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    Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life
    Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life
    Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life

    By Jeremy Stipkala

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    About this ebook

    Are you heading to law school? Already there? Come find out how to thrive in law school! This book starts very simply with what to expect in law school, and finishes with a personal exploration of why you might want to serve as an attorney. Along the way, the acclaimed author of "Pass the Bar Exam with Dr. Stipkala’s Proven Method" reveals tested techniques for: researching the law, outlining cases, studying for final exams, writing answers to essay questions, preparing for mock trial, and creating that all-important “writing sample.” Dr. Stipkala also shares practical advice for paying for law school, gaining job experience, and prospering in evening law school – all honed by his personal experience while achieving a top 8% class rank (Day and Evening Divisions) and working full time. These and other helpful tips come alive with illuminating war stories and heart-felt advice. Every law student needs this useful, personal, and funny guide!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJeremy Stipkala
    Release dateJun 4, 2018
    ISBN9780999799772
    Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life
    Author

    Jeremy Stipkala

    Jeremy passionately believes that being an attorney means serving others with knowledge of the law. A Patent Attorney, Jeremy launched his intellectual property law firm, Thrive IP, in 2005 on a "thrive-centric" paradigm. Every stakeholder, including clients, colleagues, and vendors, should thrive because of mutually-beneficial relationships. Now he advises clients on all aspects of intellectual property law, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, licensing, and litigation. In addition, Jeremy provides corporate set-up services for his earliest-stage clients to create investment-ready entities with proper intellectual property protection from Day One. Before launching his firm, he served eight years in the largest intellectual property law firm in the U.S., Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, L.L.P., in Washington D.C. Jeremy mentors law school graduates to pass the bar exam, and has served as Adjunct Professor at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law. Jeremy earned his law degree with High Honors from the George Washington University Law School, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University. Undergraduate studies happened at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA, and Leeds University in Leeds, England. A husband and father, Jeremy lives with his wife and two small children near Charleston, SC, where he enjoys sailing and toddler wrestling.

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      Book preview

      Thrive in Law School! A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life - Jeremy Stipkala

      Thrive in Law School!

      A Friendly Guide to the Most Important Educational Experience of Your Life

      By

      Jeremy M. Stipkala, Ph.D., J.D.

      To Andrew and Aviva: May you succeed no matter how you are called.

