1L Summer – The Beginning
Hello friends!
I won’t be posting in great detail about my summer job in an effort to maintain a reasonable degree of anonymity and professionalism, but I thought I’d create a post that might be of some service to people who stalk my blog in later months.
1L summer is, for most law students, a chance to get your feet wet and gain some actual legal experience…assuming they didn’t “scare you to death.” Tangent – is anybody else just thrilled at the prospect of being “worked to death” next year? Just me? Alright…
Some people come into law school knowing exactly what they want to do and have a very clear path for how to get there. Others have a more open mind and aren’t quite as sure what they want to do. This summer is a chance to test the waters in areas of law you might be interested in pursuing.
The 1L summer isn’t quite as important for permanent post-grad job prospects as 2L summer is, and from what I’ve gathered you’re not completely up a creek if you can’t find any law-related employment whatsoever. Given the economic climate, I’m sure the increased competition for even unpaid internships will be taken into account. It will be interesting to see how the summer structure for law students changes in years to come as the legal profession contracts and realigns itself.
What I’m up to…
This summer I am working as a research assistant. I’ve been in training (kind of a legal research boot camp) for the past couple weeks and I just received my first assignment today. I’ll keep the specifics vague, but for this project I will be doing mostly historical research looking at the progression of doctrines from contract into tort law. I’ll be poking around the library and the interwebs (as well as getting cozy with Westlaw and Lexis) and the end result is going to be a rather loose compilation of my findings, with the possibility that it will turn into a short memo (5-10pgs.). This research isn’t intimately related to the professor’s research topic but will probably wind up as a nice fatty footnote.
Over the course of the summer I’ll have many other projects and a good chunk of them will probably be Bluebooking and cite checking.
Why am I doing this?
Well, first, because I love being in the library! I’m a nerd…I love to learn and the chance to spend my summer with my nose in a book was incredibly tempting. I didn’t have to move to a new city, I don’t have to wear business formal, I get a chance to make some key connections with professors…there are so many positives. The 2 biggest reasons I took this job? By the end of the summer my research skills will be SHARP. I feel like legal research is pretty neglected by a lot of students as a specific skill that must be learned and I look forward to being able to say that I’m a master of Lexis, Westlaw and many other databases at the end of the summer.
The second reason? It pays! 
I just couldn’t afford to work for free this summer, so it’s a good situation all around.
Now, to you.
I get a lot of incoming and potential law students combing through my blog archives every day and finding me searching for all kinds of information about law school. I remember being in that position – thirsty for information on an experience that seemed so mysterious and intimidating. I found a lot of my favorite blogs (and now friends) that year before beginning myself…so I thought all we current and former law students could do something good for the world…share our insight!
Here’s the deal:
Current Students
Rising 2Ls - What are you doing this summer? How did you find/get your job? Does your job have anything to do with what you see yourself doing down the road? If you’ve already started working…how’s it going? What surprised you the most? What’s been hard, and what’s been surprisingly easier than you thought it would be?
Rising 3Ls - What did you do your 1L summer? How’d it go? How has what you did 1L summer impacted your continuing studies in 2L year? Are you back at the same place this summer? What impact did your 1L summer have on your 2L summer position? {please stick to your thoughts on your 1L summer…when I’m a rising 3L I’ll do another post on the 2L summer }
Former Students/Recent (and not-so-recent) Grads
What was the most valuable lesson/experience you took away from your 1L summer? What impact did your 1L summer have on your final 2 years of school and your subsequent career path? What advice do you have regarding the 1L summer experience?
*Do NOT worry about the length of your comments!! The more you have to say, the better! I know that many of you are bloggers yourselves and have either already posted on this topic or might now want to since you have some questions to get you started Obviously you can write whatever you want, but if you would still impart some wisdom in the comments that’d be swell. If you do end up writing something about your summer (the beginning stages) and you think it might be helpful to curious blog scourers down the road, feel free to send me the link and I’ll include it here.
So…1L summer…let the wisdom flow!
