How to Think Like a Lawyer

By eHow Legal Editor

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Thinking like a lawyer will help you write, argue and reason more effectively. Luckily, anyone can learn to think like a lawyer, regardless of education level, test scores or legal expertise. All it takes is the ability to craft an argument and a reasoned and analytical approach to problem solving. Here are a few tips to help you think like a lawyer.

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Flag Article InstructionsDifficulty: Moderately Easy Step1Practice issue-spotting. Being able to identify the relevant issues in a complicated fact setting is a crucial skill in thinking like a lawyer. Paying close attention to detail and reading and listening with an analytical mind will help you learn to spot issues effectively. Step2Question everything. Ask yourself why a certain rule or law is in existence. The act of questioning the reasons behind things allows you to focus on considerations of policy as a basis for the law. Understanding policy is key in making a reasoned analysis of an issue. Step3Play Angel's advocate. Arguing both sides of every issue allows you to see things from all angles. It allows you to identify any weaknesses in your own case and come up with arguments to counter these weaknesses. It also helps you to spot those weaknesses in your opponent's case and prepare how to exploit them. Step4Remain unemotional. Thinking like a lawyer often involves putting your own emotions aside to deal with complicated issues in a rational and focused manner. Remember that laws are meant to be applied neutrally in response to legal rights and principles and not because of personal feelings and emotions.

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Advice To New And Prospective Law Students

By MICHAEL C. DORF

Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2001

This month, at law schools all across the country, thousands of first-year students are beginning studies that will, for most of them, culminate in their joining the legal profession a few years from now. The start of any new venture is always a time of excitement and anxiety, but such classic works of fiction and memoir as The Paper Chase and One-L have contributed to a mythology of law school as a kind of extended hazing ritual. As a result, the anxiety can dominate the excitement.

To try to calm the fears of new and future law students, I offer a few words of advice that I wish someone had given to me when I was a 1-L fourteen years ago. I hope what I have to say will also be of interest to those of you who have finished your legal studies, or who have no intention of ever beginning them.

The Dreaded Socratic Method

First-year law students come to law school after twelve years of primary and secondary school, four years of college, and in many cases some additional years in the workforce or in graduate school. Why, then, should another three years of school be frightening? The answer is surely the mystery surrounding the Socratic method.

Here is an example of the Socratic method based on the first day of my course in constitutional law:

Me: Ms. Yavlinsky, suppose the New York state legislature passes a statute banning "the making of any statements critical of the New York government." You write an editorial for the student newspaper in which you state that the members of the legislature who voted for the statute thereby violated their oath to support the Constitution. You are prosecuted for violating the statute. Do you have a constitutional defense?

Ms. Yavlinsky: Yes.

Me: What is your defense?

Ms. Yavlinsky: It violates the First Amendment.

Me: But the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Is the New York legislature the same body as Congress?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

Me: So is the prosecution permissible?

Ms. Yavlinsky: I don't think so?

Me: Why not?

Ms. Yavlinsky: I think the First Amendment has been applied to the states.

Me: Very good. Indeed it has. Later in the semester, we will study a series of cases in which the Supreme Court ruled that when the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits any state from denying a person "liberty" without "due process of law," it implicitly includes within "liberty" most of those rights that are spelled out in the Bill of Rights. But I'm troubled by something else today. Why should a New York court have to pay any attention to what's in the federal Constitution?

Ms. Yavlinsky: Because of Article VI.

Me: I assume you are referring to the portion of Article VI that says: "This Constitution . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Ms. Yavlinsky: Yeah, that's it.

Me: Well, that seems rather circular doesn't it? I have here in my pocket another document, also labeled "the Constitution of the United States." It has the following provisions:

Article I: The form of the government of the United States shall be a dictatorship.

Article II: The dictator shall be all-powerful.

Article III: The dictator shall be Columbia Law School Professor Michael Dorf, unless and until he appoints a successor.

Article IV: "This Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land; and everybody shall be bound by it, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state or other body to the contrary notwithstanding."

Tell me Ms. Yavlinsky, why is the Constitution printed in the front of your casebook more authoritative than the "Dorf is Dictator" Constitution?

