If you are about to graduate college and are considering attending law school this article is intended for you. This article is about what life is going to be like when you arrive in law school and what it will take to graduate and succeed in law school.

First of all let me say this. If you are considering a distance learning or a non ABA approved law school save your money. As far as I know no state in America allows a person with a degree from a non ABA sanctioned law school to sit for the bar exam (and practice law) so why bother? Perhaps things have changed since I went to law school but I doubt it. I have certainly heard of no changes to that requirement. I suggest you investigate thoroughly before wasting your time and money going down that road.

So what is law school itself like? Is it like what the movie/television series the Paperchase portrayed? In some ways, yes, it is similar to that movie. Many schools use the "Socratic method" of teaching law at least in the first year of law school. Students are not given a textbook. They use, instead, a casebook with a bunch of long and boring cases in them in which they are instructed to read fifty or so pages before each class. Then the teacher proceeds to grill students one by one about the cases for the day. In essence it is the students themselves that teach the class by answering the professors questions. Failing to answer the professor can result in points being removed from the student's final grade. Professors can be kindly or they can be total jerks. It all depends upon the instructor. Some revel in breaking students and driving them away from law school. Some enjoy bullying students. Some, however, legitimately do care about the students and are trying to teach them.

Exams are typically all essay and are offered only at the end of the semester (or year in some schools). That means one exam. There is generally no mid-term exam. That means that everything rides on one test.

Many students begin preparing an outline early in the semester and add rules that they condense from each case to their outline. Ultimately it is your knowledge of the rules that you have been taught that you will be tested on. No one is interested in your memorization of every case name or date. That is not learning the law and your exam will not get bonus points for knowing all cases. Knowing a few important ones, however, can result in some better scores. It is better to know the important ones than to know all of

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