Law School Admissions Unplugged Podcast: Personal Statements, Application Essays, Scholarships, LSAT Prep, and More…
How to Succeed in Law School
How to Succeed in Law School with Lee Burgess, Law School Toolbox Law School Toolbox: https://lawschooltoolbox.com/ Start Law School Right: https://lawschooltoolbox.com/start-law-school-right/ Free Easy LSAT Cheat Sheet: https://bit.ly/easylsat Book A Call: https://form.typeform.com/to/Et1l5Dg6 LSAT Unplugged Courses: http://www.lsatunplugged.com Unplugged Prep: http://www.unpluggedprep.com/ Get my book for only $4.99: https://www.lsatmasterybook.com LSAT Unplugged Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lsat-unplugged/id1450308309?mt=2 LSAT Unplugged Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lsatunplugged/ LSAT Unplugged TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lsatunplugged LSAT Coaching YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgOHAiSs08EbD-kfDFqIEoMC_hzQrH-J5 Law School Admissions Coaching YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgOHAiSs08EbsqveKs_RZEy2sqqbz3HUL Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@UnpluggedPrep?sub_confirmation=1 ***
Hey, Lee. Welcome back to Elsa Unplugged. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you. So when I think of law school prep, you're the first person I go to your law school toolbox. You help future 1Ls get ready into law school, then you help students succeed in law school. And it's that time of the year we're in this summer before students are going to be starting their 1L. And I get a lot of questions around this time from students asking, "How do I get ready for 1L? What should I be doing if anything before the fall starts?" And so I thought it'd be great to reconnect with you and have you shared some advice for everyone. Absolutely. I don't know if my advice will be the same as what I did in my 1L summer. I took a really great vacation to Costa Rica, which was a lot of fun. That's pretty cool. I'd spend it. Yeah. I was convinced my job right before I quit it to let me go on vacation for multiple weeks. I don't really know how I swung that, but they knew I was leaving for school. I think they were just done with me. So yeah. Nice high school. Yeah. Well, I get a lot of questions around this time and there are some gunners out there who they're putting pause on Costa Rica. They're putting pause on travels and they want to hunker down this summer prior. I mean, what do you think about students reading any books or consuming any resources prior to 1L? Should they wait till the fall? Or is there something they could be doing prior? Listen, I think there are kind of two camps to this, but as much as I joke about going to Costa Rica, I actually think that's a really important part of prep. You don't need to go to Costa Rica, but you should take a breather if you can, even if you're working right until school starts. And I think I took like a weekend between ending my job and going back to school. This is a time to somewhat be enjoyed because life is going to get really intense pretty quickly. So if you're thinking like, I want to do things to prepare for the summer, we can talk about those. And I think there are some things that you can do, but I also think it's very important to take a step back and say, I'm starting a very intense journey for the next three years. And then if you go into practice many years after that, this is a unique moment, a unique transition moment to take that step back and say, what do I want to do now that I may not be able to do once I start school? It could be spending time with friends and family, especially if you're going to school far away. It could be going on a trip. It could be going and camping in the mountains. It could be going offline. So you're not dealing with technology. I do think that that is an absolutely okay way to show up as your best self on the first day of law school. So as much as there are things that you can do, we're going to talk about a lot of them and you should go in prepared. I don't want you to show up like fresh off the beach with sand in your backpack and like nothing set up before school starts. So don't take that. But I do think it is important to keep a little perspective and realize that law school is designed so you do not need to spend the whole summer intensely working to be successful. You can do things to set yourself up for success. But I think showing up as a whole person is probably the most important thing that you can do. Right. So you want to show up fresh. You don't want to be fatigued because you were cramming for who knows even what. Right. Right. And so let's start with this idea of reading materials. There are books out there on law school getting ready for maybe. There are lots of different ones out there over the years. Amazon is full of them. I mean, are they worth it? They can be. However, I think one of the things that's important to remember is law school is really about your study skills. And so one of the things that you need to do is understand, you know, the law school experience, maybe understand what is going to be required for you. But no one book or course. I mean, I even have a course. We'll talk about it later. We're like, I have a course. It's not like the end all be all right. The idea is that you want to have an idea of what you're getting into. But you really want to focus on like your own study skills. So if you don't want to dive into reading about law school, you could read books on productivity, on managing your attention. I did some interesting reading recently. I did a survey of books on ADHD, which I do not have. However, plenty of people in my world and plenty