lawyer

#What is a good gift for someone starting law school?

Law School. How do I succeed as a 1st year law student?

Quora User. Former attorney and US Congressional aide, author, entrepreneur of a VC-backe.

I think the roughest thing to adjust to during law school is time management, and as such your gift is probably going to be of more value to someone if it saves them time later during their studies.

For example, reading your first case from a law school book, perhaps in the Summer before school starts, is a tedious and quite time consuming process. You don t know what the professor likes to highlight, the points he wants you to pick up, and his view of the facts (which often makes up countless pages of reading that sometimes the prof just says ignore those facts after you ve read dozens of pages). To do this your first week of law school takes maybe 2 hours let s say. But to do it later in the year, when you have a better vibe about what is and is not important can take say 30 minutes, or even a bit less when studying the one or two paragraphs that make it into your finals outline.

Now contrast this to some other basic things, like say getting your battery changed in the car. It takes 2 hours to do in the Summer and it takes 2 hours to do during the winter, before exams and when it is cold and snowing.

Finding a way to make the little things in life easier during someone s first semester in law school is far more beneficial than say a legal book that may or may not be relevant come finals time. To that end, gift cards are good, so are other practical items that they might need that are not law related, perhaps something for the home. I had a friend who gave me two free maid cleaning coupons that I used during finals week. It was a godsend as they came in, cleaned up, even did my laundry so I could study in a bit more comfort. A pass to some movies for a stress release is also a nice thing.

As a professor said to me in the first minutes of a class-- everything you need to know to get an A in this class will be said during this class . Don t worry about giving them something academic that is going to give them a jump start to their studies. As we all say, it s a marathon, not a sprint.