Three Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Starting Law School
Matt received his JD from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2018 and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 2019. He finished in the top 8% of his graduating year, was a Dean’s Fellow, and offers tutoring services for Canadian law school students. You can find more about him here!
Many incoming law students wonder what they can do during the summer before law school to try to get ahead. The short answer is that you shouldn’t feel pressured to do anything. Doing the readings for your classes or trying to learn about substantive content before law school begins is not likely to be helpful and, instead, will likely take up valuable time that could be spent relaxing before 1L begins. However, here are a few small and practical suggestions for students who have time to spare and are determined to begin preparing for their legal studies early.
Start building your network: Joining the legal community is one of the most exciting and potentially, nerve-wracking, things about law school, but being proactive in meeting your upper-years and school alumni will be tremendously helpful to you in a few ways. Upper-year students can give you valuable insight into how to transition into 1L both in terms of studying and in the opportunities within the school community. Similarly, recent alumni can give you a window into different areas of law and what legal practice is like. These are all highly useful things that you’ll come to know as you go through 1L, so getting a head start on meeting the generous and friendly people that make up the majority of the legal community is a great way to use your time.
Start reading legal decisions that interest you: Your core reading comprehension will be one of the most tested skills through 1L with the number of readings you will be responsible for, and most of these readings will be in the form of decisions written by judges. This is often a difficult transition for students who have not had practice reading decisions before, so spending some time getting used to the way that judges write can save you valuable time later on when you are trying to get all of your readings done. One great way to do this is to go on the Supreme Court of Canada’s website and trying reading a recent decision in an area of law that you are interested in — you’ll often learn something interesting, but more importantly, you’ll have to opportunity to get some practice trying to understand the way that judges reason.
Consider how to improve the clarity of your writing: Writing clearly is one of the most important skills for a lawyer, so this will be one of the skills you will be working to develop in your first-year legal process classes. An excellent resource to begin thinking about how to improve the clarity and persuasiveness of your writing is Strategic Legal Writing by Eugene Meehan of Supreme Advocacy. Another often-cited classic is Forget the Windup and Make the Pitch by Justice John Laskin, formerly of the Ontario Court of Appeal. One way to improve your writing skills in this way is to critically review an old essay or piece of writing of yours and consider how it might be reworded to be as clear as possible. This is not an easy process, but reflecting on how your writing might be made clearer will help as you begin to write research memos, essays, and exam answers in law school which evaluate you on the clarity of your written legal analysis.
To conclude, there’s no onus on you to do anything in advance of law school. However, for those eager to begin now, investing time into building your skills in networking, reading, and writing is likely to be most helpful to you as opposed to trying to read through substantive content. You should also consult the resources your law school makes available to first-year students on these topics because these are often quite helpful.
Please feel free to reach out to me to chat! I’d love to meet you and offer support or answer questions as continue your law school journey.