you the #PracticeTuesday Blog’s very first guest post, courtesy of #AppellateTwitter mainstay Lauren Clark Rad, a litigator at Ferguson Case Orr Paterson LLP. 

 

Take a moment to pause and imagine your ideal lawyer or law student. What is her personality like? What is her workspace like? Most likely, the person you imagined is smart, thoughtful, thorough, and organized. She has a desk that is reasonably tidy and a good grasp of what’s coming up on her calendar. There are reasons for that.

Law is a deadline-driven profession. The consequences of missing those deadlines can be severe, even catastrophic. Clients depend on their lawyers to monitor deadlines and make sure they’re met.

Lawyers are human, though, and they span the spectrum of strengths and weaknesses. Some of us are just not born with an innate sense of how to be organized. Over the last decade, I’ve been on a mission to find the organization system that works best for me. In hopes of sparing others that same lengthy journey, I’ve compiled this list of various tools and techniques I’ve used, along with a discussion of their benefits and drawbacks. Continue reading “Organizational Tools for the Disorganized Lawyer (Guest post by Lauren Clark Rad)”

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Dr. Katie Pryal and the Life of the Mind Interrupted

Today on the blog, we’re delighted to bring you a Q-and-A with Katie Rose Guest Pryal (@krgpryal). Katie is a novelist, attorney, freelance journalist, and erstwhile law professor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is the author of novels, including ENTANGLEMENT and CHASING CHAOS, and nonfiction books, including her most recent, LIFE OF THE MIND INTERRUPTED: ESSAYS ON MENTAL HEALTH AND DISABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION. She is also the co-author of two popular law school textbooks: CORE GRAMMAR FOR LAWYERS (with Ruth Ann McKinney) and THE COMPLETE LEGAL WRITER (with Alexa Z. Chew). As a journalist, Katie contributes to QUARTZ, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, DAME MAGAZINE, WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION, and other national venues.

Katie earned her master’s degree in creative writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, her law degree from UNC-Chapel Hill, and her doctorate in rhetoric from UNC Greensboro. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Terrence W. Boyle of the United States District for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

My questions to Katie are in bold; her answers follow. Continue reading “Dr. Katie Pryal and the Life of the Mind Interrupted”

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Professor Katrina Lee and the business of law

For today’s #PracticeTuesday post, we’re very excited to bring you a Q-and-A with #AppellateTwitter mainstay Professor Katrina Lee (@katrinajunelee). Professor Lee is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where she teaches business of law, legal negotiations, and legal writing. She is also the author of several scholarly articles which you can find here. Before joining the ranks of academia, she was a litigator and law firm equity partner in San Francisco.

This summer, Professor Lee taught Business Negotiations at the University of Oxford as part of the University of Oxford-OSU summer law program. The picture of her on the left was taken in her Oxford flat. And the picture on the right is of her fantastic new business of law book, The Legal Career: Knowing the Business, Thriving in Practice. This innovative new textbook explores a constellation of topics in the business of law that are often a black box even to practicing attorneys, to say nothing of law students. Professor Lee’s book is unique in the academic textbook market, and it overlaps nicely with many of the topics we often discuss on #PracticeTuesday, so we asked her if she’d be willing to answer a few questions for us. Happily, she agreed! My questions to Professor Lee appear below in bold; her responses follow. Continue reading “Professor Katrina Lee and the business of law”