If you have been doing your readings of the blogs, you probably have figured out that it’s evaluation time here at the law school. First year students get academic evaluations for the courses they take every semester. Second and third years are divided into four quarters each so we get evaluations every quarter.

I will never forget the first time I received my course evaluations at Northeastern Law. About fifty of us first years lined up outside of the moot court room on the ground level and one by one we each received a large white envelope. First, I chuckled at the old fashioned way we Northeastern people do everything. Then I realized that this felt eerily similar to the time I stood in line to receive my flu shot outside of the nurse’s office in fifth grade – the cold sweat, the hushed murmurs, and the gnawing anticipation. Except this time, I knew the stakes were a lot higher. I knew that large white envelope was capable of causing a lot more pain that the physical discomfort of a sore arm.

If you have not lost complete grounding of reality (or have yet to attend law school), by now you would have realized how ridiculous all this was. They were not even “grades� for crying out loud. But trust me in those short moments, I believed that a large chunk of my life would be decided by what was contained in that large white envelope. After a quick read of the content of the envelope, my first thought was “whew�. My second thought was “what�? While I easily discerned that I would not be repeating any courses and my exam did not make any professor want to quit her/his job, I could not really tell how well I did, at least not in comparison to others like an A or B. And that’s kind of the whole point. We are all so used to defining who we are in comparison to others. I think narrative evaluation is an attempt to evaluate our work against our own standard. I have to admit when I first read about the whole “no grades� thing at Northeastern, I thought that was all “Mickey mouse�, as my labor law professor would say. What self-respecting institution doesn’t give out A, B, C? But half way through my journey at Northeastern Law, I have to say that I’m a believer. However, lest some of you think things are always happy and peachy here at the law school, they are not. For one thing, we wait forever to receive our individualized narrative evaluations. In one isolated (I hope) incident, I took my exam before thanksgiving and to this day (end of January) have not gotten my evaluation for the course. Students are putting their heads together on how to remedy this unfortunate drawback of narrative evaluation.

Posted by Wen at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Networking is very big among lawyers. You will see what I’m talking about when you start law school. It’s everywhere and apparently the answer to everything: you want to know what class to take? Network with the 2Ls and 3Ls; you need a job? Build a network of helpful contacts; you need advice on life? Reach out to your network. So we know networking is important, but what is it?

To network is to create and maintain a web of human relationships with people who share a similar occupation, interests or goals – think of it as making friends, for professional reasons. But how does one network? Well, 1Ls at Northeastern generally have a plethora of networking opportunities with either alumni or prospective employers. The school hosts this annual alumni networking event called “Connection� where we meet literally hundreds of alumni from every kind of legal / non-legal job imaginable who show up just to network with the students. Then, there are the smaller events where the school invites alumni from a specific field (i.e. international law) to come back to the law school to talk to the students.

While the opportunity and benefits of networking are bountiful, it’s not always the easiest task. It sometimes requires you to go up to an imposing-looking senior attorney and introduce yourself as if you can possibly justify taking up his precious time. Other times, you have to put yourself out there and send an email to an attorney whose work you admire and ask for 30 minutes of her time. Once you’ve built these contacts, your work has just begun because you must diligently maintain these contacts so that you will always have plenty of resources when you need a lifeline. At times, all this will seem a lot to take on for a first year law student who is just trying to keep up with the readings in classes. But from my and many other people’s experience, it is one skill that will help you go far in your career. Think of it as planting seeds to your future success.

Speaking of networking, the entire ERA office went to the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area Luncheon today in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. There is nothing that says networking better than 600 lawyers having lunch together in one big room. It was interesting for me to see that networking does not stop after law school. Lawyers are constantly networking to share knowledge, opportunities, and clients.

Posted by Wen at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I was clerking at the federal district court in Boston last summer, my judge said to me one day “we don’t do gut-feeling judging here.� That simple statement sums up what I have learned in law school and on two co-ops so far. Humans are inherently judgmental and for the most part, we’re not to blame for it. Quick thinking and fast decisions were no doubt the winning genes in the game of evolution. Unfortunately, the same is not true for good judges and lawyers. We must consciously repress our primal instincts to make gut-feeling judgments and reach a quick conclusion. Instead, the legal education conditions us to carefully parse the fine prints on the specific facts of a case before arriving at a conclusion of “it depends.� That’s why my judge rarely reached a conclusive decision about a case right after oral argument. She always went back to the record and reviewed it as a whole before writing the opinion.

