Cold Calling Is Good, Actually

“I know fear is an obstacle for some people, but it is an illusion to me. Failure always made me try harder next time.” – Michael Jordan

One of the (many) things that causes law students the most angst is the dreaded cold call. The fear is so pronounced that before I even attended a single 1L class, BC Law had shown me the famous cold calling scene from Legally Blonde multiple times. I understand why cold calling induces anxiety, especially in your early days of law school when you have likely never experienced it in other classroom settings. To be clear, this post should not be taken to suggest that cold calling does not make me nervous or that I never get a cold call embarrassingly wrong (I definitely do). But getting things wrong is kind of the point of learning and law school; otherwise, we’d be practicing attorneys already. 

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Legal Movie Review: The Paper Chase

Since I started my law school application process over two years ago, my dad has been telling me to watch The Paper Chase. I’m now a 2L with (slightly) more free time, so I thought I would finally give this classic a try. This 1973 movie details James Hart’s first year at Harvard Law School, and while nothing depicts the 1L experience as accurately as the documentary film Legally Blonde, this one does get a lot right.

The First Day

The movie opens with James’ first class on the first day of law school, as every 1L gets to their seats and settles in moments before the professor arrives. I’m generally a bundle of anxious energy on the first day of anything, so I arrived to my first class about 15 minutes early last year. What I didn’t realize was that my first-day anxieties were nothing compared to the motivations of my classmates, many of whom arrived far before I did. Needless to say, if anyone actually showed up as close to the start of the first class as every extra in this movie did, they’d definitely be occupying the dreaded front row.

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