of our students do. So it's an area. And honestly, I think we all have some sort of attention issues now in our technology world. So we can all better, you know, how we manage our lives. I think even a book about that is a really great way to prime yourself for law school. Like, how are you going to show up and be focused, manage your tasks, work on your executive functioning skills? And there are some great books on that. But those, I think, are also very important. You can also read fun books. You could read 1L, although, you know, that classic is also something that can really freak people out. You can, you know, read books on the law. Although, honestly, I just don't think that's the best use of time. Because the thing is, you're going to law school to study the law. And you can read a book on torts, sure. But you don't know how your professor is going to present torts. And what you're really being tested on is what your professor is going to, you know, give you as their, you know, you can't really interpret the law. But what they think is important that is covered in torts. And so if you come in having read all of these horn books and with all this information, and then you're like, why is she teaching it differently? You know, that can also be stressful. So you don't need to pre-study for your entire 1L semester over the summer. The other thing that I think can be really helpful is just reading hard things. So I'm a big fan of nonfiction. I read a lot of nonfiction. And, you know, sometimes I read challenging nonfiction where the type is really tiny and you're just slowly, you know, you work on those books for a very long period of time. I usually have multiple books going at once. That is a great thing to work on. Because you're going to do a lot of reading and a lot of reading that's going to be slow and deliberate. So kind of challenging yourself to read something dense, to see how you retain that information. That can be a great exercise, you know. So just read something that is denser than you would usually read. It could be a good time for a beach read on your vacation where you're trying to like recuperate. But maybe you read something a bit more challenging outside of that to kind of get back into those skills, especially if you've been out of school for a while. I think that, you know, it could be a challenge when you've been out of school to get back into this habit of reading dense material on a daily basis. So that was a very long-winded response to your question. But there's no magic bullet of what you should be reading. But what you should not do is try and learn a whole bunch of law for the entirety of the first semester. Because that's not really your job showing up as someone else. Your job is to show up as your best self ready to work. And that's really your job. Right now, this is really helpful. So what I'm taking away from this big picture is that rather than cramming information or specific facts, it's more about building your skills in general, whether it's focus, whether it's interpreting difficult dense text, getting back into a little bit more of an academic mindset if you haven't been reading in recent years. So maybe what I'm hearing more about skills rather than information. And so it brings me to something I want to ask you about, which is I know that in law school itself, once students get there, they're going to have to do hundreds of pages of reading. They're looking at these cases, again, difficult dense text. What do you tell students with regard to note taking or case briefing? Are those skills they can learn prior to law school? Absolutely. And this is something we do focus on in our start law school right course, which we have in the law school toolbox. Is this idea of what do notes look like in a class? And what's helpful? So here's the thing in the age of the laptop. And I'm not so far removed from law school that I did have a laptop. And I made these mistakes when I was in law school as well. It really becomes tempting to dictate or to do dictation, right? To just be saying, like, I'm going to type every single thing that's coming out of my professor's mouth, especially if it sounds foreign to me because I'm not really internalizing it. I'm just writing it down. And that is a huge mistake in my opinion when you think about taking notes. So one of the things we do in our courses, we have a mock Socratic method lecture. And you're supposed to try to take notes on that lecture. And then you evaluate your notes. And for me, I am still a very big proponent of taking notes by hand. If you don't want to use paper, I think using like a Kindle scribe or some sort of technology that helps you take those notes is a good idea. But we know from data that you retain more when you handwrite it and you do not retain when you type in the same way. I mean, we've all sent emails and have no recollection of sending them. I mean, maybe it's just me. So I still like this idea that you're going to want to try and take notes by hand. Now, that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable because you cannot take those scribe dictation type notes. Because you're going to have to pay attention and edit what's coming at you. And but that is part of the learning. So you want to say like, well, what are they, you know, what are they talking about? What are the important words? Maybe they're writing something on the board. You can always go back and double check your notes. You can go to office hours and meet with your professors. We're going to talk about study groups. I'm sure today we can, you know, you can compare notes with your study group. You can check that your notes are right. That's