Author: Lawschooli

It can be very intimidating being a law student and trying to talk to your law professors. I know many of you have seen the movie Paper Chase. You will develop a fascination with some of your professors and want to get to know them better- it’s part of the law school culture. However, the Paper Chase approach, sleeping with the professor’s daughter, can lead to unnecessary complications. Here, we tell you how to approach law professors in non-harassing ways.

When you are choosing a law school, yes, you should figure out the big stuff. The most important thing to research what kind of job prospects the school gives it’s graduates. After you’ve decided you are happy with your chances of finding gainful employment, the rest is more or less all down to taste. You are likely going to be at this place for three years, so you better like it! Here’s some stuff you’ll want to find out about your law school. None of this stuff alone should be a deal breaker, but when you add little stuff up…

The LSAT is just around the corner. Don’t worry, there is still time to make huge improvements. For me, it wasn’t until my last month of LSAT study that logic games really clicked. I wanted to check in and make sure everyone has there remaining prep scheduled correctly in at least one important regard: Most of the timed preptests you do from here on out should be the most recent preptests. Work from oldest to newest so you are doing the most recent preptest right before the test. The most recent LSAT preptest currently available is Official LSAT PrepTest 86.

I looked around the internet and there is a serious lack of practice available for basic conditional reasoning and logic concepts, fundamental skills needed to master the LSAT. To address this, here is a LSAT conditional reasoning and logical inferences quiz, the first of a series of LSAT quizzes to help round out your LSAT prep.This quiz focuses on diagramming conditional statements and making some key inferences commonly found on the LSAT. If you want to brush up before the quiz, our totally free intro conditional logic lesson is here. Answers to the LSAT quiz questions are below. Enjoy!– Evan…

A Wall Street Journal blog posted yesterday that by and large, LSAT numbers at the top law schools are holding despite the fact that far fewer people are taking the LSAT and sending in applications. Applications to law school have plunged in the last several years: in last year’s cycle they were down over 40% from pre-recession highs, causing many law schools to reduce class size, accept weaker applicants, or both. Top law schools have not been spared from the crash- Harvard for example saw a 27% decline in applications from 2009-2012. However, very few of the top schools have…

Overall Rating: 180 out of 180 (A perfect score!) PowerScore® LSAT Logic Games Bible- Revised 2013 Edition The PowerScore® LSAT Logic Games Bible has long been the LSAT prep book most frequently recommended by top scorers to prepare for the notoriously tricky logic games section of the LSAT. Now, PowerScore has revised the book with more 228 pages of new material, including new drills, more logic games for practice, and expanded discussion of some of the key concepts. MY SHORT REVIEW: This book give you a straight-forward, fundamentally correct approach for doing the logic games section quickly and accurately. You…

Law school is a bit like a stable, and the professors are its horses. Brian Leiter, a professor at UChicago, devised a method of ranking the law school stables with his proprietary “Scholarly Impact Score.” The score is calculated from the mean and the median of total law journal citations over the past five years to the work of tenured members of a school’s law faculty. This score gives us an idea how influential the faculty are among the various schools.

We have talked about how incoming law students are in a better position than ever to get big merit scholarships. A recent article in Fortune has me realizing that I may have underestimated just how green the grass is out there. How green is it? It’s 18th-hole-at-Augusta-green. Fortune reported on a student bound for the law school Washington University in St. Louis who negotiated a full-tuition scholarship with a 166 LSAT score. While that’s a respectable score, it should be noted that it’s just at the school’s median for the previous year!

You’ve probably already realized that logical reasoning questions make up half your total score on the LSAT. It’s critical that you have this section mastered if you want a high score. Thankfully, the logical reasoning section of the LSAT is very teachable. Start off your LSAT prep with the best logical reasoning prep books to give yourself a proper foundation to reach a high LSAT score.

If you are considering law school, you might be wondering what law school is like. All law schools in the United States share some basic features. We already covered the nitty-gritty of what makes law school so challenging in our post HOW HARD IS LAW SCHOOL? so here we want to walk you through some typical days at law school to show you what you are likely to encounter 1L year (‘1L’ is the term for your first year at law school).