Ms. Yavlinsky: Because the real Constitution was ratified by the People.

Me: Did you ratify it?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

Me: Did any of your ancestors ratify it?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

Me: What were your ancestors doing in 1789, when what you call the real Constitution was ratified by the People?

Ms. Yavlinsky: They were serfs in Russia.

Me: I see. Well perhaps the so-called real Constitution is binding because it was democratically chosen by the people who lived here at the time?

Ms. Yavlinsky: Okay.

Me: If you had been living in the United States in 1789, would you, as a woman, have been permitted to vote for the people who decided whether to ratify the Constitution?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

Me: Did enslaved African-Americans vote for ratification?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

Me: How about Native Americans?

Ms. Yavlinsky: No.

And so it goes. For every answer it seems there is another question, until the exasperated students begin to feel like the point of the Socratic method is to show how much smarter the professor is than they are.

The Truth About the Socratic Method

It's true that the Socratic method can be used to confuse and humiliate students. It can also be misused in other ways — for example, when the professor asks the students in effect to try to read his mind, rejecting perfectly intelligent answers because they are not exactly what was expected.

When used well, however, the Socratic method teaches law students a vital skill: critical thinking.

In The Paper Chase, Professor Kingsfield (memorably portrayed by John Houseman in the film version) tells his students: "You come here with minds full of mush — and leave thinking like a lawyer." But, what exactly does it mean to think like a lawyer?

The answer — the secret to law school success (offered here for free!) — is nothing. There is no such thing as thinking like a lawyer. There is only clear thinking and confusion.

To be sure, the law often requires much greater precision than is needed in other spheres of life. A person's ability to avoid going to prison or to keep her fortune can turn on exactly what a word in a statute or contract means, and accordingly lawyers must learn to pay careful attention to nuance. But there is nothing different in kind about lawyerly precision that distinguishes it from any other type of clear thinking.

Why the "Thinking Like a Lawyer" Myth Persists

To paraphrase the first President Bush, for at least a generation, most law professors have practiced a kinder, gentler form of the Socratic method. These days, one would be hard pressed to find an example of the archetypal, Houseman-like Socratic law professor who never utters a declaratory statement and gives the impression that everything any student says is wrong.

Nevertheless, the myth of the bullying Socratic law professor persists as a staple in fiction and in the fearful imaginations of new and prospective law students. Why?

In part, the myth persists because it glorifies the legal profession. Those of us who hold law degrees have an interest in the general public believing that we have some distinctive skill in virtue of our special, and especially arduous, training. Thus, there is a tendency among current lawyers to exaggerate how much they suffered when they were law students.

But the self-interest of legal professionals is only part of the story. The public also has an interest in believing that lawyers think differently from everybody else.

In his 1930 book, Law and the Modern Mind, attorney (and later federal appeals court judge) Jerome Frank explained why the lay public had always been hostile to lawyers as a class. According to Frank, most people believe that the law itself is clear, but that hair-splitting lawyers introduce uncertainties as a means of manipulating the law to serve their clients' and their own interests. Law school, in the public mind, aims to displace common sense with legalistic pedantry.

The public's view, Frank argued, is mistaken. In most instances, the law cannot be certain, because life is simply too complex for a lawmaker to anticipate all of the circumstances to which a legal norm might be applied.

To borrow an example that is famous in the academic literature, a city council concerned about safety and quiet enacts an ordinance prohibiting "vehicles in the park." Does the prohibition apply to roller skates? To a statue of a tank? To an ambulance?

Even the most careful of lawmakers will not think of (or specifically address) some of the borderline cases, and the diversity of human experience will then require a nuanced judgment by lawyers.

The Risks of the Socratic Method

Although most lawyers would probably side with Frank and against the myth of legal certainty, law school does pose a real danger for those students who absorb the wrong lesson — and come to resemble not Socrates, but the Sophists.

The point of the Socratic method is to encourage students to question assumptions they did not even realize they were making. That is an essential element of legal training, but it can be taken too far.

