“You’ve never seen The Paper Chase?” the attorney asks me.
I shake my head no.
“Oh, it’s great. There’s a scene where one of the guys is trying to give his outline to his friends, and the wind takes it. He freaks out because his whole semester’s work gets scattered everywhere.”
“I’ll have to check that out,” I say.
“Yeah, it’s a great movie about law school.”
***
Live Oak, Florida. Present Day
I use the DVR (Digital Video Recording) feature on my satellite TV subscription extensively. Pretty much all I watch now is sports and recorded movies. I enjoy being able to record a film off the Turner Classic Movie Channel at 2am, and then watch it at my leisure later. My DVR memory space is completely filled up with classic movies, so that now when I record one, I have to decide which movie I must delete in order to create enough memory space. It is a difficult decision.
Thanks to the DVR, I recorded and then watched The Paper Chase this week.
The attorney whom I worked for in the summer of 2009 was right, it is pretty spot-on as to what the first year of law school felt like.
Granted, the film is about Harvard Law School, and I went to Florida State University. Also, a big part of the story is a romance. I never enjoyed a romance in law school, not with a girl like Lindsay Wagner, not with anyone. Still, the brightest people whom I have ever met in my life were in Tallahassee during those three years, from 2008 to 2011.
John Houseman’s performance as the Contracts Professor was highly entertaining. My own Contracts professor ran his class much the same way. He was younger and more energetic than Houseman, but after watching the movie, I would bet my professor borrowed a few things from Houseman’s performance.
The movie stirred up some painful memories for me, though. The scenes with the study group and how the students divided up the outlines were particularly intense and accurate. I could actually picture specific students with whom I went to school saying some of the lines of the actors.
In the movie, I would have been one of the guys who got kicked out of the study group for failing to make a useful outline. Outlining was a key to success in law school, yet I never made a single one. I never figured out how to do it, or maybe my brain just did not work that way.
My first year of law school, I joined a study group with what would turn out to be some of the best students in my entire graduating class. I talked a lot that first semester in the study group, perhaps more than anyone in the group.
I remember arriving at the school library one night, to continue my studying. As I walked up the stairs, I saw the students from my study group coming down the stairs, carrying an empty pizza box. It was obvious that they had just finished a study session, and they had not invited me. It stung even more because I had some pretty strong affection for one of the girls in the group. They realized that they were caught, but they did not know what to say, so we kind of awkwardly passed each other. I trudged up to the library.
After the first semester, I really did not participate in study groups. I succeeded in large part by finding the student who booked the class (made the highest grade) the semester or the year before, getting his or her outline, and taking notes on top of it. Though using others' outlines is perfectly acceptable and widespread in law school, some of these students from whom I got the outline resented me a little, I think.
Most of whatever success I had at grades, though, came from hard work. I out-studied a lot of students who were smarter than me. In the end, I managed to graduate with honors, inside the top 25% of my class. I also booked three classes during law school. The number of students in those three classes were significantly smaller than our first year classes or the required course after the first year, Constitutional Law II, but I was proud of the fact that I did not use anyone else's notes but my own to achieve the highest grade those three times.
Overall, law school was a fantastic experience. I am glad that I went to Florida State University. The fact that I could not prepare a good outline, though, and the fact that I am not a great legal writer and thus failed to make the law review, foreshadowed that I would not be successful in a large swath of what constitutes law practice. As the dean of my law school said on occasion, the practice of law is a literary endeavor. Most lawyers spend their lives performing research, drafting and editing documents, and writing memos. What is more, they do this in measured, six minute increments called the billable hour system.
My brain cannot function in such a system. I tried it, and I was miserable living my life that way.
The highest point, and the most important single victory that I scored in law school, was the night that I made the Mock Trial Team. I have written about that experience before. It opened up an avenue of employment for me- that of a trial lawyer- and barring any unforeseen incidents, criminal trial law is what I will do for my career. The research in criminal law, at least at the trial level, is typically low hanging fruit. It comes easier to me than research in civil litigation. More often than not, too, the case is not won on legal research, but rather arguing the facts in front of a jury. There is more room in my mind to be creative in that kind of game.
Just as important, one can practice criminal law without use of the billable hour system, in either private practice or as a Public Defender or State Attorney. This was not depicted in The Paper Chase, though.
Unfortunately, The Paper Chase brought back the memory of the single lowest point in my law school years…
I worked as a mentor in a summer program for the law school, to help incoming 1Ls (first year students) adjust to what they would be facing. My fellow three mentors were some of the best and brightest at the school, members of the law review.
As part of the program, the mentors were to grade a mock law school exam taken by the incoming students. To make sure that we as mentors were on point with our grading, we took the exam first and had it graded by one of the top faculty members at the school.
I cannot remember all of the details, as I have actively tried to forget the incident in the years since it happened. But the next day after the professor graded the four exams, we came in and my three colleagues had theirs handed back to them by a staff assistant, along with their scores.
The staff assistant told me that the professor who graded the exams wanted to see me in private, though. So I left the room, with my friends looking on at me curiously.
Again, I cannot remember the exact dialogue, but I do remember the professor calling me on the carpet to basically question my intellectual abilities. He gave me a look like he was wondering how I ever got admitted to his school, and he told me to go off and review the copies of the other three mentors’ exams so that I might learn what an answer should look like.
It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life, and I am sure my face was bright red when I walked back into the room with the other mentors and we had to discuss our scores.
My dad later asked me over the phone how I did on that practice exam, and I snapped at him some angry response. Dad left it alone after my answer.
I suppose that anecdote could be humorous if told the right way.
All in all, though, I am happy with my life and career and what law school has done for me. I wish working as a government trial lawyer paid more money, but it is nice to wake up each morning and feel confidence in what I do.
Unlike the top students in my law school who enjoyed success at any number of activities, time and experience have taught me that there are precious few things in this world that I am good at. But trial law is one of them.
Though I suspect I will always battle butterflies and nerves bubbling up in court, I have no fear of going to trial. I have no fear of losing trials, though of course it is disappointing when it happens. I have no fear of who the other attorneys might be, I do not care who the other attorneys are, or if there is one attorney or twenty lined up against me. I feel like, given and equal set of facts, with the law and judge being neutral, I can beat anyone in the world in front of a jury. I do not care if that sounds arrogant. In front of a jury, I can beat the professor who thought I did not belong in law school. The courtroom is my room.
That makes me happy.
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