- One of the questions I get all the time
is how do you get into law school.
Everyone has a different route,
but today I thought I'd tell the story
of how I got into one
of the best law school's in the country.
(bright music)
Hey legal eagles, D. James Stone here,
teaching you how to think like a lawyer
so you can crush law school.
Now before you can crush law school,
you have to get into law school.
Now I have been a practicing litigator
for over 10 years now,
but before that I had to go to law school
just like everybody else.
And so here is my story.
I knew from a very early age
that I wanted to be a lawyer.
There was a brief period of time
when I thought I wanted to be a policeman,
but when I learned that police officers
are not allowed to carry machine guns,
I didn't really want to become a policeman
after all.
There was a short period of time
when I wanted to be an architect,
but that didn't last too long,
mainly because I started to see lawyers on TV.
I was really into the TV show, Law and Order.
Now this is back in the day
with the original Law and Order series,
not the SVU or any of the off-shoots,
when they would split up the episode
into half that was for police
and then half for lawyers.
And I always thought the latter half
of the episode,
that focused only on the lawyers,
was always the best part,
and I knew I wanted to be a lawyer
like I saw on TV.
There was only one problem.
My parents put a hard limit
on how much TV I could watch.
I think I was only able to watch 30 minutes
of recreational TV,
but I was able to watch an unlimited amount
of educational TV.
So in one of my first acts
of pure legal argument, I convinced my parents
that because I wanted to be a lawyer,
really Law and Order was educational TV
and I should be allowed to watch
as much Law and Order as I wanted.
For some reason, this argument carried the day,
and my parents agreed.
And this is back in the day when TBS or TNT,
one of those cable channels,
would just show Law and Order,
basically non-stop.
I mean, these were almost during the daytime,
the Law and Order channel.
And so I had a chance to watch
quite a bit of Law and Order
and that provided the goal
for what I wanted to do with my career.
I think my parents assumed two things
based on my arguments.
Number one, I think they assumed
that if I was willing to make
these kind of arguments
that I was really interested in the law,
and so what harm could it do?
And number two, that they figured
I was pretty good at arguing.
So that led into high school,
where I did mock trial in high school.
I was really mad because my freshmen year,
they would not let freshmen compete
on the mock trial team.
So I had to wait until my sophomore year.
I graduated from high school, went to college.
And I chose the college that I went to
because they had one of the best collegiate
mock trial teams in the entire country.
And ,in fact, while I was on the college team,
we won the national championship twice in a row.
In college, I majored in poli-sci
mainly because I was interested,
but it really seemed like so many lawyers
had also majored in political science.
So I figured if other lawyers
majored in poli-sci, it probably couldn't hurt.
A lot of people ask what majors
they should take in college.
They see the same thing,
that lots of lawyers take poli-sci.
I would say that the poli-sci degree
was really interesting for me.
Because it was interesting,
I put a lot of effort into it,
and so I got good grades.
But it definitely didn't really help
in terms of preparing for law school itself.
Just because you know about government
doesn't mean that you know what the laws are,
and it certainly doesn't mean
that you're able to think like a lawyer
just because you know
some of the history of governance
and maybe even some political theory.
So while I really enjoyed my poli-sci degree,
I don't really think it helped me all that much
in law school.
But frankly, no major really helps you
that much in law school.
Really what you should do is just the major
that you are most interested in,
so that you can get good grades
because law schools look at your grades,
and that helps decide
what law school you can go to.
Now that being said,
I did take a number of electives
that did end up being helpful for law school,
one of which was a business class
that was taught by my mock trial coach.
My mock trial coach was not only a professor
at the undergraduate level,
but he was also a professor
at the business school.
And he happened to teach business law classes.
These were mainly for business students,
but undergrads could take it.
And while it wasn't a great survey
of all the different types of subsets of law
that are out there that you learn in law school,
it did provide a framework
for what we call civil procedure in law school.
In law school, you have six core classes,
one of which is called Civ-Pro,
and that's the process of filing a lawsuit
and how to file motions
and basically everything that leads up
to going to trial in a lawsuit.
And so that gave me a framework
for that specific class in Civil Procedure.
So I'm really happy
that I took that Business Law class.
I did pretty well, in general, in undergrad.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa.
And I was able to graduate with honors
from UCLA undergrad.
Now I knew that when I graduated,
I immediately wanted to go to law school.
I couldn't afford to do a gap year
and to travel the world,
and I knew that
I didn't wanna enter the workforce
because that would just be a waste of time
because I really wanted to be an attorney.
So I didn't wanna mess around,
I wanted to go straight into law school.
So basically, from the entire time
that I graduated from college,
for the entire summer
and a good portion of the fall,
I studied for the LSAT.
And I think I might have started
studying for the LSAT during the school year
to get a head start.
