Later in Life Lawyers: Tips for the Non-Traditional Law Student
by Charles Cooper
Reviewed by Catherine E. Roberts
Having lived this book, I wish had read it before I went to law school at age 41. Linked to a website known as www.nontradlaw.com, it is filled with useful information about who chooses to go to law school, why they do it, how they get in, and how to succeed once admitted. It recommends study techniques and contains comments from many people in different situations – from the older, married students with past careers, to the ones who are “non-traditional” because they took a few years off between college and law school but are still in their early twenties. The book takes advantage of recent commentary from current law students, quoting directly from lengthy emails.
A large fraction of law students these days are non-traditional. In fact, the “traditional” student may have been the exception, and not the rule, at the University of Utah when I was there. From those who came to Utah to ski and enrolled in law school (partly because of lower tuition), to our “Older But Wiser” social group (those, like me, who were in their thirties or forties with lots of life experience behind them), the U of U Class of 1994 had it all. Many of us with children and other obligations regarded law school as a nine-to-five job.
The book 1-L by Scott Turow was a popular must-read for law students back then, but it had little application to my law school experience at the U. No professor intimidated me as much as Professor Kingsley did the Harvard students. I was older than most of the professors, for one thing. On the contrary, they were positive and encouraging. And no young classmate ever tried to make me feel foolish. We all found the material challenging, whether we could spend the night in the library preparing for a final or had to cut class to retrieve a sick child from preschool.
Cooper takes a strong position on the people who change careers to go to law school not intending to become lawyers: don’t do it. Cooper writes, “If you could die without attending law school, don’t attend. It’s not worth the trouble, expense and stress.”
Cooper also emphasizes the numbers game in law school admissions, saying that “a school will rather admit a student with a 3.5 in a lightweight major such as political science from a no-name state college, over a student with a lower GPA in a heavyweight major from a well-known and highly regarded university.” Because the admissions score places heavy emphasis on the LSAT, the book spends an appropriate amount of space on preparing to take that exam.
The book also reaffirms the notion that the only sure way to work for a big city, big firm is to go to one of the top law schools, and get the best grades possible.
After the applicant is accepted, the greatest challenge begins: law school itself. The authors and e-mailers provide useful advice on buying books, study groups, learning to outline, preparing a resume, and advice on whether to use Macintosh computers in law school. (The answer is no; they are not supported.)
Cooper acknowledges that making friends and gaining the respect of colleagues in law school helps cement later professional relationships – but they also warn later in life lawyers against making fools of themselves by trying to reclaim their youth. (I insist that my performance in the 1-L parody was not embarrassing, and I was sober.) Their advice boils down to the following: act your age at parties, and don’t be the eager beaver in class. Learning to organize one’s thoughts quickly in the face of an unexpected question in class pays off later in court, but asking stupid questions and pursuing irrelevant issues just irritates your classmates.
My greatest frustration in law school was trying to glean the important information from everything thrown at me. I started out wanting to know it all, from the arcane minutiae of civil procedure to the property law professor’s own pet theories about the redistribution of wealth in society. By the end of the first semester of my first year, I was ready to give up completely. I found a wonderful study partner: an ex-submariner who was being sent through school by the Navy. (If that’s not non-traditional, I don’t know what is). He not only seemed to possess a photographic memory, but also had an automatic “delete” button that eliminated the superfluous information law professors love to impart. We became, and are to this day, fast friends, although his military law career and my local career are very different.
My only quibble with the book is the mediocre quality of the book itself, which extends to the editing, the book’s design, and the proof-reading. Perhaps the niceties were skipped to keep the book’s price down for the impoverished law school applicant. Its shelf appeal is not great. That’s a shame, because what’s inside is. After nearly thirteen years in practice in family law, litigation, and criminal defense, I agree with the author’s conclusion that law school, expensive and stressful as it is, is nonetheless “deeply satisfying, a great achievement, and an intellectual challenge like nothing else.”