Law firm memos to clients

Imagine that your company is considering expanding its products to a new geographical market. Your company is excited to proceed, and you reach out to a law firm to ask what, if any, licenses are required. Two weeks later, when your firm is ready to sell its first product, the law firm sends you a 20-page memorandum, full of legal jargon, which you now have to sit and decipher. And you still don't know if any licenses are required! 

Unfortunately, in my stint at a law firm, I found that lawyers frequently communicated with their clients this poorly. In fact, law firm culture encourages communication to be in the form of a lengthy memorandum, so that all possible legal risks, relevant or not, are documented. However, this format of communication leaves the client frustrated and confused. 

I would advise law firms to:

1. Replace lengthy memoranda with clear, concise emails. For instance, in this case, the law firm should have stated: "we recommend that you obtain 3 licenses, X, Y, and Z."
2. Law firms should organize their emails by headings, so that clients can skip sections that they do not wish to analyze. 
3. Law firms should replace legal jargon in their communication with conversational language that clients can easily understand. 
4. Lastly, attorneys should call their clients while sending a complex response, so that they can walk the client through the complex issues involved. 

By simplifying their communications, lawyers may find that they save time and turnaround faster on client requests. Lawyers may also providing superior service to clients while billing lesser hours, which can help them either charge their clients a lower amount, or bill at a higher rate and take on more clients. Ultimately, the most important benefit to law firms is of retaining happy clients who bring continued business to the law firm.

Should you go to law school?

I think going to law school is the best decision I have ever made because I really enjoy my classes, I love moot court, and I've met some of my closest friends here. Even so, law school has been an expensive investment resulting in heavy law school loans. And if I did not enjoy the material, the 3 years in law school would have been really long.

So how do you know, without going through law school, that you would enjoy it? Here are a few ways of sampling legal work:

• Advocate: Try an internship or a club position that requires you to advocate for people. For instance, I worked in constituent services for a Senator that allowed me to interact with underprivileged clients, understand their circumstances, and advocate on their behalf with various US agencies. Various community service projects can also involve you advocating on behalf of underprivileged students or tenants with a school administration or landlord, respectively. Advocacy lets you sample various legal skills - like listening to your client, spotting issues with their applications, writing and speaking in persuasive manner with agencies, and understanding and organizing supporting documents.

• Debate: Try activities such as public speaking, debate, and mock trial in high school and college. Legal skills include being able to identify reasons for various rules, and persuading various parties - your client that your advice is sound, the opposing party that your client's case is strong or perspective in a transaction is the right one, or a judge or regulator that your client should receive a particular judgement. 

• Get legal experience: To get a better idea of how lawyers operate, I would recommend trying an internship or a paralegal position at a law firm. As a summer intern, I got a brief exposure to how litigation works - what happens in depositions, at the negotiation table, and at trials. However, my exposure was really cursory as a summer intern, as 2 months is a really short time, workload over the summer is generally light, and interns generally do not get to delve into real legal work. I worked for 2 years in the legal department of a company, and this experience proved a lot more realistic.

• Explore classes: Take a class on philosophy, political science, or economic theory. In law school, you learn rules by understanding the reasons for having such rules. As such, different theories about human nature and the role of society become important. Some schools also allow you to audit law school classes, particularly introductory constitutional law classes. Do take advantage of these.

• Research: Take a class that requires you to write a research paper, or conduct independent research with a professor. This experience will help you analyze data, research different authors, and accumulate the information with a new perspective of your own. Also, importantly, it will give you a glimpse into citations. Lastly, if you can get experience publishing a journal, magazine, or newspaper, even better. Law school and your legal career will require you to write analysis based on research - whether it's a memo to a client, brief to a judge, or analysis of a legislation/regulation. Research, citation, and analysis are valuable legal skills.

• Write a story: Try writing a fictional story or even start a personal journal, writing the same story from different people's points of view. A valuable skill in law school is reading the court's opinion and trying to decipher the facts of the case. The court may put a particular spin on the facts, and in class you try to think about what may have really happened. And as a lawyer, you will frequently have to present your client's story in the best light (as a litigator) or imagine your client's facts in the least favorable light so you can let you clients know about the risks with their transaction (as a transactional lawyer/advisor).

• Explore the LSAT: Study for the LSAT. The LSAT can be a pain because it requires you to do a lot of thinking in a very short amount of time, but it does test many of the skills that are built in law school - such as reading comprehension, analytical thinking, logic, and persuasive writing.

• Network: Talk to current lawyers and law school students. You can visit law schools you are interested in attending, and some students there may give you genuine feedback. Talking to lawyers in your family, friends, or alumni of your school will likely be most helpful.

Obviously you don't need to try all of these activities out, but most law school students have a mixed bag of experience in some of the above. These activities can both help you sample law school as well as persuade law school admissions officers that law school is the right place for you. And if you can show good results from the above activities, your resume becomes that much stronger for law school and legal jobs.

What is law school culture like?

It's like high school. My law school is small - technically it's four buildings, but are all connected to form a single quadrangle structure. Students have lockers! Yeah, that was a welcome change for my back!

I have Professors who actually care about me - my understanding of the material, performance in class, and career prospects. In college, I did see a few Professors who similarly cared, but in law school, more Professors seem to care. The administration is similar; I have a feeling it's not as altruistic as it is for the Professors though. After all, the better we feel, the better we do, the higher the school's rank. But still, it's a great feeling to know that I have a support network to rely on.

The students are similar to those in high school, maybe just more "professional" about it. I am finding some close friends - people I would love to tell all my "secrets" (if I still have any). And many people who are hard to trust. People who tell you they like you and want to study with you, have dinner with you, etc., but all the while, who seem to be competing with you.

After all, the whole 1L class is setup to compete with each other. Classes are curved - so even if your section is full of geniuses, as soon as you hit the say 20% mark, the next genius gets a B+. Performance does not matter, relative performance does. And jobs go to the highest grades... the rest have to work twice as hard to recover and still risk going into a field of law they do not like! There is no middle ground. Many people are constantly aware of and pressurized by this setup. It's hard to build genuine relationships with such people.

What do I think of the competition setup? Well, you could say this setup reminds one of Aristotle. Aristotle said truth exists in your experiences. The more you experience life, the more you know about people, the closer you get to the truth. There is an urge to constantly gauge our abilities against that of our classmates'. That's one way of trying to get feedback in a law school semester where we get no feedback in our regular classes till the final (well, maybe except for that practice midterm when we didn't know any of the material that would actually be covered on the final)!

I am trying to stay inspired by my favorite Plato. Truth exists inside us as a perfection in an abstract place. I don't know what the perfect law student would look like. But that's what I aspire to be. I am far far below - maybe that's why I am constantly disappointed. But it does make me not compete with my classmates but instead see them as fellow passengers on the same journey. When I see others struggling the way I do, it makes me feel that we are all in the same strange boat, and I feel less lonely. When I see others succeeding, I feel more confident - that like my classmates, maybe I will also get closer to the perfect law student.

I think my approach works better for me. I feel less jealousy with respect to my star classmates. I feel more humble when I succeed. I do much better than I would if I compared myself to real flawed people.

I see some of the 2Ls and 3Ls and find them to be like me. Maybe many of my classmates will feel the way I do in a year, when many of us will have reasonable jobs waiting for us. I can't wait.