For those of you in 1L, the excitement of O-Week is just starting to fade, and the realities of life as a law student will soon be kicking in. For the rest of us, the first week back also represents a transition, as we jockey for positions on the waiting lists, get ready for OCI’s, or scramble furiously for a precious articling position. The beginning of the year is all about change with chaos, followed by a relatively peaceful period where we get down to the business of being students; attending class, making summaries, and writing exams or papers.
These large, stressful transitions fill our minds so much that we often forget that law school itself is a transitional period. We are all being transformed, over the course of three years, into lawyers. Our work habits, our world-views, and our very personalities are being transformed by the education we are receiving, and the people we’re sharing our experiences with. We’re being taught how to construct arguments, and to not love those arguments too much. We’re being taught how to read and write with a great deal of precision. We’re being taught to love working under pressure, to thrive in environments where others would burst. But the dirty open secret of the profession is this: law school doesn’t really prepare us well to be lawyers, it best prepares us to be great law students. What we’re doing now as students doesn’t bear much resemblance to what we’ll actually be be doing as lawyers, whether one goes on to private practice, to academia, or to government.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism of the quality of our legal education. There are good reasons why we need to learn (among many other things) how to do legal research, and write great facta from start to finish: a lawyer who can’t research the law or prepare an argument isn’t much of a lawyer. But the bulk of your professional life will not be spent engaging in these tasks. Take for example the writing of facta. In private practice, most lawyers simply don’t have time to write a factum from scratch. Clients either can’t or won’t pay lawyers to duplicate work. Instead of taking a day or two or three to research, argue, edit, and revise a 20-30 page factum, you’ll be going to your firm’s precedent library, pulling a copy of the most recent factum that most closely applies to the facts of your case, and then you’ll spend a couple hours editing and tweaking that factum where it doesn’t address the arguments you need to make. Law school is about thoughtfulness and attention to detail; private practice is about process and efficiency.
What you learn here at Osgoode is how to identify the important details and understand what they mean for your fact situation. These are critical skills to have, but they are far from the only skills you’ll need. In academia, you’ll need skills in pedagogy and academic writing (which is not quite the same as legal writing); in private practice you’ll need to understand thoroughly the legal process and how to manage a team; in government you’ll need a fine appreciation of policy and how it relates to politics. Sadly, it’s possible to get your JD, even here at Osgoode, without having more than a cursory look at any of those skills. Despite the fact that Osgoode offers extensive opportunities to do clinical, academic and policy work to us students, we often miss these opportunities, or participate in the programs but still miss the point.
We all know that doing activities like editing for the Law Journal or doing a clinical intensive program are good for our education, but many of us think of these activities in terms of resume-building, failing to see that they can be a critical component of our education, one that will immediately affect our work lives after graduation. If you sit and think a bit about what you want to do after law school, and have some idea of the kind of training you’re going to be receiving while doing your Articles, you can pick activities that will give you a running start. Even your choice of summer job can help you get ready for the “real world” that comes after graduation. Is your new firm going to put you to work babysitting a photocopier all summer, or are they going to send you to court? Will they give you a chance to try a bit of everything, or will they need you mainly to assist a solicitor? Or a trial lawyer? These are all questions you can be asking yourself, and your interviewers, when you go through the job interview process.
You have choices, and you have a long working life ahead of you after graduating with your JD. While the staff and faculty here at Osgoode do their best to make you aware of those choices and future needs, the headlong rush of a legal education will tend to pull you along, and you’ll always be distracted from thinking long thoughts by the ever-present pressure of deadlines. Take the time to sit down, think about what you want for yourself, and ask yourself if your education is giving you all the tools you need to have the career -- the life -- you want after law school. A little time spent doing this now will make a big difference for you down the road.