The LSAT is to law schools
what the SAT is for college.
It's your law school entrance exam.
It really is the single most important thing
that you can do to get into a good law school,
is to get a really high LSAT score.
And the LSAT is scored from zero to 180.
So if you get a perfect score on the LSAT,
you get a 180.
The LSAT is scored,
I think, using a normal distribution.
So really only the top
.1 or .5% get a 180.
If you get a 170,
that means you're in the 99th percentile.
And if you get a 160 or so,
you're about in the 90th percentile,
and 10's of thousands of college students
take the LSAT every year.
So I had taken a couple of practice tests,
practice LSAT's just to see how I scored.
And I scored really low
just with no studying whatsoever.
So I knew that I needed to take a prep course
in order to boost my score
to get into a good law school.
There are several good options
out there right now.
I highly recommend live courses.
The ones that force you to go into the class
and force you to study
as opposed to the ones that are self-directed
because it's so important
that you really have to squeeze out
every point you can
and I just didn't trust myself
to study on my own,
at least to learn the strategies.
I took a course with a company called Test Master
that was based out of California
and I think they've expanded nationally now.
I took their live class
and I was actually instructed
by one of the instructors who would go on
to form the competitor to Test Master's
called Blueprint.
And I think those instructors
were just phenomenal.
The original Test Masters instructors
and also the ones that defected
and went off to Blueprint.
I think they are really phenomenal.
So I always recommend those two companies,
and especially their live courses.
They're really pricey,
I mean on the order of 1500 to $2000,
but the instruction that you get
is just really good
and it's an investment in your future.
You can't get into a good law school
without a really stellar LSAT score.
So I think it's just a worthwhile investment.
It's expensive, but I think
you just have to do it.
After I took the live class with Test Masters,
I then basically buckled down
with my college roommate
and we practiced taking LSATs every day
for about two and a half months.
I mean, we just we studied all day, every day
and by the end of the summer, we had taken
every single publicly available LSAT
that had been published.
So that was on the order of hundreds of LSATs.
And both he and I were scoring
in the 99th percentile.
He averaged, I think, a 174,
and I averaged a 172.
So I went into the LSAT feeling very confident.
Unfortunately, the day I took the LSAT,
still can't really explain it,
but I scored significantly lower
than I had in practice.
I scored in the mid-160s.
So that still pisses me off to this day,
but the score was high enough
that I could apply to most of the schools
that I wanted to apply to
and have a reasonably good shot
at getting into a few of them.
So I applied to pretty much every school
in the top 20 and some of the schools
that were outside of the top 20,
but were regionally very good.
I knew, for personal reasons,
that I wanted to stay in Los Angeles.
So I was really, really looking to get into UCLA.
I was also looking as USC.
I also looked at Loyola and Pepperdine.
I considered some East Coast schools,
some Northern California schools,
and I basically just applied everywhere
in the top 20's, hoping that a few of them
would stick against the wall.
And that summer,
I got into a few
and I was wait-listed at a few.
I got wait-listed at Cornell, Duke, and UCLA.
I got into Loyola and Pepperdine.
So I knew I could stay in Los Angeles
if I wanted to.
My study partner, my roommate, scored a 172
on his exam or it mighta been a 170,
so he was safely within the 99th percentile
of the LSAT and he got into Stanford
through early admission.
So good for him.
(laughs)
But I played wait-list game
for most of the Summer.
And for personal reasons, I wanted to stay in LA.
So I was really hoping to get into UCLA and USC.
Now that being said,
since I was an Undergrad UCLA Bruin,
I was really, really reluctant
about going to USC.
Nothing against the school, it's a fine school.
It's just that UCLA Bruins hate USC Trojans
and vice versa.
So I decided I would,
even though I got into USC,
I was still playing the wait-list game
over the summer, hoping that I could get in
off of the wait-list into UCLA.
So eventually a few weeks before school started,
I was looking for apartments close
to the USC campus.
I had resigned myself to going to USC
in downtown LA.
And I actually signed a lease in Hollywood.
I figured that was
a reasonably close neighborhood to downtown LA.
And it was the day that I signed the lease
for an apartment in Hollywood
that I got the call from UCLA admissions
letting me know that I got in
off of the wait-list.
I did a few tactics
to get in off of the wait-list.
So I was pestering the UCLA admissions department
probably more than I should have,
but my efforts paid off.
I got in to UCLA.
And that's where I decided to go.
I graduated from UCLA Law,
stayed in the LA area
and became a practicing attorney in LA.
Now the story of how I did well in law school
will have to wait for another day.
But if you wanna hear more
about my experience in law school
and my experience as a practicing litigator,
check out this quick playlist (funky music)
I've put together.
It includes a bunch legal war stories.
And so just click on that playlist
and I'll see you in the next video.