For example, in the above hypothetical dialogue, I was trying to induce Ms. Yavlinsky and the other students in the class to ask themselves why the Constitution is binding law. A clear answer to that question will be useful to students in figuring out how the Constitution should be interpreted. By using the Socratic method to elicit an answer, or a range of answers, rather than simply telling them what I think in a lecture, I am helping them sharpen their own analytical skills.

But a student who comes away from the class thinking, as a result of the Socratic give-and-take, that the law has no rightful claim to authority and that he can therefore ignore it, has missed the point of the lesson. Even if he is right as a matter of political theory, he will not be an effective lawyer if he treats the law as wholly illegitimate.

More generally, in exposing students to the law's inevitable ambiguities, the Socratic method risks inducing cynicism — the view that the law can mean anything or nothing. But this view is no better than its opposite: the naïve view that law always has a single, undebatable meaning.

Cynicism is an unwarranted and unintended consequence of the use of the Socratic method. While there is some uncertainty in some areas of law, that is a far cry from saying there is no certainty anywhere in the law. The existence of dusk does not call into question the distinction between day and night.

Michael C. Dorf is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at Columbia University.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20010822.html

How to think like a lawyer without changing career pathsBY AMY POFTAK

Printable Version

L.A. Cicero

Larry Kramer teaches a session of Thinking Like a Lawyer, a new course designed to offer graduate students outside the field of law a window into core legal concepts. Kramer is one of a dozen Law School faculty members, with areas of expertise ranging from torts to intellectual property, who are co-teaching the course.

Rebecca Goldman does not want to go to law school or be a lawyer. But as a student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources who hopes someday to develop policies for sustainable land use, she would like to know how lawyers approach land disputes.

Frederick Antwi is a second-year business student who, when he goes to work for an investment firm, wants to better understand how securities laws are structured.

This quarter, both Goldman and Antwi are getting a chance to explore these subjects thanks to Thinking Like a Lawyer—a new Law School course designed to offer graduate students outside the field of law a window into core legal concepts. Taught by 12 Law School faculty with areas of expertise ranging from torts to intellectual property, the course draws graduate students from a wide cross-section of disciplines.

Of the 63 enrollees and 15 auditors, 43 hail from the Graduate School of Business, with the remainder coming from the schools of Earth Sciences, Engineering, Education and Medicine, as well as from the departments of Philosophy, Political Science and Physics.

"Law is more art than science," said Law School Dean Larry Kramer, who helped to develop the class. "It's like learning music. In music, there are a limited number of foundational notes and chords that one learns to combine in ever more complex ways to create different melodies and different styles of music. So, too, in law there are a limited number of concepts and forms of argument that law students learn to use and that make up the underpinnings of different fields of law."

It's a rare opportunity to learn from top legal scholars without having to take the LSAT. Peer inside the class and you might find Pamela S. Karlan, who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, examining constitutional issues, or Robert Weisberg, director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, walking students through a criminal case. Kramer, who holds the Richard E. Lang Professorship for the Dean of Stanford Law School, is teaching two sessions on litigation and dispute resolution.

The idea is to explore essential questions in the legal field, said Mark Kelman, the James C. Gaither Professor of Law and vice dean, who came up with the idea for the course and oversaw its development.

"We're not trying to teach law lite. We're teaching law in a reduced and intense way, focusing on the essence of a particular subject area and addressing key conceptual issues that come up again and again," Kelman said.

Another central goal of Thinking Like a Lawyer is cross-disciplinary understanding.

"Most people will have to interact with lawyers during some point in their professional lives, whether it's doing a business deal or forming public policy," Kramer said.

Learning outside the box

Thinking Like a Lawyer comes at a time when the Law School is seeing an influx of non-law students taking law courses—from fewer than 20 per year in the late 1990s and early 2000s to more than 70 in 2006-07. At the same time, there's been a 10-fold increase in law students venturing to other parts of campus for courses. In the past decade, law students registered for 30 classes outside the Law School in a typical year. In 2006-07, there were 305 such registrations.

This increase is, in part, due to lowered administrative barriers. As part of the Law School's push to educate students more broadly beyond the traditional legal curriculum, the school is aligning its academic calendar with that of the university to make it easier for law students to enroll in courses outside the school—and, likewise, open the school to non-law students. In anticipation, the school has dramatically expanded its formal joint degree program offerings to cover more than 20 possible degrees.