       2018 Jeremy M. Stipkala

      Persimmon Woods Press, LLC

      Paperback ISBN 978-0-9997997-6-5

      eBook ISBN 978-0-9997997-7-2

      Table of Contents

      I. INTRODUCTION

      II. WHAT TO EXPECT IN LECTURE

      A. Look to Your Right; Look to Your Left

      B. So What Is Law School All About?

      C. Right Tools for the Job

      D. The Dreaded Socratic Method

      III. HOW TO PREPARE FOR LECTURE

      A. Reading and Outlining Cases

      B. Now Organize All That Stuff!

      IV. FINAL EXAMS

      A. Format

      B. How to Study

      C. Issue Spotting

      D. All Elements Rule

      E. All Evidence Suggestion

      F. Outline Your Answer – AIRAC

      G. Write Your Answer

      H. Further Test Taking Skills

      V. LEGAL RESEARCH AND WRITING

      A. Pay Attention: You Will Need This Later

      B. Format and Style

      C. Citations

      D. All Elements Rule

      E. All Evidence Suggestion

      F. Putting It All Together

      VI. TRIAL ADVOCACY

      A. A War Story – All Elements Rule

      B. Another War Story – A Procedural Win Is a Win on the Merits!

      C. Offense

      D. Defense

      E. Final Preparation

      F. Checklist for Trial Preparation

      VII. EXTRACURRICULARS

      A. The Rock Star Career

      B. And for the Rest of Us?

      C. Practical Experience

      D. Fun for Everyone!

      VIII. GAINING JOB EXPERIENCE

      A. The Rock Star Career, Continued

      B. Clerkships and Internships

      C. Summer Associate Programs in Big Law

      D. Law Clerks in Law Firms

      E. Legal Clinics

      IX. EVENING LAW SCHOOL!

      A. Advantages

      B. A Day in the Life of Jeremy

      C. The Important Stuff

      X. PAYING FOR LAW SCHOOL

      A. Work for It

      B. Uncle Sam Needs You

      C. Borrow Like a Politician

      D. Student Loan Forgiveness Programs

      XI. FINAL WORD OF ENCOURAGEMENT – FIND YOUR WHY

      I. Introduction

      Congratulations! Welcome to law school! You are about to embark on the most important educational (and professional and perhaps personal growth) experience of your life so far. This law school adventure will resemble in some ways your college experience: you will take courses, earn grades, and progress toward a degree. But this will be different. Law school resembles college the way college resembled high school. New and seemingly impossibly complex material will challenge you to digest and deftly employ it. Novel ways of thinking, speaking, and even acting will be thrust upon you. And, at the end of it, you will be called Lawyer, Counselor, Attorney at Law: Juris Doctor.

      Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Can you handle it? Dear Reader, I tell you emphatically YES YOU CAN! You have conquered college. Do you remember how difficult college appeared at first? No more spoon-feeding by friendly high school teachers. No-one telling you when to go to class, or when to do your homework, or even how to do your homework. No more classes with all of your friends – every class seemingly filled with strangers. Think back now to your freshman year in college. What if you had to take those classes again? How easy would that be? How about high school? Piece of cake! One day (next year), you will look down your nose at those poor 1L (first-year) law students, and scoff at their deer-in-the-headlights expressions, as you will have mastered by then what they must face.

      But before you do all that looking down your nose and scoffing (and I urge you to be gentle, even generous, with those who come behind you), you have to survive your First Day Of Law School. And then your Second Day Of Law School. And then your, umm, well, you get the idea. It is my hope and goal that this book, with its friendly voice, gives you insight into what comes next, and provides you with some tools that really help you thrive in law school and ultimately triumph in your study and practice of the law.

      (Return to Table of Contents)

      II. What to Expect In Lecture

      A. Look to Your Right; Look to Your Left

      Just before my first day of law school, I attended an orientation lecture in the university’s grand auditorium. The law school dean, an august man with flaming red hair, came out to address the assembled cohort of fresh new law students. Ladies and gentlemen, he said. "Look to your right; look to your left. Everyone you see here today, you will see them at graduation." A sigh of relief rippled across the auditorium, and morphed into an eruption of heart-felt applause. We were all going to make it!

      A friend of mine told me of his law school orientation at a different law school. His dean gave the same instruction. Look to your right; look to your left. But what that dean said next had a much different effect. "At the end of this academic year, ten percent of you will be gone." (That school had a policy of failing out ten percent of its incoming class.) I can only imagine the collective anxiety in that auditorium rocketing up to fever pitch. Students nervously glanced about, wondering if they were going to make it, or if they were going to number among the sacrificed in that decimated class of new law students.

      What your law school dean says to you at orientation has a profound effect on you, apparently. My friend became such an effective student fighting for his academic survival. I met him taking an advanced class, Patent Licensing, while I was finishing my law degree and he was earning his LLM in intellectual property law at my law school. When we got together to study for the final exam in May, he could recite from his notes the exact dialogue between the professor and certain students from a lecture that happened in February. He even caught the nuanced variation the professor threw at the students, and the subtly different outcome that variation caused. I earned my only A+ in law school in that class, and I owe so much to that friend and his fierce skills as a law student.

      In contrast, let me tell you about a classmate who was told that we would all be there at graduation. At the end of my second-to-last semester, I was good. I mean really good. As a 4L – a fourth-year evening law student – I had mastered this law school thing, and I could eat a final exam for lunch. This course was Environmental Law, and the final exam was open book. I had my casebook and my book of statutes flagged with little yellow tongues of plastic, each flag marked in pencil with the name of a case or statute. Nervously awaiting the beginning of

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