not an issue. But you're going to be more engaged in class. If you are doing that, you know, the information is coming into your brain and then you are editing out through your fingers. So that is definitely a skill. And you can read about different note-taking techniques online. You may have had stuff that worked for you when you were in undergrad. The idea though is, is you want to be engaging with the material and do not just write down everything your professor says. It's just not the best use of time. You're not actually learning or synthesizing information. This is a little bit different than case briefing, which is something that is really specific to law school. It's this idea of taking notes on a case, because you realize you're going to read these books of edited cases. And you may read three cases before a class. You may read more or less. But there's a formula for how you take notes on those cases. And there are some different perspectives, but basically you want to write down what the facts of the case were and what the rule was that the court was focusing on and how they got to their result, which is called the reasoning and then the holding, which is kind of like what they said in the end. And then some people have different nuances that they like to include. But these notes, again, cannot be long book reports about the case. They are supposed to refresh your recollection. You read the case, you think about it, and then you write down the case briefs. And the case briefs are just there to help you be able to answer questions on the case in class. Some people also like to do something called book briefing, which is where they take notes in the physical book itself, using highlighters and different colors. All of that's fine. But what you need to do is learn about some of these different techniques and then try them out. And you may want to try them out when school starts. You can take a couple of weeks and experiment. I think that's totally fine. You don't want to experiment too long. You want to pick a direction. But you do want to say like, oh, I did this type of briefing before class. And I got to class and I couldn't, if I'd been called on it, I couldn't answer the questions. Well, then your briefing's not working. So try again. And then it's like, oh, I took these class notes and then I tried to go create this outline, which is where we organize the law so we can study it and I couldn't. Well, then there's a problem with your class notes, right? So you're going to use the process to kind of test your skills. But I do think, you know, spending some time evaluating for yourself what worked for you in your other academic situations can be really helpful. But it really does benefit you to go old school. Some professors are refusing to allow laptops in the classroom for this reason. So you might as well practice getting your hand muscles ready to go. Get one of those little balls that you to get your hands ready to do lots of writing. Awesome. So what I'm hearing here is that, like, processing the information coming at you either from the professor or from the cases that you're reading is incredibly important to actually learn things. I can imagine some students out there, they're going to just record their professor's lectures. They're going to run it through AI and try to make a summary. And while that would give you a summary that would prevent you from being the one to process the information. So would you be against that sort of approach? I am. You know, and that's, let's say that this is really advice for someone who is, do doesn't have a learning difference or some other need to do that. But let's say we do the AI. I mean, hey, I love a good Claude. Like we talk about my good friend Claude. I like AI. I find it can make me more efficient for some things. But I can guarantee you, whatever I put through Claude, I think about less than anything that I do on my own. And one of the things that, I mean, AI can do a little bit now. Maybe it'll do well in the future. But we're still trying to teach you to think like a lawyer, judgment and how you analyze things, how you answer that question of a client coming to you and saying, what happens to my case? This happened to me. Now what, right? That is your job. That requires you to think like a lawyer and Claude or, you know, GDP or whatever is not going to do that for you at least now, maybe someday. But you need to practice those skills. And the way that you practice those skills is by reading a case and thinking about what the judge said and deciding whether or not it makes sense to you and realizing how they got to those conclusions. That's what you're asked to do on an exam. And so if you're just, you know, spitting out a summary from Claude, that's not really struggling with the material or making it your own. I mean, you could study off of that, but you're going to typically get legal, legal trivia or legal facts. You're going to say like, oh, well, you know, the rule for this is, you know, three prongs. Well, cool. You do have to know that. But could I give you a fact pattern? Could you apply those three prongs on your own without AI in an exam situation? That's the question. That's, that's the output you need. So all this work that you do in class is getting you to have the ability to answer an exam question, which is a fact pattern where they tell you that something happened. And then you have to apply law to it and say what's going to happen next. And that is the skill. Basically, that's all of law school. You also have to be able to do it in writing and you have to do all this legal research. But basically, that's the skill. And that's not going to be helped