"Students should take courses and degrees outside the law school in order to develop the intellectual capital they need to practice law today," Kramer said. "At the same time,

we're broadening our program to include more cross-disciplinary opportunities for non-law students."

Chris Golde, associate vice provost for graduate education, thinks the numbers hint at larger shifts across campus. "We're seeing two trends," said Golde, who is auditing Thinking Like a Lawyer. "Students taking courses more broadly and schools teaching more outward-facing courses aimed at non-specialists in other fields."

That these changes are happening is not necessarily surprising, given the university has made interdisciplinary learning a key priority. Thinking Like a Lawyer represents one model of cross-school interaction for graduate students that the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education is working to expand, Golde said.

To be sure, it fits in the outward-facing course category. So does the Business School's Interpersonal Influence and Leadership (offered winter and spring quarters), which focuses on teaching students from various disciplines how to build more effective working relationships.

The idea of enabling graduate students to go outside their discipline is not new, of course. The School of Education, for example, requires its doctoral students to obtain a master's degree or minor in another department. And other schools have similarly created programs that integrate various disciplines, such as the School of Earth Sciences' Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources, which blends environmental science, engineering and policy.

Then there are offerings that encourage interdisciplinary collaboration—such as Biodesign Innovation, in which budding lawyers, engineers, doctors and business people work together to develop ideas for medical technology, or the Law School's Expert Witness class, in which law students work with peers from the natural and social sciences to prepare for mock trials.

"Being able to borrow tools and ideas from other fields can lead to breakthroughs," said Golde, whose office is creating an online clearinghouse of interdisciplinary opportunities for graduate students (http://vpge.stanford.edu/students/id).

Legal lessons

As for non-specialists Goldman and Antwi, they say Thinking Like a Lawyer offers a unique perspective on how lawyers frame problems, as well as how law professors approach teaching.

"Coming from a science background, I'm looking for the answer," Goldman said. "In law it's about making a case—not necessarily about right or wrong answers."

"It's much more pedantic than [Business School] classes. I like how they use the Socratic method," said Antwi, who adds that he finds the idea of being able to interpret "lawyerly talk" appealing.

For Goldman, the class is not only informing her doctoral research—one class session is devoted to a land use case—it's preparing her for life after Stanford.

"I'm going to be sitting at a table with lawyers discussing land-use contracts, policy and other issues," she said. "This course gives a breadth of understanding so I can communicate with them and understand the complexities that go into their work."

Amy Poftak is assistant director of communications at Stanford Law School.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/october24/lawyer-102407.html

Attitude is Essential!Anyone, regardless of education or LSAT score, can learn how to be successful in law school. It doesn't matter how high your IQ is or what your grades were as an undergraduate. There is a simple formula to legal reasoning that can be learned inside of ten minutes and practiced to perfection for the rest of your life. To help you use this formula, however, it helps to adopt a new way of looking at the world. In other words, you need to start thinking like a lawyer. Here's how to do it.

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Four Strategies to Think like a LawyerLaw school is not about learning a set of rules. Law school is designed to teach you how to "think like a lawyer." Professors have long ago settled that lawyers can always look the law up in a book, but designing an argument and analyzing a legal problem is a matter of reshaping the way a person thinks. Four key strategies will aid you in thinking like a lawyer.

Four Strategies to Think like a Lawyer

1. Accept ambiguity2. Don't be emotionally tied to a position3. Argue both sides4. Question everything

Strategy #1: Accept ambiguity.

Consider the following rule of law:

There is always an exception for every rule of law, except for the rules in which there are no exceptions.

At first glance this statement seems circular and contradictory. It states a general proposition that every rule has an exception. Then it goes onto say that there's an exception to this rule for rules that have no exceptions. It's like the childhood riddle, where someone states, "I am a liar." If that person is a liar, how do you know that they are telling the truth in the statement that they are a liar?

