well update: everything worked out and NY is going to let me sit. Wasn't a big deal once i sent everything over. What a relief hahah

Good job and good luck

Thats great A1923N, good luck!

I keep hearing horror stories about first years being called on in class and they have to stand and discuss/debate with the instructor for the whole class period. Is this something you have to fear everyday of your classes?

LOL unless things have gone back about 50 years no it is something some profs like to do in the first year. It isn't a debate it is a socratic method.

Look wanna be prepared for it? It is easy, read the hornbook for the black letter law, then read the cases in the chapter. Read ahead. Shepardize (you will learn what that means) the case and read the cases that cite the textbook case. Now you are prepared for what is to come.
Instead of getting scared of it, look forward to it. It can be fun. Don't worry about looking stupid. The richest lawyer I know did not know what the "Bill of Rights" was and asked the Con Law prof. Now that was funny.
If you do get called on, listen carefully to the question and think about the cases you shepardized and the hornbook law. The professor is trying to get you (and the class) to see how cases morph from one holding to the next. Hence they take a case and try to get you to see how to apply it to a similar but not exactly the same set of facts. They change the facts to try to get you to see what a court would do if confronted by the problem in a different form.

Recitation, is one of the strengths of our system. Remember law school isn't trying to teach you how to be a lawyer, it is trying to teach you how to think like one. It is a pedagogy just like learning medicine or teaching. It doesn't as a goal try to turn out ready to practice lawyers. It turns out ready to think people who may become lawyers.

If you go in with these thoughts you should be fine.

Good luck! Enjoy the journey!!

I just finished my first year and acshark hit it on the nose like usual. the worst thing you can do is try to bs the prof if you didn't do the reading and think you can just sly your way out of it. I saw this work maybe 5% of the time this past year. most of the good profs will immediately pick up on what you're trying to do and make you look like an ass in front of everyone. but if you sound confident and genuine then reasonable inferences are encouraged.

my second year im going to be reading a lot more hornbooks and supplements and a whole less from the case book.. if you can get the BLL down like the back of your hand then applying it to any set of facts is the easy part..whether its a 50 year old supreme court case or a new one (assuming the law hasn't changed lol)

Why are you advocating Shephardizing cases? No one I knew in law school ever did that. There is almost no reason to know cases not discussed in the case book (or supplemental material provided by the prof).

Additionally, you typically only read a 1L case for a few limited points. Thus you will get tons of cases that may cite the case you're reading on irrelevant points. There are far better uses of your time as a 1L than Shephardizing.

This.

I guess times have changed. We did this all the time. Sure you had to be smart enough to figure out the name of the chapter you were on and then look at the cases for that topic (Headnotes were helpful with that)then again you are in law school one would hope you could figure that out. Of course I went to school when there was no such thing as Shephards on-line. In fact noone had personal computers and I don't think anyone in the whole Univerity had a fax machine... Mostly our profs wanted to take us beyond the case books and to where the law was going. Maybe they do it differently. OTOH, if you ever have me as a prof, I'd shepardize if I were you

Just got a new case on Friday. Was super leery about the guy, who was living at the veteran's hospital over an hour away. I get there, find the guy, nice as can be, easy as hell car wreck, perfect situation. Proud of myself for driving out there. Bet there are only a handful of lawyers who would've gone through that effort and hopefully it pays off.

Advice to students/new lawyers: don't take short cuts and treat every case like it's a big case. I had another case which was probably the worst one I had (old lady slip and fall)...took it seriously, put a ton of work into it, made a decent case out of nothing. Turns out the lady's kid gets t-boned and injured, easy case. And the kid's ex wife's 9 year old son passed away in a house fire due to a defective stove. So, now since I signed up and slugged through the crappy case, I get two new very good cases. Stove case is super sad, not sure how "defective" the stove was yet.

In most of the casebooks that I was assigned, there were notes after the cases or a set of cases. These notes usually contained references to cases that expanded on, commented on, or distinguished the holdings of the main case. When the professors were going through permutations of the BLL in class, the material was generally drawn from the notes and the cases cited in them. Reading those notes (which almost no one does), fulfills the Shepardizing function described by AC, and I would recommend doing that. While I understand that you can get all of the substantive knowledge you need to do well in a class without cracking a case book. reading actual cases will give you a better grasp of legal reasoning and will make you a much better legal reseracher and writer in the long run.

As for getting called on in class, in my experience the professors were basically looking for the students to be prepared and attentive in class. I never saw a professor give a student a hard time merely for misunderstanding a holding or for giving a clearly wrong answer to a hypo.

+1

Bar study sure is fun.

