Everyone Fails Lawschool #6: 3L Ever After

Summary: If you’re a 3L, try less. You’ll be happier and get better grades.

Just wrapped up my last year of law school. It’s been a hard fight, but I came out with only tinges of alcoholism and bouts of weight gain. Note: not dropping out, failing out, or committing suicide=law school success.

For those that don’t know, being a 3L–a third year law student–can be an enjoyable experience, if you plan accordingly. “Planning accordingly” means having as few classes as possible, picking classes that are a guaranteed B+ or above, and having enough time to do as many non-legal things as possible, like blogging daily, writing fiction, partying on weekends, rarely having to read, and…having enough to time to write and film a TV pilot (we’ll get to the last one in a minute). Oh, did I mention I have no finals? <–Planning accordingly 101.

If you are becoming a 3L, I encourage laziness and using your energy to perform scatterbrained activities. Why? (A) Your entire Summer will be spent in a library studying for the bar and (B) this will be every day of your life, once you're employed (from my experience):

1. Wake up at 7am (at the latest);
2. Coffee
3. Work all day, perhaps eating lunch at your desk (Fun!);
4. More coffee
5. Get done with work at around 6pm (on a very good day);
6. Maybe you’ll go to the gym for an hour (or two, if you’re not me);
7. You’ll finally get home about 8pm and have to eat something;
8. You’ll get done with dinner about 9:30PM because your ambitious Stuffed Chicken with Parmesan Risotto was not the “30-minute meal” that bitch Rachel Ray said it was going to be  (note: if you came home later, you microwaved a Lean Cuisine Panini and hated yourself for doing so…especially when you bit in to the cold center);
9. You’ll watch a few episodes of The Office without laughing because your life is eerily similar to each plotline;
10. After, you’ll start dozing off because your spin class/Risotto/God-Awful-Coworker combination inspires a stress induced coma;
11. You’ll go to bed and try to read a novel you wanted to read in law school but never found the time–but will stop quickly because your already-permanently-damaged-from-law-school eyes are burning from document, statute, case, or memo review;
12. Despite being exhausted, you toss and turn for over an hour because you’re dreading something you may have omitted at work that will, if omitted, cause your immediate termination (Don’t worry, the legal job market is SWEET, right now. You’ll get another, right?);
13. Wake up the next morning and repeat…for the rest of your AA-Meeting and Cardiologist-Appointment filled life.

How awesome does that sound? Hopefully your divorce is amicable and your child support payments are low.

Knowing that this is a lawyer’s future, I spent this semester enjoying everything about life that has nothing to do with the law…or as much as I feasibly could without pissing off my professors. Without going in to too much detail, I think it’s safe to say I succeeded. It took almost an entire semester for me to realize that life can be enjoyable–despite repeated attempts from my friend/enemy, Law School, at telling me “Life is all about trying to minimize how much you hate yourself…then you die.”

So, after a semester of legal catharsis, I have come to a few important conclusions:

1. Writing, although enjoyable, would probably be unprofitable (and very selfish) for many years…so I’ll do both law and writing, for now.
2. Six figure debt is not only depressing.
3. Six figure debt with the costs of an impending wedding are terrifying.
4. Six figure debt, an impending wedding, and possibly having to pay for rent in New York City (yes, I’m taking the NY Bar) might require a Zoloft prescription (and don’t forget, drugs aren’t free).
5. My Summer is going to test my sanity (the NY Bar is one of the hardest in the country)
6. Lawyers can be creative people. Whoever says otherwise is an idiot.
7. I actually got better grades when I stopped caring (something to think about)

 

 

My hat goes off to all the graduating law students. Whatever you do with your new “Esquire” status, I hope it doesn’t cause you to give up on other aspirations…and impresses a few people at dinner parties. 3Ls, you may be poor, jaded, and substance dependent, but you at least no longer have any regrets about NOT going to law school (your only regret now is deciding to go to law school).

For all those fledgling 3Ls out there, do yourself a favor: be lazy. You’ll be less stressed, be more rejuvenated to practice…and maybe I’ll get that job you would have got had you kept on trying 🙂

As a 1L and 2L, perhaps you should try a little and feel free to NEVER enjoy yourself. But, as a 3L and in all things after, have fun. I did and I will continue to do so. Okay, and I’ll try a little too, Mom. I’m not a complete hippy.

Example: As a 3L, I wrote and filmed a TV Pilot for a project worth 5% of my grade. I think I spent more time on this video than I did studying for my Contracts final:

http://www.youtube.com/p/E30AA0F68C4AD2F0?hl=en_US&fs=1

 

P.S. Found this searching for “Zoloft”

Tags: 3L, apathy, Funny, projects, Satire, tips