The Law School Confidential: A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience, By Students, For Students has been called “a must for anyone attending or considering law school” by The Houston Lawyer, and it is a book that is you can find on the shelf. of every law student.
Law School Confidential is considered the “little black book” of America’s law schools. Rather than being a simple guide to study tips and test preparation, this book is intended to be a comprehensive guide to the entire law school experience. It guides the reader through what it feels like to be inside a law school: surviving the freshman year and 1L exams, the summer law internship, selection interviews, and graduation. The author frequently uses the experiences of former law students to clarify his points, and at that he is quite effective.
The book begins with a series of long chapters on how to orient the reader through the process of entering law school. This “beginner’s guide” is comprehensive and well written, and does a good job of introducing the reader to law school and its lifestyle. However, one feels that more could be spent on actually choosing which school to apply to.
Some very useful information comes in the form of grade curves at each individual school, and which school has pass and fail grades available as an option. For most freshmen, this information can be vital; the first year is easily the hardest.
The book emphasizes the fact that the best and most useful tips and advice often come from fellow students and not from teachers. In most schools, 2L and 3L students are the best – teachers are often too busy to entertain individual students or not open enough to share information.
The book’s strongest point, and one that has made it so popular with most law students, is its serious conversational tone. Most law books tend to hurl legal verbiage at their readers, a tradition among attorneys themselves, but this book keeps detail to a minimum and focuses on providing frank information that can be really helpful to those who think about or attend to law school.
Where this book fails is that it can sometimes be too basic, giving the impression of being a sermon. Some of the study tips are downright basic, things most people have learned in their college years. Additionally, the book attempts to push for certain tactics that may not be applicable to everyone.
Nonetheless, as the Houston attorney says, this book is definitely a must-have for anyone thinking of becoming a lawyer. As the New York Law Journal put it, this is a “useful and valuable book.”