Top Six Pieces of Friendly (Though Perhaps in Some Instances Tough) Advice for Incoming Law Students

Every half decade or so I try to update, revise and offer to incoming law students — in my biweekly column slot that roughly coincides with the beginning of the new academic year — some tips on how to approach the great intellectual and professional journey on which they are about to embark. In decades past I have offered as many as 12 suggestions. But (regrettably) attention spans seem to be shrinking, so for now I offer (below) my top half dozen, specifically tailored for the class entering in 2026. 1. Develop a strong work ethic:One of the biggest problems today—and you see it clearly in the context of today’s political discourse—is that people are disinclined to read and analyze anything that isn’t short, catchy, and superficial. The internet and social media have created amazing opportunities, but they are also responsible in part for the demise of good journalism, and the lack of depth people have in their knowledge about — and their ability to carefully analyze—the world around them. X and other social media platforms have their virtues, but they have also inflicted great harm to deliberative democracy, since it is hard to meaningfully explore anything in 280 characters, but many people still use tweets as their primary source of opinion formation. Exacerbating these problems is that the rampant grade inflation in undergraduate education has induced college students to spend less and less time on their classes (where high grades are easy to get anyway) and instead try to distinguish themselves by focusing on non-academic outside activities. While real-world experience is great (and necessary), many entering law school students come into their 1L year less academically prepared than their counterparts were a decade or two ago. And yet law is a very academic discipline, and one that, when done right, is all about depth and substance. The texts are long and often dense; the analysis is complex, sometimes tedious; the assertions and conclusions frequently come with qualifications; and the bottom lines are usually nuanced. Properly approached, law school—and the practice of law thereafter—is hard work, and plenty of it. Discipline, persistence, and stamina are attributes of most successful law students and lawyers, and the sooner one makes peace with that reality, the better. At a charter middle school in San Francisco where I used to serve on the Board, there hung a banner advising: “Don’t pray for a light load; pray for a strong back.” After years of reflection, I would tweak it for law students: “Don’t pray for a light load; build up your back muscles!” 2. Relish the Indeterminate Nature of Legal Puzzles: More and more so (and perhaps especially after Covid), students arrive at law schools wanting their teachers and their classes to provide them “answers” to the difficult questions posed by the first-year fields of legal study. Students crave “takeaways” and “summaries” of the “right ways” to address various kinds of scenarios. In a similar vein, many students are tempted to make extensive use of artificial intelligence tools to help provide them clean, crisp responses to their questions about how law operates on a given set of facts. But one of the big reasons artificial intelligence—while definitely useful in helping direct someone to some basic analytic frameworks and authorities that are important to know, and surely helpful in improving the organization and clarity of someone’s prose—has not (at least right now in my experience) truly displaced high-level legal analysis is that in the real world (or on law school exams) the questions that need to be answered do not have clear or indisputable answers, but instead allow for different kinds of possible answers depending on one’s ideological and methodological priors, one’s analogic and creative powers, and one’s ability to apply with sensitivity human experience and history. The fact that many legal questions—unlike computer coding or mathematical calculations—can’t easily be reduced to responses that either work or don’t work (and can be accepted or rejected on that basis) is not a reason for anxiety or dread. Ambiguity and indeterminacy themselves create opportunities for human lawyers to add value where machines cannot (yet). But embracing that opportunity — and the economic returns that come along with it—means letting go of undergraduate habits of wanting answers and ironclad resolutions. In law school and in the practice of law, individuals succeed not just by intuiting the “right” or even the “best” answers, but by being able to effectively advocate on behalf of particular answers among a universe of plausible ones. One entailment of this aspect of law is that sometimes in law school you just need to sit back and think. When I was in full-time legal practice, a wise partner and mentor lamented that the standard time sheets that lawyers use for recording how they spend their time (so that clients can receive some detail along with their bills), contained categories for many lawyerly tasks—such as researching, drafting, editing, sending emails, and participating in conferences and telephone conversations—but did not contain a standard category for what good lawyers do that justifies their high billing rates: simply sitting and spending time thinking, carefully and systematically, about what they have read or heard. Many a law student and junior lawyer assumes that when she has finished reading her assignment, her work is done. (Relatedly, many folks assume that if one reads a large enough number of cases, the answer sought will clearly present itself.) To the contrary, when the reading is finished, some of the hardest and most important work—trying to fit all the reading into a detailed big picture that makes sense, and that can be framed so as to benefit one side or another in a dispute—is just beginning. As noted above, playing with and shaping ambiguity is how lawyers earn their keep. But to do that, one really has to sit and reflect on how the small pieces fit together, and at which intersections there is the most room for beneficial manipulation. Law students should, early on, get into the habit of setting aside chunks of time after they are done reading or researching on a topic simply to intellectually digest all that they have just swallowed. 