by just having beautiful materials that Claude has written for you. Right. So funny. I'm always looking at the parallels between the LSAT and law school. And similarly, the LSAT is not about facts. It's about your ability to interpret and understand methods of reasoning to extract principles from a situation or apply a principle to a situation. So yes, these AI generated summaries, they might help you memorize the facts of a given case from the past. But that would be kind of giving yourself your training wheels or a crutch that prevents you from developing the skill of principles and applications for yourself. Yeah. And I think here's the question. You know, if you want to do well in law school, you want to think about being excellent. If you want a big law job or a clerkship or you really want to be at the top of your class or the top of your fields, you need excellence. And the only way you become excellent at anything, as I tell my children, almost every day, is through practice. There is no shortcut, right? My son plays the guitar. The only way he gets better at the guitar is by practicing it, right? He can take classes. He's got a guitar teacher. But when it all comes down to it, it's what he does, right? To practice every day, to create that muscle memory, to, you know, get his fingers tough. Like all of that, right? And this is a professional school. And if you want to be excellent at what you do, then you're going to have to practice. And you do that in class. You do that for your exams and then you do that as you get further and further in your legal career with externships and things like that. But the best lawyers I know, all practice. And that is something you want to invest in. You're spending a fortune on this experience, a fortune. If you could just do it with AI, don't go to law school. What's like, it's like you're cheating yourself out of the experience of being in class. Once I calculated what the per hour cost of each class was to make myself pay attention. Because I was like, if I am like surfing the internet, what am I really paying for? And it's a lot of money per hour of class. If you do that math. Of course. You know how mature it is. Now, one area where AI could not help you is if you get called on in class. Oh, true. There's this, there's this, your Socratic method that some professors use. I'm curious, is that still relevant? I've heard some talk of some criticism of it that putting students on the spot. Some professors are maybe moving away from it. Does it still happen in law school? And of course, I'm imagining that if you had AI do all the work for you, you're going to be in trouble in the line of fire when it comes up. Yeah, you know, I think they're the old school professors who are still adhering to it. Then there's kind of the hybrid model, which is you may know you will be on calls. They might be going row by row. So you know when you're going to be on call. And then there are some professors who are just taking volunteers and they're not putting anyone on call anymore. The idea of the Socratic method is you teach through asking questions and soliciting information instead of just lecturing and having people take notes. For some people, it's very torturous, especially if you have a lot of social anxiety, and for others, they really like it. It's supposed to be an engaging way to teach, but a lot of people find it very intimidating. I think the only thing to realize about this Socratic method is probably depending on what class you're in, there's going to be some sort of participation element to it. So you're going to need to speak in class, whether or not you get cold called, which means you have no idea that it's coming, or if you volunteer. If you don't do any of those things, it's likely that you're not going to get participation points for your class. And you might feel like an idiot. I mean, I did. The first time I got cold called was in criminal law. And it was one of those moments where I was frantically typing the question. This is when I was scribing. So I was frantically typing the question. And I thought in my head, wow, I have no idea. And then I hear my name. And I was like, oh, no. So I kind of like look up and I just start talking, not always the best, best tactic. I just start talking and I just start like repeating facts. And after a while, my professor says, well, my name was followed. And he's like, uh, Miss Fowler, thank you for that recitation of the facts, but has nothing to do with whatever I'm asking you. And I was like, uh, uh, uh, and then he let me go. Because I must have looked so sad that he was like, fine, I will leave you be. I was mortified. I took this home. I was like, I took my parents or lawyers. I like, I was on the phone. I was like, oh my gosh, this professor is going to hate me. Then the next year, the professor recommended me for something. And I went to him and I said, I can't believe that you think that I leave me. And he's like, what are you talking about? I confess about this, you know, moment that was very pivotal in my legal career. And he had no idea what I was talking about, absolutely none. Because he did that to everyone all day, every day. He could not file away who felt like they, you know, were completely lost. And so that is really what you're fighting against for this graphic method. Your own interpretation of, you know, how you're doing. And then everyone else, if you screw up, everyone's just glad it's not them. So like nobody's going to remember. And the professor is so busy. They have no idea. Like, well, they're not worried about it. But being put on the spot and needing to speak as eloquently as you can and come up with an