The law is full of conundrums and ambiguities like this one. If you can accept the interplay between those two statements without being distressed at the inherent fuzziness, then you will do well in studying the law. The law is inherently fuzzy in order to be flexible. Although judges attempt to interpret laws that are clear, there is almost always a set of circumstances where applying the rule would be unjust. Consequently, some latitude exists in the law in order to reach a just result.

This can drive you mad as a first year law student. You want as clear of an answer as you would get in mathematics or physics. The law is seldom black and white. Everything is a shade of gray. The right answer is almost always couched in terms of probabilities. "Maybe he's liable for damages." "He'll probably go to jail for murder."

There is no way around this, and the best method is to embrace and accept the inherent ambiguity of the law as a strength. Instead of thinking of the law as ambiguous, consider it flexible. Your skill as a lawyer will be in how you can use this flexibility to achieve the correct result for your client.

Strategy #2: Don't be emotionally tied to a position.

One of the biggest traps that professors use on unwary first year law students is playing on the emotions. The professor poses a hypothetical situation in which it's easy to hate one of the parties and sympathize with the other. The trick is to apply the law neutrally in response to the parties' legal rights and not your personal feelings.

The classic example is a situation in which a group of Neo-Nazis attempts to assert their First Amendment rights for free speech by holding demonstrations in a city largely populated with Jewish people who are concentration camp survivors.

Naturally, almost everyone feels sympathy for the concentration camp survivors. These people shouldn't have to be subjected to a Neo-Nazi's political belief in their own home. However, professors purposefully set up situations that create internal emotional conflict in order to illustrate that you should judge a situation according to the law and not let your individual biases get in the way. The correct legal result here is that the Neo-Nazi possesses a free speech right even in these circumstances so long as they are not inciting a riot.

This does not mean that you have to check your ethics at the door of law school. People complain that lawyers have no morals but these critics don't see the higher principles that are at stake. Those higher principles might be constitutional rights such as free speech or the right to be represented by counsel. This is the higher ethical ground that you need to take as an attorney rather than siding with one party or another merely because of your own political beliefs.

Finally, be aware that the professor's hypothetical situations are not the real world. While you may not like the result of the hypothetical, you need to demonstrate to the professor that you know how to apply the law. If you really feel that the result is unjust, then state the law with the correct legal result followed by your reasons on why you don't think the result is just. Just remember that it's a hypothetical. Don't be tied emotionally to things that don't matter.

Strategy #3: Argue both sides.

In order to avoid being emotionally tied to a position, you should always try to argue both sides of an issue. Luckily, the same ambiguity of the law that drives you crazy in Strategy # 1 allows you the flexibility to be on either side of a question in Strategy #3. Adopting this attitude will better prepare you for the exam and the practice of law. You want to be able to take on either a defendant's or plaintiff's position for any given legal issue because you don't know whether the facts on the exam will lean towards one side or the other.

One of the biggest traps that first year law students fall into is studying only from their own point of view. For instance, some people are naturally plaintiff's attorneys - fighting for the underdog against the big corporate giant. Others tend towards representing defendants - protecting shareholder interests from people out to make a quick buck on a fraudulent claim. Each side is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Your immediate goal on the exam is not to figure out what kind of lawyer you are. Your immediate goal is to do well on the exam. This means that need to be able to argue the side that seems to be correct given the facts. This may, in fact, be a party that you wouldn't normally side with.

One major upside to this sort of training is that it will make you a better lawyer to be able to argue both sides of a case. Once you do adopt a plaintiff's or defendant's posture in real life, you will benefit from knowing what arguments the other side will bring forth. If you can understand the intricacies of another side's case, then you can better attack that argument.

Strategy #4: Question everything.

Around the age of two years old, a child often starts asking his or her parents "Why?" You should be like a two-year-old. Every rule of law, judicial decision, statute and legal construct has a reason for its existence. It may not be a very good reason, but you will be a better lawyer for behaving like a two year old and repeatedly asking "Why?"

This act of questioning focuses you on policy as a basis for the law. Understanding policy will carry you far in successfully writing exams. Arguing policy is one of the four key methods of analysis.

