Law School Confidential (Revised Edition): A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, for Students

I feel this was the most useful law school prep book that I read. And I read quite a few !!! Loads of useful tips and information to make the beginning of this journey easier. Especially liked the colored marker system of highlighting. Saves time and makes organization a snap.

This bood was excellent. I really enjoyed it and I can recommend it without a problem. It was very useful and informative. It was a great resource, it was an excellent comprehensive guide for new law school students.

Found this to be very opinionated and filled with doomsday advice. You would do better going to your undergrad school's pre-law advisor and asking them to connect you with alumni who are either finishing their 1L or who have graduated from law school.
Read it for a thorough understanding of LSATs and applications to graduating and getting a job but don't let it be your only source of information. And you would do better to just borrow it from your library and save your money for text books. You'll need it.

Any guide to law school should start with the pointed questions of "why do you want to be a lawyer?" and "what do you think lawyers do?" Getting into law school (especially the "best" ones), making it through academically, getting a summer associate position and then a post graduation job can all be nerve wracking enough, but what then? Right, you are a lawyer and, unless your dad paid for school, your first loan payment is coming in 6 months and will be coming for the next 10 or 15 years minimum. In short, you had better like your job because you will be living it for a while.

I am a lawyer. I have obviously gone to law school, which I enjoyed and did not find stressful in the least. Being a lawyer is very different from law school. You law school students out there, you will learn more in your first 2 months of being a lawyer then you did all through law school. That stress you felt first year--thinking "how can I cram all this stuff into my brain and then spew it out again for a decent grade?" is nothing compared to the stress of answering to a client whose livelihood may depend on whether you got the answer right and who likely only gave you half the relevant facts. Those nights that you spent studying late into the night and thinking that all this hard work will pay off, embrace that life style because it will not get better and you will be required to account for every 6 minutes of your day. Being a lawyer is exactly that--a life style. It is not a job, not for anyone who is successful as a lawyer. It is not all court room drama and big paychecks and traveling to fun places. There may be some of that but it is also long hours reviewing tens of thousands of documents in a windowless room in a strip mall warehouse in Tulsa. And anyone who thinks things get easier when you make partner, think again. It gets harder because you don't just have to do the legal work, but you have to get clients and manage the firm too. The government attorneys may have it a bit easier on average, but I have certainly called one at 10 pm before and they have picked up the phone, so I wouldn't bet on it.

Also those of you who think that getting a law degree is a "gateway" degree to a broad array of job possibilities--wrong. Getting a law degree qualifies you, sometimes, to be a lawyer. There may be a number of people out there who have law degrees, and have a non legal job, but the high likelihood is that they had other qualifications that got them that job.

So all of that is a way of saying...understand what you are getting into because it can be a very expensive and unhappy mistake if you do not. Before you pay a dime to a law school, get a job in a law firm for the summer or a few months. See if it is something that you can enjoy. If you are 23 or 25, do something else for a year or two and see if you are thinking law just because you don't have a different idea. Law school will always be there. I went to law school when I was 31 and the timing was good because it was actually a nice break from work. I am generally happy in my law firm job and have been at the same place for 8 years. If you decide that law is your path, go for it, but try to avoid having the realization that it is not your path and that you are stuck with 250k in loans after your first year as a lawyer, which a very large number of people do.

I am starting law school this fall and purchased this book along with many others in order to prepare myself. I've read the relevant sections of Law School Confidential and it has been BY FAR more helpful than any other book I've read. I've found that most prep books written by one author turn into either a bragging soap-box or an over-exaggerated horror story. This book on the other hand has multiple authors with different experiences to share and who keep each other in check. Therefore you get a realistic and straightforward view of the law school process. My favorite aspect of this book is the way it is organized. There are 4 sections to the book. The first covers preparation i.e. considering law school, LSAT, Applications, etc. The next three sections are devoted to the next 3 years of law school. This breakdown makes it easy to identify what part of the book is right for you and which parts you can skip or save for later. I've already been accepted so I've been reading the chapters dedicated to the summer before starting and 1L. The advice so far has been extremely helpful and I feel more confident about starting school. I'm sure the advice found in the 2L and 3L sections will be equally helpful when that time comes.