+1000
So one night I am sitting in my hotel room in Chicago. I just finished a lecture for the ABA and I am half in the bag (You think tournaments are parties? Try an ABA or better an NACDL meeting. Man do people let loose). I open up my e-mail and there is the saddest note from this poor guy in Minnesota. Now I just happen to be in Chi. but my office is on Long Island. So I rent a car and drive to Rochester Minn. (This was stupid, I shoulda flown up there but I like driving and for this suburban kid the country ride was actually a good time. It took way to long though.) I meet the guy and he is a train wreck. I took the case, no it wasn't easy, but I feel like it was the case that defined my career. This was the result

Since that case (and the resulting fee award which was the largest hourly rate allowed in the nation for a 1983 case) my life has changed. I am still the same lawyer I was before I took it, but to all those who laughed at the way I practiced, (Client first, Firm second, me last) take a step back. The level of respect has changed. I've had other cases that were as important as this one but did not receive the publicity that this one got. It was a chance for me to speak to young lawyers kind of the way I speak to you guys about why it is important to remember what brought you to the law in the first place.

For litigators especially, most of us didn't picture ourselves making huge money, yeah we expected it, but the picture in our dreams was us standing next to a client whose life was changed because we chose to be their hero.

My client in the above case, had become a paraplegic after having his car tossed off an incline in a tornado. In the 20 years after, he had earned a reputation as being good guy in a wheelchair. He helped other paras learn to use their lives and live their lives in a positive way. He would alter their vans to make them easily drivable for free, and was always working out. His doctor described him as fit as a gymnast from the chest up. He could swing himself around like a guy on the rings or Pommel horse.

When he was arrested, it was during a divorce. He allegedly "felt up" his 16 year old step daughter after doctors improperly sent him cold turkey off of a lot of pain killers.

His assigned counsel did nothing for him at all (he was off running for judge and didn't want to even represent a "sex offender") and he went to jail on a misdemeanor first offense. (PS how does a 16 year old get felt up by a guy who can't walk, is in bed?) This guy had never gotten anything but screwed in life. He lived with his mother, both penniless in a ground floor urban renewal complex in a ghetto area. He had lived on a farm, but they lost it when he lost his job due to the injuries he had received while in jail.

When I won the initial case, people in the newspapers comments section called me an ambulance chaser. I must have been a lousy lawyer to have to go all that way to take a case. After winning the appeal, which I argued myself, and getting the fee decision (which was even better than the money, the judges words were that: but for me, this man would never have been made whole) that "chasing" crap stopped.

I wish you could have heard Phil's voice when we called him at the Hospital to tell him what had happened, or seen his mothers face, when we told her. I wish you could have seen the face on the City Counselor or the Sheriff when they got the verdict. I thought the Sheriff was going to go into cardiac arrest. Just so you all know, the "offer" was 40K, a month before the trial. 40K for rendering a man hospital bound for the rest of his life. For torturing a crippled man, because they didn't think he was worth the trouble.

In all, what POKEROMGLOL wrote above is a cosmic phenomenon. When you go the extra mile, it comes back to you in spades. I am proud of you POKEROMGLOL. Sure you were rewarded, but you would have done it anyway. Guys like you define what is right about our profession.You cause other people who have the best intentions for people to want to be lawyers. You are the next generation of advocates, of centurions, of protectors of the masses. Good luck, do justice, and be proud.

I got one too.

So I was out at a bar with a bunch of friends for my birthday (another friend and I both have the exact same birthday, it as on Tuesday) and one of my friends starts talking about how her dad died 2.5 years ago. I knew that he'd died around that time from another mutual friend, but that friend had told me never to bring it up. Anyway my friend starts talking about it and that basically what happened was her father had cancer, but was over it, and the Dr. had prescribed some drug. The friend telling me this story is a nurse, so I kinda defer to her on the medical stuff, but basically she didn't like the drug, didn't think it was necessary etc. Or at least gave me that impression, I'm not 100% sure. Anyway dad comes into dr's office complaining of chest pain and has low blood pressure, the nurse in that office communicated that to the dr. Dr. sends him home, and dad dies that day. This was all extremely sudden for the family, I mean generally she describes him as a healthy, active guy with no real problems (other than the cancer that was in remission I guess). He worked manual labor so he was active in that way.

At this point I'm suppressing every law school created urge to ask "did you sue about it" and the like so as not to come off as an insensitive dick. It's incredible how law school creates that in us. Seems like a pretty open and shut case though, I'm pretty surprised nobody from the dr.'s office offered a settlement to them just to keep them from suing. My friend talked about that it's not about the money for her, it's about punishing the dr.

She brings up that the family thought about litigation, but doesn't want to put mom through that etc. I looked up the SOL here and it looks to be about 3 years for this case (five years from the time the injury was committed or three years from the date the injury was discovered, whichever is shorter. ) so I guess she still has some time. This whole thing actually landed my friend in the hospital due to the mental strain, so that actually should extend the time as far as I know.

Point is that I guess this is one of those cases law school never talks about. Litigation probably won't get brought just because the family is so traumatized.