answer, that is also part of most, you know, most of the experience of being a lawyer. Most people have to do that in their job, even if you don't do it in court. So again, you got to kind of suffer through it to work on your skills. And it's about skills. So it is a little scary. Like I said, we have a sample Socratic method lecture that I think can ease the burden on some folks because they have an idea of like what it might be like. But the reality is you just can't take it too seriously. It might feel like, you know, it's a life for just moment, but it only is for you. Well, no one else is going to ever remember. Right. So it sounds like even if it's stressful or embarrassing in the moment to be under that sort of pressure, it may not impact your grade. And no one's going to care about it in the future. And you're thinking more about it than anyone else is. Everyone else is totally they're not going to get called on next. Yeah, exactly. Now, if your professor catches you completely unprepared for class over and over again, then they're going to be pretty annoyed. And they might remember that. But if you just like kind of feel like you bombed it, I mean, nobody's going to remember, except you clearly, because a long time ago that I was in my one year, I mean, I knew that you used to know the case. I mean, I was very silly. That's fine. Cool. That's good. Now you mentioned if someone is unprepared for class again and again. And of course, they're assigning an enormous, ridiculous amount of reading, right? So yes, how do students strike the balance between fulfilling their obligations, you know, for their study groups while also doing all the reading and doing other preparation? How does students manage the time or how do you recommend they manage the time when there's such an enormous amount of work assigned, maybe more than students have ever encountered in the past? Yeah, this is time to lead in lean into your executive functioning skills. And if you don't have great executive functioning skills, that's okay. You need to figure out how to have some because you need to be able to track your time of how you're spending your time. You need to have a calendar where you block out times of study. You need to work on distractions. If you don't have enough time to get all your work done and you don't have a learning difference or something that's going to make things typically take much longer for you. And then if that's the case, then make sure you're talking to your support services at school to get any accommodations that you need. But if you really don't have time to do your work, it's time to step back and regroup. So, you know, it's typically at least an hour and change of reading for each like hour of class that you have. So if you have like three hours of class on one day, you're going to have three or four hours of reading. You have to think about, you know, reading in a way and taking notes and briefing in a way that makes the best of the time that you have to prepare for class. But you shouldn't be reading cases twice. We hear that sometimes. That's not the best use of your time or reading multiple supplements, which are books that are on cases or on different topics. That's always not the best use of your time. You really want to say like, what do I need to do to try and be as prepared as I can be? And if you are trying and not being successful, then you need to go get some feedback on how you're spending your time. But I'm going to suggest that the first thing to do is to turn off your internet and shut down your phone. Because I think most of the time we're not actually doing high impact work because we are being interrupted constantly. And so I think that that's the first place to find time. You want to treat law school like a full time job and then some and to track your time. And if time is disappearing, you need to figure out where it's going. But I'm a big proponent, like you have to sleep. You have to like move your body. You need to spend time with friends. But that's all only possible with solid executive functioning skills. And I know that that can be really challenging, but you're going to need that for your job too. So you can use tools like we use love Trello to do project management to track assignments. I think a Google calendar can be really helpful. Block out those times that you're going to shut off your phone and just focus and study, shut off the internet. I know it feels so archaic to do so, but we used to not have the internet to be more productive. But you can just turn off your Wi-Fi and just give yourself three hours. You might be amazed at why you can get done. So it is notoriously heavy. You are going to study a lot. But if you cannot manage it, you need to take a step back, self-evaluate, go to your school's academic support services, talk to them, hire tutors like us who can get into that with you and say like, where is all this time going? But it shouldn't be that way. If you're not sleeping, that's not okay. Something else needs to give. So you need to dive into it. It's hard, but it's not an insurmountable amount of stuff. Right. Now, you mentioned, of course, there's all these project management or even just a simple Google Calendar to keep track of things. If you're blocking off the time, if everything's on airplane motors, shut off, of course, that's going to help you when you're studying solo. And of course, time in tutoring with someone like yourself is going to be well spent as well. But then what about study groups? Like are study groups, how productive are they? I've heard they're really big in law school. But how do you know if you're using that time effectively or if it's just