Getting A Real Education From Law School

(Part two of a two-part post. The first part of this post can be found here).

No thinking person would believe it reasonable to train doctors to treat disease by scrupulously avoiding contact with actual human bodies that have actual diseases, disfigurements, and injuries. Doctors hold human lives in their hands, and a mistaken diagnosis or incorrect treatment can have devastating consequences. This is why we require medical students to spend hundreds of hours studying physiology and anatomy, and why we require new doctors to complete internships designed to hone skills of diagnosis, treatment, and patient care: we recognize that practical experience is necessary in order for doctors to perform the tasks we will ask of them.

Learning to be a Lawyer?

(Part one of a two-part post. The second post can be found here.)

Think back to the first days of your second year of law school. In your first year, you covered the basics of civil procedure, property, torts, and contracts; in your second year, you’re ready to buckle down and learn how to practice in areas of interest to you. You know how to brief a case; you know how to spot issues. Now that you know how to discern legal problems from fact patterns, isn’t it time to learn how to deal with such problems, how to file a complaint, submit an answer, or draft a contract?

The Work-Life Balance Sales Pitch

Wallflower is a 3L at NYU School of Law

It's hard to imagine any law student making it out of law school without being bombarded with talk about the extended hours attorneys work and the difficulty many have in maintaining both a happy home life and a successful career. Long hours, stressful working conditions, and having little time for social lives are challenges most attorneys face. In my experience, however, the work-life balance issue is most often discussed as a problem that primarily affects women or parents, and in my opinion, this does a disservice to all attorneys.

During my 2L interview process, seven of the eight firms with which I had callback interviews emphasized how woman-friendly the firm was. At these seven firms, I had face time with female partners; at one of them, two of the three partner interviews and all of the associate interviews were with women. Also at these seven firms, I heard about policies regarding flex-time and part-time opportunities (brought up without prompting from me), pro bono programs, and mentoring programs for female attorneys.