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Four Strategies to Excel as a StudentLaw school is as much a psychological game as it is an intellectual game. Students defeat themselves ahead of time by stressing out on the workload. You can put yourself in a better position as a student by adopting these simple attitudes.

Four Strategies to Excel as a Student

1. Keep your cool2. Compete only with yourself3. Play with concepts like a new toy4. Strive for balance in your life

Strategy #1: Keep your cool.

Law professors use fear as a tool to motivate students to 1) work hard and 2) be cautious lawyers. Many professors feel that a little anxiety is a good thing for students. The very structure of the case method and Socratic dialogue used in most classrooms helps foster this fear since nothing is laid out on the table.

However, fear also takes you away from learning. It's a waste of valuable energy. Instead of focusing on the learning, you focus on the fear of not "getting it." To counteract the fear that is inherent in law school, consider three ideas:

First, everyone in your class is in the same state of ignorance. No one knows what's coming next.

Second, if you make a mistake in the classroom, it doesn't count. The only grade that counts in most law school classes is the final. Relax and make mistakes. It will help you in the exam to know your weak points.

Third, hundreds of thousands of students have sat where you're sitting now and have survived and thrived.

Some people purposefully create stress as a motivator for themselves. They freak out at the workload and use it as a way to bond with other students. Stay away from the people who are stressing out. Stress creates stress, and you want to focus your energies on studying, not stressing out.

Strategy #2: Compete only with yourself.

Although grades are important, it's also important to put them in perspective. One key factor in getting good grades is to forget about them and concentrate on the learning. Focusing on the competition - i.e. your fellow students - takes your eye off the ball, which is to learn the law. If you are constantly sizing up the competition and comparing yourself then you are taking yourself away from valuable study time.

Consider the following truism:

While grades are the only thing that counts, grades also count as only one thing.

The idea here is to recognize the importance of grades in determining certain things, such as law review, summer jobs and so on. At the same time, you realize that the learning and relationships are far more important keys to happiness than grades.

The stress of getting good grades often creates competition, which leads to bad feelings between students. There are true stories of people hiding books in the library or ripping pages out of case books that are necessary to complete an assignment. This sort of competition can be very destructive.

The best strategy to deal with the stress of grades is to compete only with yourself and not others. The people in your class are your future colleagues. Building trust and relationships with these people will take you much further than any marginal increase in grades you might get from cut-throat competitive tactics for grades. The most successful people in the world are not those who are most competitive with others. Rather, the most successful are those who compete with themselves to learn the most.

Strategy #3: Play with concepts like a new toy.

Whenever you learn a new legal concept, play with as if you were a kid and the concept was the coolest, neatest, newest toy that you own.

Make the concept your own by restating the principle in your own words. Turn the idea over in your head as you're walking to class or taking a shower. Whenever you learn a new rule, restate it a dozen times until you don't need notes to say it by heart. Once you really understand that concept by putting it in your own words, move on to other principles.

Apply the rule to your everyday situations. For instance, you might begin to apply the principles you learn in Contract law to your everyday dealings with grocers and retailers. As you drive down the highway, consider what you would have to prove to bring a negligence suit in Tort if there were an accident. If the car crash was caused by a faulty part in a foreign car you were driving, how could you use Civil Procedure to haul the manufacturer into Federal Court.

Closely related to this concept is the idea of making up hypothetical fact patterns in which the rule of law will or will not apply. Try this make-believe technique in order to better learn how to apply the rule. You'll be surprised at how closely you might come to guessing what fact pattern is on the exam.

A lot of the difficulty in learning comes from fighting it. We put ourselves into a non-receptive state by saying, "This is difficult. I don't understand." We also make it harder to learn by not focusing on the learning but by focusing on where we are on the general curve of learning - i.e. what's our class rank. By wasting energy on these areas we don't focus on the area where the true energy should flow - the actual learning of the law. Playing with the concepts like they were toys will defuse that difficulty.

Strategy #4: Strive for balance in your life.

A lot of law students end up studying 12 - 14 hours a days in order to get through all of the reading and work of law school. This can easily lead to burn out. Putting in more hours doesn't necessarily lead to more knowledge. The law of diminishing returns suggests that 80 hours a week may lead to less advancement in the study of law than a focused 40-hour week.