more just socializing in chit chat? I think study groups are kind of a dangerous thing. I think they can work really well or they can be really tricky. And like everything else, you have to evaluate it as you go. And I don't think there's like the myth of the study group. Oh, I met these people first year and we were in the study group together. And then for all three years, all we did was hang out together and they were the key to my success. Sure. Okay. That's great. I think a lot of folks find that it's not necessarily that way. It can be a couple of people that you like to work with. It can be a few people in a certain class. Like I had different groups of friends that I would study with for kind of different reasons. But I also realized that I needed to study on my own to make the material my own. So we could get together and like wrestle with some law. But if I was going to go sit and memorize something, I had to be done on my own. I think the thing about study groups is you have to make sure that the time that you're spending and it is actually productive. And if it's not productive, you have to extract yourself from it, which can be challenging because it's typically also a social situation. And you have to realize that it's not always going to benefit you for all times and all subjects. You know, property law is one of the things that typically you take first year. And I struggled with future interests, which is this area of property law that is like archaic and has all these weird rules. And I did lean on a study group, we would get together and we would just do practice problems over and over again. And there were friends in that study group who were much better at those future interests than I was. However, I did much better in the class than many of the people in those study groups, because I did a lot of the heavy lifting outside to get ready for the exam. And then I think that sometimes some of my friends in the study group didn't think they needed to do that too. They thought the study group was it. It's not a group project when it comes to the exam, you have to be able to execute it on your own. So like everything else, you can try it out. But don't feel like if you don't have that setup that you're not going to be successful. I think most people, you know, dabble in the study group and then they kind of move away from it. And you have to keep evaluating what works for you. But just remember, what is the test and how are you going to study for that test? I mean, the L sets the same way, right? You could have a study group, you can go to a class for the L set. You can study with your besties, but like there's, it's not a group project in the end. Right, right. You got to do the work on your end outside. And maybe your solo work is actually the primary. And then the study group is a secondary or a tertiary in tutoring somewhere in the middle. Yeah, exactly. So it really is about, you know, knowing yourself. If you are a social person and just realize that if you get together with a bunch of people, it's going to turn into a social hour, then just have happy hour with people. Right. That's great. That's important too. But don't count that at study time or count study groups as social hour. Don't count it at study time. That's fine too. Yeah. And you mentioned the exams, of course. So what's the deal with exams? How important are they? How does one prepare for these exams? Maybe focusing more on like the solo element of actually preparing for it. Yeah. So law school exams are everything. Most classes still only have one final exam. Some more progressive professors are giving midterms. But oftentimes they're a very small percentage of your grade. And the tough thing is, is you often get very little feedback in law school. And so it can feel like this big exam is the only feedback that you're going to get. Which for most of us is pretty stressful. And so when you're preparing for these exams, there are a few things you really need to think about. One is you need to understand what an exam looks like. And that could be getting past exams from your individual professors, which sometimes will be like in a library or they might be in your registrar's office. You can go to your academic support office and see if they have some past exams. But you need to understand what the end game is, right? You would never like, I play tennis. You would never like prep for a tennis match. Like not knowing the rules of tennis, like that would be silly, right? If you don't know how to score a tennis match, like I would be pretty terrible at playing. And so you need to understand like the rules of the game. And that's really about what the exam looks like. The exams typically look like a story. And then you have to either from an outline because some exams are open book where you can take in notes or some are closed books where you don't have any notes. So you either need to have law in your head or law in the paper that you understand. And you have to look for the legal issues that come out of the facts. You have to apply law that you've learned. And then you have to argue what you think the outcome is going to be. And then you have to conclude. And you do this like many, many times over a number of hours. So it's not like a short little back pattern. Sometimes these stories are multiple pages long. But that's the idea. And then sometimes they can include something called a public policy question where they might be asking about how law functions or how new rules should be made or how courts are weighing in on something. It depends on the professor, but that's kind of another class of questions. But mostly in your first year, especially