00:05 What else is there?
What other steps, what other mechanisms can you use to make yourself competitive?
00:12 A Ninja trick that I want to share with you guys that I absolutely used when I was
in law school was that if your 1L first semester, grades are not as high as you want them to
be, or just out of precaution and making sure that you fall within that class ranking percentage
that you need to fall into in order to be competitive for a big law firm position, you
can take a summer school course.
And the great thing about taking a summer school course is that it's generally a smaller
group.
It's generally a less competitive group, and there is a really good chance that class is
not going to be graded on a curve, which means that you have a really, really good chance
of getting an A. And the summer school courses should absolutely get back to you in time,
the grades should absolutely get back to you in time and in order to include in your GPA
before the big law hiring process starts at the beginning of your 2L year.
And so you can use that A to boost your GPA to get your grades up, get that class percentage
up right before interviews starts and the law firms that are interviewing you are not
going to know that you took a summer school course, they're not going to care.
All they're going to see is that higher percentage class ranking.
01:16 So as you can tell by now your 1L summer is going to be incredibly busy.
You're going to have your 1L internship, which is either going to be the full summer, 12
weeks, or perhaps broken out into two different internships of 6 weeks each.
You're going to potentially have a summer school class, which I highly recommend taking.
And then in addition to that, in the end of your 2L summer, you're going to have the opportunity
to participate in the law review write on.
01:45 Law review is the student body that publishes a law journal usually on a quarterly
basis and the law journal is a compilation of law review articles written by other professors,
by industry experts, by other lawyers in particular areas.
And so the law review's job is to take all those articles, edit them, blue book them,
and publish them.
And some are very, very well known like the Harvard law review, for example.
But every law school is going to have one.
And law review is something that I hope actually gets phased out in our lifetime in terms of
prestige and in terms of importance because it's just not something I think law students
should be spending their time doing.
It's incredibly tedious.
It's a lot of administrative work.
And it's just not substantive legal experience, which in my opinion should be the focus.
But, nevertheless, it still is a very important part of the recruiting process, of the law
firm process, and so I would still recommend participating in the application process to
become a member of the law review.
02:47 Every law school generally has a flagship law review, which has the law school's name,
so Fordham law review for example.
And then will also have several more specific law reviews that focus on topics.
So the international law review, or the environmental law review, or the corporate and finance law
review.
And if your goal is to be competitive for a big law law firm position, you're going
to want to focus on getting onto that flagship law review.
And every law already has a bit of a different application process, generally consists of
the following.
You're going to submit a writing sample, so X amount of pages on a topic that they give
you and you're going to do an editing exercise to show your blue booking skills, editing,
and your grammar and sentence structure skills, general writing skills in editing articles
that have been submitted to the law journal, so articles from, again, professors or or
industry experts.
And generally speaking in the application process
03:42 For most law schools, there's going to be a grade component.
Now, that could either be everybody in the top 10% of the class automatically gets on.
That could be a sliding scale, so your percentage of your class ranking is going to play a part
but not a definitive part in whether or not you are accepted onto the law review.
However it's done, I recommend putting your best foot forward and putting a lot of energy
into the application because getting onto that law review is going to be something that
big law law firms either look for or explicitly require.
And so if you don't have that on your resume, you're going to need to have an explanation
for why you don't.
Either because you decided to become a member of the moot court mock trial team to get more
substantive experience, or some other really, really good reason.
Otherwise, they may not even consider your application to that particular big law law
firm.
Now we're at the end of your 1L summer, you have both semesters of 1L grades.
You have your one summer internship in the bag, and hopefully you have your membership
on law review, and you are ready for the big law law firm hiring process that's going to
start in the very beginning of your 2L year before classes even begin.
So August, early August, September...