Now I know the word “fine print� is not exactly what excites a perspective law student or any normal person for that matter. It’s not as sexy as litigation or mergers and acquisition or rule of law in developing countries. However, I would like to make a case for fine print for all of its hidden marvel. For example, I went to my first deposition last Wednesday and witnessed first hand the power of fine print. A deposition is just legal jargon for an under-the-oath interview in which an attorney tries to establish relevant facts and evidence in support of his or her side by asking a witness questions – lots and lots of questions. This particularly deposition is a whole day affair from 10AM to 5PM.
By lunch break, my gut-feeling was too optimistic about our side. The deponent (interviewee) answered most questions with “as I sit here today, I do not recall.� So I say to our attorney “this witness is the defendants’ dream deponent – she doesn’t recall anything!� Right there – I made a newbie mistake of not reading the fine print of the case. Five hours later, our attorney miraculously got exactly what we needed to establish in this deposition.
I realized that all those questions she was asking before were merely setting a stage for the later questions so that the deponent could not backtrack or tell stories that are inconsistent with each other. Thus the winning strategy in a deposition is that an attorney not only needed to carefully choose the words in each question, but also ask the questions in the right sequence, at the right time – in other words, delve into the fine print. I understood right there that good lawyering is all about the subtle fine print. Everyone can have a knee-jerk reaction or a gut-feeling about a situation but only a well trained lawyer knows how to use the fine print of the situation to best advocate for his/her client’s interest.

Posted by Wen at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m beginning to understand why some litigators love what they do. Our firm is gearing up for a motion opposing summary judgment against us. As plaintiffs’ attorney, this means we have to convince the court that our case should not be dismissed on summary judgment and deserves to be tried in front of a jury. This is the last stage of a lawsuit before it goes to trial. Considering 99% of all disputes never go to trial, summary judgment is a big deal. The entire office is buzzing with energy – the people, the computer keyboards, the telephones, and the printers. It’s as if the firm has been transformed overnight into this litigation headquarter (I imagine it’s not unlike what is going on at the presidential candidates’ headquarters).
As for me, I have been busy collecting evidence in support of a key argument why our case should be allowed to go forward. It is a pretty interesting process. In an earlier phase of the lawsuit known as discovery, both parties get to interview key witnesses and collect documents. At these interviews called depositions, the witnesses are sworn under oath and their testimonies are transcribed word for word and entered into a database. The database also contains documents parties produced as part of the discovery. This makes my job a lot easier because the database is fully searchable. So all I need to do is search the database for a keyword of what I need evidence on and anything related to that keyword will pop up on the screen. Then I put all the key statements and citations to evidence supporting those statements in a table of material fact. These evidences will eventually be coupled with powerful legal arguments in the written statement we submit to the court called a brief. Because attorneys will sometimes realize that we need evidence on a particular point, they sometimes get to do supplemental depositions. I am heading out to partake in my first deposition as I write. I will let you know all about it in the next entry.

Posted by Wen at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is a brand new year! I hope everyone enjoyed some time off from work and / or school to rest and spend time with family. Conversations during the first couple days of the new year have always involved resolutions. I always thought of a New Year's resolution as the perfect affirmation that we’re all more alike than different. Getting in shape and losing weight is always on everyone’s list. So is quitting some undesirable habit. Among my peer groups, law students and twenty-something’s, figuring out “the future� and managing personal finance are also common goals. On my way to work this morning, my pod cast informed me that as we become a nation of debt in both the micro and macro sense, youth debt has skyrocketed 50% in the past ten years. In addition to the ever mounting college loans, the average college student has more than $2000 in credit card loans. So for my first entry of the new year, I thought I would write about how you can survive law school without compromising your (relative) financial freedom.

It will not come as a surprise to those of you applying to law school that you will be taking on a substantial debt to finance your juris doctor diploma. This may be in addition to your existing college loan. Though these pesky loans may sit in their abstract form with all those zeros while you’re in school, trust me, they become very much real as graduation lurks in your horizon and you start to think about what kind of jobs will allow you to pay off those zeros. It would be a pity to forego your dream job after you earn your law degree just because it does not pay enough to cover your minimal loan repayment.

The only way to stay above all that is to think about the ways to minimize the debt you take on during law school. Just because a law school offers you a large amount in loans in your financial aid package does not mean you should take all the money out for a spin. Remember, for every penny you take out now, you have to pay two back. Only the scholarship and grant portion of your aid package is money that won’t come back to haunt you later. So seriously consider living at home, getting a smaller apartment, eating out less – you will have more time to study torts and you won’t be broke for the next fifteen years. For future Northeastern Law students, you will have the opportunity to earn a living and subsidize the cost of your education with four co-ops. Also make sure to take advantage of the endowed scholarships generously donated by alums who love us. So resolve to take on the little sacrifices now – you can live out your dreams of a rich and fabulous life when you actually become a big time attorney.

Posted by Wen at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)