you're going to see these issue spotters, which is what this is called. This is also what you're going to see on the bar exam, although the bar exam is somewhat changing. And so it depends. But right now that's what the bar exam is. It's basically full of these issue spotters. So understanding what it is and then making sure that you are learning the law, like the actual law, and then practicing applying it. And so if you're concerned about exams, the best thing you can do is practice, practice, practice. You can try and get feedback from your professors, like taking them hypos, maybe that they've given you in class. Some professors may give you feedback, some won't. You can go to academic support, talk to them. Maybe they'll give you feedback. Maybe they won't. You can come to my team. We will give you feedback, but you don't want the first feedback to be all your grades at the end of the semester. So you've got to figure out how to do the practice, applying the law, arguing facts, and then getting some feedback on that. And that's really I think when the magic happens. We do that as part of our start law school right course. We take you through what an exam feels like. So you can see what those issue spotters look like, but you can also just utilize your law school to get that answered for yourself. But you got to know the end game. And you got to practice going through the semester to get ready. You don't want to try and start applying law two weeks before the test. It's going to be too late. Right. So it comes back to developing that skill, not just knowing the facts, but knowing how to apply the fact the principles to a given situation. Now, you mentioned exams are everything. We also have the potential stress of old calls if the professor engages in that technique. I mean, how do you help students navigate the stress of law school? All the hundreds of pages of reading, all the assignments getting prepared for class? What do you, what advice do you give them? You know, it's really hard. Like I said in the beginning of this podcast, you know, you got to show up as your best self, kind of give yourself the best chance. And that means you need some good coping skills for stress. And everybody's cop, and hopefully they're not like negative coping skills. We don't want, you know, like that happens, but you need to have some coping skills. And they, and you need to know what you need to stay regulated. So you can perform as your best. We are all the, almost everyone that goes to law school is a type A, somewhat perfectionist, that is what draws us to this profession. And that makes challenging things really hard for us because we don't like to not do well. And most of us have been high achievers in almost everything that we've done. And so really working on like your mindset that you are going to stumble and that's okay. It's all about kind of how you go from there. Like what are you going to do with that stumble? That's really important. It's about having your support system in place, whether it be family, friends, a therapist, learn about student services. A lot of law schools offer therapy for free, which should tell you something about what they're concerned about. But you don't want to let this stuff really sit. It's hard. Everybody has their moments, but you have to be able to move through. And if you are stuck, if things are feeling really too hard, you must reach out for help. A lot of folks find that they are diagnosed with things in law school. The pressure cooker of law school is tricky. You could be diagnosed with a learning difference or ADHD in law school. That is very typical because it is such an intense environment or some folks struggle with things like anxiety and depression more because of the pressure cooker. So you've got to be aware. So having your support network, knowing some coping skills, what you need, whatever it is, that makes you happy. Like I said, I love to play tennis. And one of the things I love about tennis is you can't be on your phone. Love it. Love it. My phone has to be like on the side for as long as I play. And even if my watch goes off, unless like a kid is bleeding, like I don't have to respond. It's great. Like everyone knows that that, you know, so some people love to swim or run or whatever. But you got to find something that kind of pulls you out of it and makes you feel like a whole person. I went to law school in an area where I had other friends outside of school. So they were one of my kind of anchors to reality. I would say like, please go hiking with me and talk to me about something other than school because I didn't really want all of my waking moments to be about school. But my business partner Alison on our podcast talks a lot about the fact that she went through a period where she was really struggling with sleep due to stress. She had crazy insomnia. She finally ended up going to the doctor because they were like, you're spiraling into depression just from lack of sleep. You have to get some help. So yes, it's stressful, but it's also about the self awareness, like checking in with yourself. I read an interesting book a while back that talked about putting on your calendar appointments to check in with yourself about different things. So if it's, if you're trying to reach a goal, like a professional goal, it can be like, okay, in two months, I'm going to evaluate how my goal is going. But I think you can also do this for things like handling stress. You can say like, you know, maybe once every two weeks, you're going to take an hour and you're going to journal and you're going to ask yourself how it's going. And you might be like, uh oh, and then you're going to go