3. Talk to your classmates about what you are learning: As one might gather from my last observation, I think chatting with AI models is not productive for new law students at all (and that is why many law schools regulate access to AI by students). But that doesn’t mean chatting more generally is unhelpful. To the contrary, it is no secret that lawyers do a lot of talking (perhaps too much!). Oral presentation skills, whether deployed in front of a judge, a jury, a fellow lawyer, an outside client, the press, or a group of interested citizens, are often essential to effective legal representation. The only way to get comfortable using a new language and a (somewhat) distinct way of thinking is to try them out on other folks. And who better as a practice audience than your classmates, who are going through the same set of experiences, and who are going to make the same or similar mistakes in learning this new culture? At good law schools, a student can learn as much—about what it means to think and act like a lawyer—from her classmates as she can from her professors. Indeed, increasingly what separates the very best law schools from the rest is less the quality and character of the faculty, and more the richness and depth of the student body from which each student can learn. 4. Engage people with different ideologies than your own:This fourth piece of advice is in some ways a corollary of the third. We all know of the modern tendency for people to retreat to echo chambers populated by like-minded thinkers. That doesn’t work for democracy, and it certainly doesn’t work for legal education. Broad (and sometimes uncomfortable) freedom of speech and inquiry is an essential value at the foundation of any good law school. That certainly doesn’t mean that harassment or threats should ever be permitted. But it does mean that sometimes law students will have to be subjected to ideas that they find not just unpersuasive but morally offensive. Rather than avoiding those ideas, law students should engage and (in civil terms) confront those ideas. Throughout your legal career, you are going to go up against opposing counsel whose stated positions may at times make your blood boil; developing the ability to endure such situations and use them to sharpen your own thinking and advocacy skills is essential to career success. So begin that process in law school itself. Try to make a point of occasionally attending meetings of student organizations whose philosophies you disagree with; reach out to students after class sessions to explain to them why you have a very different take than the ones they articulated during class. At worst, you will refine and improve your presentation and persuasion powers. At best, you will cause others to look at things somewhat differently, and perhaps refine and improve your own thinking too. 5. Working smart can be as important as working hard: The raw number of hours spent in the library (or other place of scholarly work) is not the only, or even the best, measure of what constitutes a good effort in law school. Strategy is important in law school, just as it is in the real world, and what matters most is how—not just how much—time is spent. After law school, almost every lawyer serves clients and customers. A lawyer’s clients or customers may include individuals, businesses, government agencies, judges, in-house counsel, and (quite often) other lawyers, such as partners, within a practice group. Successful attorneys develop an effective customer-service mindset; the best lawyers are the ones whose clients or customers walk away the most satisfied. Although perhaps it is not apparent, law students also have clients and customers—most commonly, the law faculty, for whom students produce work product in the form of exams, papers, and so on. In the same way that different customers or clients in the real world may be looking for slightly different things from the lawyers they hire, law professors might not all react to the same work product in the same way. The ability to quickly figure out what the client or customer is looking for, and to vary your style and approach accordingly, is a characteristic that the real world values, and thus is the kind of skill that should be developed from the beginning of law school. 6. Read the materials in casebooks actively: This last piece is closely related to several of the others. It is often said that law school is not (the way undergraduate coursework tends to be) about learning or memorizing any particular knowledge or canon of rules (which in the legal world may change over time and for that reason must be looked up anew in the future anyway), but rather about learning how to go about teasing legal rules and standards from ambiguous materials, analyzing how the legal rules can best be defended, how they interact with each other, which alternative legal rules might be suggested to courts and other decision-makers, and the like. This (oversimplified but still useful) statement of the nature of legal education means, among other things, that it is not enough for you to read a case and understand what the judges said. You must also consider why they chose to say what they said, and in the particular way that they said it. A law school casebook assignment is thus more than an exercise in SAT-like reading comprehension; it is an invitation for you, the reader, to ask questions such as: How does what is said here compare to what is said elsewhere? If what is said here is correct, what also follows from this? Given what is said here, what are the kinds of questions that one would naturally expect other cases down the line to have to address? And so forth. This kind of analysis requires a student not just to follow along in the case materials, but rather to attack them: to break them down, look at their component parts, reassemble them in different ways, and more. Although I certainly cannot say my own style would necessarily work for all or most law students, I can say that when I was in law school I found that I was not reading energetically and methodically enough if I was not scribbling down a lot of questions and comments to myself (to return to later) in the margins of the casebook as I provisionally evaluated each paragraph and what it added or was trying to add. For me—and perhaps for a good number of other students—active reading involves a fair amount of writing.