Practice Management

There was an interesting post by a recent law graduate on The Good Kind of Random, in which he expounded on the 5 things he learned in law school.  These are all good.  I believe they are worth highlighting here.

1. Good study habits.   My first semester of law school was pretty unimpressive. In fact I managed to get my first ?C? ever. And also my first ?D?. Ouch.  I thought I?d improve greatly in the second semester, but I basically had a repeat performance. I was so disappointed, I was used to thinking of myself as ?naturally smart? and not ever needing to study; I was used to academics being easy.  After a rough first year I gradually turned things around and by my last semester in law school I finished with all Bs?not perfect, but hey this is law school we?re talking about.
2. Argumentation.  [M]y legal education has helped me to see important counter-points when reading/hearing an argument.  I honestly really enjoy working through the pros and cons of a particular argument and trying to see an issue from both sides, and I think I?m much better at doing so thanks to law school.
3. Patience.  Perhaps nowhere other than law school can you pay ten thousand dollars a year to be poked at and ridiculed in class (the Socratic method of humiliation), take a four hour exam covering every possible detail of the past three months which alone will determine your grade for the course, and then be made to wait two months to find out if you passed. Maybe that doesn?t sound like the response of a man who has learned patience, but trust me, that?s going easy on the experience.  And by easy I mean taking full advantage of the oddities for your reading enjoyment. Sarcasm aside, the way grades are posted in law school really did help me to be patient.  There?s only so much anxiety a person can take ...
4. Humility. [C]oming to law school was a MAJOR reality check, as I went from being in the top five percent to being average at best.  Being ?average? is not a bad thing?it?s pretty normal.  But for me this little paradigm shift opened my eyes to how I thought of myself in relation to others. I think most folks value intelligence, and there?s nothing wrong with wanting to be smart, it?s just that I had an inflated sense of how smart I was.  Now my view is that pretty much everyone I meet is intelligent, even though we communicate that intelligence differently. And at any rate, a person?s intelligence does not determine his worth as a person? And that leads me to the next big lesson from law school.
5. Self-worth apart from externals.  [I]t is sometimes hard to fully appreciate, especially with our culture that so highly values individual merit.  So while the first year in law school is hard on its own, it?s even harder when your grades tell you that you maybe aren?t that smart, and that maybe learning just isn?t your forte, or that there?s something wrong with you.  These are thoughts I grappled with during my first year of law school.  I think I managed to discard the distracting self-doubt questions (no more ?D?s after that first year was a huge help too), but there was some value in the experience.  Law school helped push me into a hard, uncomfortable place, one that I had to grow out of, and one that I am, retrospectively, grateful for.

You can read the entire post at The Good Kind of Random.