Filed under: 1L Summer, job search | 8 Comments
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Chatter
Caity on A good run… Jansen on A good run… Ronnica on my prerogative Ronnica on roll call Amanda on my prerogative
I spent my 1L summer volunteering at the Westchester County DA’s office in the city bureau in Mt. Vernon. In addition to making a life long friend in one of the young bright attorney’s there, I also found that I really liked criminal law as a pracitce if not a discipline. I also found out how important it is to learn procedure. I spent a lot of time learning Crim Pro and Evidence. Those subjects were a lot better to study than Criminal (Penal) Law. I used the summer to pen a note for my law review/writing requirement and I also took every friday off to have the last summer of three day weekends in my life (till this year and I am 50 now.) I returned to campus to my duties on my journal, law fraternity and classes renewed and spirited. It didn’t hurt that two of my classes that year were Evidence and Crim. Pro!!
All and all, if I had to earn a living, I would have worked nights or part-time. The one thing I wouldn’t have given up was my volunteer project. The mentoring, the education and real world experience made the whole thing very worthwhile. Sure it took longer to pay off the loans than it might have, but that last summer was the best I ever had. It was worth every minute.
Not to mention that it turned into a job offer and built the resume up for other jobs including the one I selected.
Good luck.
TLD
I’m a 1L who has a summer job, but my summer job is the same as my fall, winter and spring jobs. I work full time and go to class at night. I lament not being able to follow the traditional route and having a 1L summer clerkship/research role and 2L internship, but the its tough starting from square one at my ‘advanced’ age.
A lot of other students at my school are taking summer classes, but instead I’m choosing to pre-read the cases for my fall and spring classes (since finding time to keep up with homework when working is difficult).
On the flip side, it is really nice not having to beg for food.
Well I hope you get a ton of experience and have a blast doing this! Good Luck!
I’ll think about this one. My 1L summer was about 5 or 6 years ago.
I’m a rising 2L. I go to a tier 1 school that has a really good reputation. I am in the top 1/3 of my class. I did not get a job for this summer. To be fair, I really didn’t put too much time into looking for one, because of a personal problem I was going through (my mom died pretty unexpectedly in the middle of march). I really wanted to be a research assistant, so I put most of my time into applying for all of those, and it turned out that since other people weren’t getting jobs either, they were VERY hard to come by. Some of my friends who are in the top 10% are even working as research assistants because they went on like 10 interviews and didn’t get anything. It’s depressing. I hope I fare better next summer.
Eek! But can’t people with JD’s do “anything they want”? A pox on you, economy!
/runs away
I just realized that my comment sounded very bitter. It’s actually not that bad because I am doing a comparative law study abroad program with my school in Venice for a month in July. I guess I can’t complain that much.
I’m interning with a justice on my state’s supreme court. Working for a judge was actually my first choice for this summer, because I would like to clerk when I finish and getting to know judges is supposed to be the way to go for that. (Or, well, it helps!) I started looking near the beginning of spring semester, sent out a bunch of applications to a bunch of judges in February, and got this job at the beginning of March; I got the info about the judges from my school’s career office (they have a “get a judicial clerkship/internship” handbook). It’s not specifically what I’d like to do in the future (not that I would complain about being a state supreme court judge, but sadly, it’s not exactly a job I could walk into out of school!), but again, getting to know a judge was the point (especially since I’m not sure what I want to do when I finish). It’s all research and writing, and I like that fine, and I’ve enjoyed delving into totally varied points of law. I’m glad to get the research/writing experience. I’m a little sorry not to be getting more practical nuts-and-bolts experience (it’s not like it will teach me how to write a contract or a motion or something), but am hoping that the research/writing skills will be useful and will look good to future employers. And I’ve certainly learned a lot about just how the whole system works in my state. (The other interns are fun, too.) I was a little surprised at how isolating I found it initially, but that’s got better as we’ve had more interns show up and there’s been more conversation about what we’re working on. It’s helped me realize, though, that I do like to work with other people, which was useful.
It’s totally unpaid. I didn’t even bother trying to look for something paid this summer – I just wanted experience (because I had no legal work experience before this). I think most of the 1Ls in my class who are doing paid work are research assistants (with the exception of a few people who got firm jobs, mostly through a diversity program we participate in). And my sense is that a lot of people who wanted paying jobs didn’t have much luck; a lot of people are interning. Others of my classmates are taking classes/studying abroad.