Keeping Your Own Counsel: Simple Strategies and Secrets for Success in Law School, by Professor Walter A. Effross, is a unique toolkit of practical systems, schedules, and scores of (sometimes-surprising) suggestions, to help students distinguish themselves in the classroom, the exam room, and the interview room.
Drawing on the author’s seven years of big-firm practice and quarter-century of full-time law teaching, the book provides encouraging and immediately-usable methods to support students throughout their law school careers, starting well before the first day of classes. Keeping Your Own Counsel includes structures for mastering information, maximizing efficiency, minimizing stress, and building a portfolio of publications.
Students will benefit from:
- Clear and meaningful discussions, with numbered lists of considerations, questions, and suggestions;
- Consistent emphasis on maintaining and cultivating one’s purpose, values, and professional and personal ethics;
- Recommendations of effective ways to use inexpensive and easily-available, but often-overlooked, resources;
- Chronological coverage includes: pre-law reading; becoming fully oriented; how law school differs from, and resembles, law practice; core lists to maintain; preparing for classes and exams; exam-taking; analyzing, and writing, law review articles; selecting upper-level courses; judicial clerkships; and, succeeding in job interviews.
- Eight detailed appendices present lists of: dozens of ways to enhance the lawyer’s role in decision-making; more than 150 potential paper/blogging topics; over 50 elements of contract-drafting; and, more than 25 creative career categories of practice in corporate and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) law.
