- And as time was up
and she turned in her Contracts final exam,
she realized she was in the wrong class
and she had done the wrong final (gasps).
Today, we're talking about real life
law school horror stories.
(imitates ghost)
Scary.
(light music)
Hey, legal eagles.
D. James Stone here teaching you how to think like a lawyer
so you can crush law school.
Law school can be a really scary place.
It's three years long, and in that time, a lot can go wrong.
So I thought I'd share some of the scariest things
that actually happened to me in law school.
So let's dig in to some of these scary stories.
One of the first things that happens
when you get to law school
is that you are surrounded by some of the smartest people
you've ever met in your entire life.
I don't really care which law school it is.
You're gonna be surrounded by A type personalities.
And some of those people are what are called gunners.
Gunners are the people that always raise their hand,
they always seem to have the answer.
And when you first get to law school,
they can seem really intimidating
because people don't like to answer
the professor's questions.
So I had a few gunners in my class.
Hopefully, I was not one of those gunners,
even though I liked to answer on occasion.
But there was one particular gunner in my class.
For the sake of anonymity, let's call him Alan.
Alan was hardcore.
He would answer every professor's question.
He had a background in mathematics and philosophy.
So he was able to talk about the philosophical underpinnings
of different legal doctrines,
he was able to think logically,
and he always seemed to have the answer.
So after your first semester,
you are given a slip of paper with your grades in it,
and I happened to be sitting behind Alan in class,
in between classes when we were getting
our grades for the first time.
Basically, you open up a slip of paper
and that's your report card.
And I happened to see that he got all Cs his first semester.
I was shocked.
I had never seen anything like it.
One of, if not the smartest person in class got all Cs.
Let it be a lesson to you
that, just because someone is very good in class
and seems to be one of the smartest people in the room,
it doesn't mean they're gonna get good grades in law school.
And this person eventually became a friend of mine,
but man, it was quite a shock to see that this person,
who seemed to know all the answers,
got straight Cs his first semester.
Another horror story that happened to me
relates to my mock trial competition.
I was on the mock trial team
for all three years in law school.
It was one of the best experiences that I had.
Mock trial is where you pretend to be a lawyer,
you conduct a trial, and you are scored by judges
based on how well you do.
It's just like mock trial in high school and college.
And part of the mock trial competition
is traveling to different cities.
Well, one of the competitions was held in Las Vegas.
In fact, it was one of the national finals
for this pariticular mock trial competition.
And after my team had done their round
and we had actually conducted a round
in front of a real judge
who actually tried cases in Las Vegas,
the mock trial judge started to brag
to my team and the other team
about what happened one night
when a burglar tried to break into his house.
So this sitting judge regaled us for about 15 minutes
about how an intruder tried to break into his house
and what he did with this intruder.
Well apparently, to hear this judge tell the tale,
he sat the intruder down on a chair,
tied him up, put him in a small bathroom,
and then for the next hour or two,
proceeded to threaten him with a gun to his head
and told him never to come back to his house.
I'm guessing that, if that actually happened,
that that burglar never burgled that guy's house again.
And this is, again, a sitting judge.
I don't know if that's a true story or not.
This was Vegas, after all, so I probably believe
that this judge is an insane person
who threatened a burglar with a firearm.
So that was an interesting experience.
Another horror story that happened to me
was that, when I was sitting for the California Bar Exam,
it was at a hotel in West L.A.
Not just in the regular part of the hotel,
but three floors down in the basement.
And this was a huge cavern.
I mean there must have been 500 people, at least,
sitting for this exam.
And so, on day one of the exam,
we were into the second essay portion of the Bar Exam,
and all of a sudden, as what happens in California,
everything started to shake.
There was an earthquake.
I later learned that it was over a 5.0 on the Richter scale.
So it was enough to get the chandeliers
in the basement to swing back and forth.
And all of the people who were not native Californians
hid under their desk and were shaken,
literally and figuratively,
and they lost some crucial time on the Bar Exam.
I and the rest of the native Californians
just simply couldn't be bothered
and carried along writing our essays.
I actually feel that that gave me an advantage
on the Bar Exam because I think the people from out of town
were a little bit frazzled,
whereas, being a native Southern Californian,
it was just a normal Tuesday afternoon for me.
So I give partial credit to the earthquake
for helping me pass the California Bar Exam.
Another horror story that happened to me
was that my computer crashed right before finals.
So this was over 11 or 12 years ago.
So this was back in the day
when computers didn't have solid-state hard drives
and Dropbox and Google Drive did not exist.
So I was relying on the files
that were physically residing on my computer
and my hard drive just stopped working.
There were clear signs that something was going wrong,
so I had the wherewithal to transfer
some of these files to, I don't know,
a floppy disk or a Zip drive
or maybe I burned it to a CD.
I'm not sure, but I was able to get my notes
off of the computer probably about 45 minutes
before the thing just stopped and never started up again.
So I got really lucky.
It still was very frazzling.
I lost a lot of files just before finals
in my second year of law school.
But that's why I am very adamant
to current and future law students
to always use cloud services, backup your files.
There's a chance that you will never get them back.
Laptops fail.
They're stolen all the time.
You never know when your computer's going to crash
and you can bet that it's probably going to happen
at the worst possible time.
So do yourself a favor and backup your crucial files.
And my final law school horror story
is that, after three years of law school,
over six semesters, I graduated with over $160,000 in debt.
Yeah.
That's more than a lot of people's houses cost.
That's three BMWs' worth of debt.
And that was over 10 years ago.
Now, law school tuition has gone up even more,
so I really feel for all the current law students
that are out there who are racking up law school debt.
It's crazy.
It's everyone's personal horror story.
It took me years to pay it off
and it really impacted my quality of life.
I don't regret going to law school,
but all of the debt that you accumulate
really does build up and, man, it's tough.
So those were just a few of the horror stories
that I personally experienced in law school.
If you want to hear more stories about law school,
check out this short playlist that I put together
that includes my personal experiences with law school
and, even better, strategies on how to beat law school
once you get in and how to get As in law school.
Also, please subscribe, really appreciate it,
and I'll see you in the next video.