reach out for help. But the mental health aspect and the stress management aspect of law school is incredibly important and you need to make sure that you can show up at your best self. So if you're sick all the time, because you're not taking good care of your body, like that's not, you're not going to be able to show up as your best self. If you're so stressed and so tired, because you're not sleeping and you have terrible insomnia, you're not going to be able to be at your best. So you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be able to kind of show up and be honest about where you are. It is really, really hard. I think it's one of the harder things in life, generally speaking, but you got to find your coping mechanisms. So true. Thank you for shedding light on this important area, often overlooked. And so much of what you said also applies to LSAT preparation. And students, LSAT may not be as immersive as law school is, but I know for some folks today, some students are doing nothing but LSAT eight, nine hours a day. And I'm telling them, take it down a couple of levels. It's you don't need to burn yourself out on this. And of course, taking time for sleep, diet, exercise, relaxation, getting out of that bubble and talking to some people who are not doing the same exact thing you're doing, maybe spending less time on Reddit, for example. Oh my gosh, yeah. You can go into those rabbit holes. I, yeah, I mean, Reddit, social media, I mean, really, I just read that book, the anxious generation. Have you read that one yet? I'm Jonathan Haidt, right? Yeah, I'm familiar with it. Yes. Yes. So highly recommended to read not during the school year, but you can read it before or after, but it really is interesting to read his discussion of, you know, what social media is kind of doing to adolescents. But we also need to be aware of how much time we are giving that. I mean, it makes so often, again, if we think our time or our attention is, is disappearing, it's sobering to ask yourself where it goes. And if you're starting to feel super distracted, you know, turn off all your notifications and see, you know, how that feels. I mean, you can really start to kind of gauge this. And I mean, for LSAT Prep, I studied for the LSAT while working full time. And yeah, that's an intense schedule to keep. It really is. And so you have to be really aware of how you're doing and check in with yourself. It's if it's not going well, you need to pause and regroup and ask for help. As much as we would like to think that we are all snowflakes who are having our own unique experience, we are, but many people have also done these things before us. And so we can learn from others who can help guide us when we are having our struggles. Exactly. And so one way to mitigate some of that stress of law schools, of course, to prepare an advanced start developing those skills, setting yourself up for success, which, you know, this has been an amazing conversation. Lee, thank you for sharing your insights in so many areas. If students are interested in getting some of that support prior to law school with your courses and then getting some tutoring from your company in law school itself, what's the best way for them to connect with you? And can you share a little more about what the summer course in particular involves? Absolutely. So you can find us at lawschooltoolbox.com. We also have a very popular podcast with like a couple million downloads or something now. I don't know how that's even possible. But it's called the Law School Toolbox Podcast. We have tons of great information in there. And you can even go on our website and to our podcast page and search for just the episodes on getting ready for law school, if that's where you are in this process. But a ton of free resources in there. We even talk a little bit about law. You really want to get some snack. I call them study snacks where we just talk about like a little law. You can go on there and I've got lectures on the podcast as well. What we do as an organization is we offer courses, tools, and 101 tutoring for folks in law school in those studying for the California and UBE and future next-gen bar exam. For our law school offerings, we have something called the Start Law School Write course, which is an on-demand course, which does involve feedback from our tutors. And we really walk you through the life cycle of law school. So you get a sample of what it's like to listen to a lecture, what it's like to take class notes, what it's like to outline, and then what it's like to write an answer. And we do it in a very small universe, so it's not overwhelming. But I do think it's great if you're not sure what you're getting into, so you will have seen the universe before you start. That is on-demand and can be done in just a matter of weeks, which is kind of nice because a lot of people are working. Even if you want to take a trip or do something fun. And then we also offer one-on-one tutoring that is all done remotely with tutors all over the country. We've tutored for almost all of the law schools it feels like at this time. And you can reach out through our contact form or our website to learn more about those packages. But my business partner and I are always happy to jump on the phone call with you and talk to you more about that. So check us out on all those places. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. I definitely encourage folks watching and listening out there to seek out Lee and her team for help with all of this. It's too important to be left to the last minute. So thank you, Gently. Really appreciate you coming on. Absolutely. It was great to talk to you again, Steve.