Here we give you some useful LSAT Logical Reasoning tips that should help you on your way to mastering the logical reasoning section of the LSAT. The two LR sections constitute half of your total score on the LSAT, so the work you put in learning to master this section has a big payout. Your tipmasters, Joshua and Evan, both did very well on logical reasoning (Josh got none wrong on LR, Evan got only one wrong total on the two sections). Here are some logical reasoning tips that helped us completely dismantle the LSAT logical reasoning section. These are…

The LSAT Logic games section is the section that most people find the most difficult when starting out LSAT prep. Whereas most of us have honed our reading and critical thinking skills considerably over the years, it’s less often that we’ve been asked to group campers in two canoes when there are crazy rules about which campers can go together. Fortunately, the logic games section is also the most teachable part of the LSAT and the easiest to develop true consistency on. Here we give you a bunch of tips and tricks that will help you on your way to…

In today’s post, we compare the GRE vs. the LSAT to help those thinking about graduate or professional school and deciding where their strengths lie. To get into most decent post-graduate programs, you are going to need to take a seriously difficult test of some kind. The GRE and the LSAT are both hard. However, though there is significant overlap in terms of the skills required and the form of the questions, these are very different tests. First off (in case you are totally new to this) the LSAT is the one that gets you in law school and the…

Law school usually means it’s time to get a new computer- your one from undergrad is on its last legs and you can’t risk crashes and lost notes. Plus, I think we all can admit that buying a laptop is a lot of fun. Your financial aid package will generally have a laptop allowance where you can borrow up to $1,500 extra to get a computer, more than enough to get a great laptop for law school. Consider it a nice present to yourself for getting into law school 🙂 Without further ado, here are the best laptops for law school:

There was a time when law school was an excellent default option for very bright individuals who didn’t have any other ideas about what to do with their life. Rather than asking themselves “why do I want to be a lawyer?” they probably just thought, correctly, that they could do a whole lot worse, and off to school they went. While this probably made for a lot of unhappy lawyers, at least they had enough money for alcohol, so everything was okay. Now, everything has changed. The legal economy was very fragile during the great recession. As a result, media…

While it isn’t selecting a mate for life, finding a great LSAT tutor is pretty similar. They have to be smart, kind, patient, and capable. Also, you are going to be working with them in close quarters, so it’s a major plus if they don’t have bad breath. Compared with taking a prep class and self study, tutoring is an expensive option no matter what company/tutor you go with. However, it’s very likely to be helpful: no other resource can show you what you are doing wrong as you do it and fix it right there on the spot. LSAT…

The media is on fire lately covering the topic of law school cost. While people differ in the particulars, there is general agreement that law school is currently too damned expensive. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has pointed out that lawyers going into biglaw in the 1980’s had to pay a little less than 60% of one year’s pre-tax salary to cover the full-tuition cost of going to law school, whereas now biglaw lawyers have to pay something closer to 100% of one year’s pre-tax salary to cover it. So even those in…

A snippet published in the ABA Journal today says that some 25 law schools are now accepting June LSAT scores for admission to class in the coming fall. The change is hardly surprising given that schools are doing anything and everything to bulk up admissions as total applications to law school continue to tumble year over year (see yesterday’s post for more on these trends). The new policy isn’t confined to schools outside the top tier either: Among the schools to announce such a change is 21st-ranked University of Alabama School of Law and 31st-ranked University of North Carolina School…

No, I don’t have a blue screen yet so we can’t do this like a proper weather forecast (don’t worry, we are working on that). However, what we can do is tell you is that law school admissions is in a heavy period of flux: the number of people taking the LSAT as well as the number of people actually applying to law schools is plummeting from highs set during the peak of the recession. In this post we predict the ongoing effects of these trends on law schools and on student’s admissions chances for this application cycle- 2013-2014.

Standardized tests are really, really tough to focus on, and the LSAT is undoubtedly no exception. Reading comprehension especially tends to set even the most diligent mind wandering. While the LSAT may not even be the worst offender around when it comes to boring tests, it certainly doles out some harsh punishment to day-dreamers trying to climb its scaly heights. The LSAT, remember, is brutal in large part because of significant time pressure. The questions are designed so that the average untrained person would take considerably longer than the allotted time to complete them. Losing too many seconds to mind-wandering…