It is essential to have a balance in your life with exercise, eating right and fun time with your friends and family. You will get more out of the classroom if you are alert, well fed and otherwise on top of your game physically and emotionally than you will if you have read yet another treatise about the law.

You need to give law school a break in order to give it your maximum attention later on. You need time when you're not thinking like a lawyer in order to better achieve becoming a lawyer. In the words of the Alan Watts, a professor of Eastern religions, "By going out of your mind, you come to your senses."

  Return to Top   Test Yourself!

Two Strategies to Bolster Self Confidence

Many law students suffer academically because they lack self confidence in their ability to handle the material. By deciding ahead of time that they don't have the ability, they fulfill that prophesy before even trying. In order to succeed academically in law school you have to adopt a belief in your ability. Belief alone won't carry you through to your goals. You also have to put in the work. But without a belief in your ability, you defeat yourself before you begin.

Reprogramming for Success

If you've gotten as far as being accepted into law school, then you have the native intelligence to understand legal reasoning. Hundreds of thousands of people have learned to analyze issues like a lawyer, and you can do it too. If that isn't proof enough, then consider adopting a few techniques to foster self-confidence in studying the law.

One method is through affirmations. Affirmations are a tool you can use to counteract the negative self-image that is ingrained in the subconscious mind. Through the negative messages we receive in childhood, the subconscious mind develops limitations as to what we can achieve. The subconscious tells us that we aren't an "A student," so we never put forth the effort to counteract that negative message.

Affirmations are a powerful tool to reprogram the subconscious. Affirmations are said in front of the mirror in the morning immediately when you get up and in the evening right before you go to sleep. It could be something as simple as:

"I, (your name), am an intelligent, confident, and articulate student who will become an outstanding advocate and attorney for my clients."

Affirmations generally get a bad rap. It's easy to dismiss affirmations as hokey, and, in a way, they are. But affirmations are also incredibly empowering. Affirmations illustrate just how powerful language can be. I challenge you to use affirmations for a week and see if they make a difference in your underlying attitude.

Another method to improve self-confidence is through visualization. High-performance athletes visualize winning a race before running it. During the actual race, they merely put into action what they have already visualized. You can use visualization to be successful in law school before you crack a book. Take a moment to visualize your first year in law school. Close your eyes and imagine a classroom where you and your fellow students engage in a lively debate. See in your mind a situation where you convince your peers to adopt a different viewpoint. Imagine taking your first test, having fun with it and knowing that you aced the exam. Fast-forward to your third year when you graduate. See yourself successfully taking the bar exam in your state. Visualizing doesn't mean that you don't have to do the work, but it will foster the belief in your ability to accomplish the task.

The Myth of Mistakes

Fostering a belief in your ability is difficult when you are constantly faced with making mistakes. Mistakes are a fact of life in law school. The number of mistakes that a law school student makes

is enormous. Everything about law school is new. The language of lawyering is new. The process of learning is different than most academic fields. The analytical thought process is a skill that doesn't come easily. You should expect to make mistakes.

Success is determined by what you do with those mistakes. Are mistakes a learning experience or do those mistakes reinforce a belief that you can't do the material? If you can look at each mistake you make in law school as an opportunity to get it right for the exam, I guarantee you that you'll excel.

You're not alone in making mistakes. Did you realize that the best baseball players in the world strike out two thirds of the time they are at bat? Do they let that huge failure ratio deter them? No. Each time they step up to the plate, they have an unwavering belief that this is the ball they are going to hit out of the park. They don't let their failures get in the way of believing in their ultimate ability to succeed.

Recognize to yourself that you are only a beginner. As a beginner, you have to start out with simple concepts and take small steps in learning the material. Sometimes you won't succeed, but that's part of being a beginner. In fact, you want to make mistakes in order to see where you got it wrong the first time through. You must never let your mistakes fool you into believing that you are not capable.

Summing up, there is a two-step approach to putting yourself in the right state of mind. Adopt this phrase as your guiding principle:

Think like a winner by knowing that you will ultimately succeed, but act like a beginner by learning from your mistakes.

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