Eric Grigg

Trying to learn about law schools and the law student experience can be a daunting project in and of itself, that is, if you are looking for Canadian law schools or the Canadian experience. More ink has been spilt discussing the state of legal education in American than on the auto bailout, but try and find something specific to Canada and you may as well be asking Google to turn water into wine.

I know when I first started looking for information on law schools, the application process, and the student experience therein that I had some difficulty. Bellow, you will find a few of the resources that I have found particularly helpful to the applicant or the pre-law student who is looking to get a head start. I have endeavoured to be as evenhanded as possible, but I have also not pulled any punches where I feel they are deserved.

Lawstudents.ca

At lawstudents.ca the budding law student can find several things. First, and most importantly, they can find several boards dedicated, as the category suggests, to ‘applicants.’ Here you can find the appropriate boards to ask: general questions, about the LSAT, for help choosing between different schools, about how to pay your way, and, a new addition, about pre-law best practices. This is where applicants will probably, and unsurprisingly, spend the bulk of their time. Here one can learn some of the basics of the application process, the jargon, and about the competition. Be warned, the learning here will generally be by osmosis as there are few (if any) explanatory posts stuck at the top of these forums.

Bellow the applicant section, you will find separate, school-specific forums (or fora, if you will) for all the common law faculties, a couple civil law faculties (the rest are in a catch-all forum), and a catch-all for foreign programs. These forums fill several different roles. First, they can help you get a better understanding of a particular school that  you may have an interest in (or a shot at). In this respect, it can often be helpful to look for posts that were last active during and leading up to the previous admissions cycle and leading up to the current academic year. Here you can usually find an (unscientific) sample of applicant profiles and see which types of applicants were accepted and when. Similarly, many of your questions (regarding particular academic programs, exchange options, etc.) may already have been addressed. This is not to say that you should not ask for up-to-date information, as programs and options do change, but that general information is often easy to come by. These forums are also the place to find (or create) IN and OUT threads, which as their names suggest, usually include a list of those who have been accepted or rejecting in any given year. While often eliciting a mild case of envy or schedenfreud, they can help you establish rough baselines. In addition, those who have been accepted tend to gravitate to the school-specific forums to ask and answer questions and, if your lucky, current students have been known to put their two-cents in from time to time.

While lawstudents.ca can be a great general tool for those looking to get a better handle on the law school application process, it does have its own shortcomings. First of all, though they require logins, the relative anonymity of the medium allows for some serious incivility. While some of the coarser responses are well deserved, many simply turn otherwise well-meaning and informative threads into protracted flamewars. Secondly, as with most internet resources, the signal to noise ratio can be fairly low. By this I mean that given the amount of ‘information’ on these boards it can be quite difficult to find the genuinely useful stuff. Add to this an economy of diminishing returns such that the longer one spends on the boards the less use you will get out of it and the reality is that it simply does not hold much for more aware applicants. Thirdly, and finally, one should try not to get dragged into or become unduly influenced by some of the more baseless debates to be found therein. While I am all for the sharing of personal opinions and anecdotal evidence to created a fuller picture, this process can quite easily hop the tracks and become a horrific derailment of the purpose at hand.

Law School Book

Of the two books to be reviewed next week, Allan C. Hutchinson’s The Law School Book: Succeeding At Law School is by far the better of the two for the applicant or pre-law type. Not only is it an easier read, it also places an almost exclusive emphasis on the law school experience as opposed to the study of law itself. Consequently, for those looking to get a handle on whether or not an LL.B. or J.D. will be the investment for them, Hutchinson’s insights prove more useful. This is not to say that The Law School Book ignores a discussion of the study of law, but rather than he condenses it into a single chapter (the second one) and gets on to other subjects of interest to the applicant (like what all the fuss about exams and mooting is). Indeed, if you read nothing else, I would suggest the first four chapters (70 pages or so) of Hutchinson’s work as it will stand you in good stead to decide whether or not you are going to take the plunge.

Canadian Lawyer

While perhaps of more use to the established student, the utility of Canadian Lawyer’s 4Students section (a quarterly publication) for applicants is related more to its ability to get you inside the heads of current students (or at least what the editors of Canadian Lawyer thinks they might look like). For example, in the Spring 2009 edition there was a lot of attention paid (as the cover would indicate) to articling and graduating in uncertain economic times. Perhaps not a worry for those not yet in law school, but the discussion of student debt load alone is instructive.

The rest of Canadian Lawyer (a monthly publication) generally provides the applicant with a helpful insight into the Canadian, as opposed to American, legal profession itself. Most instructive are the occasional profiles of practicing lawyers – a fantastic way to appreciate the different roles lawyers can take on and the paths that can take them there. Similarly, the Canadian Lawyer’s yearly ranking of Canadian law school can be helpful to the applicant by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different programs that are available. Canadian Lawyer itself admitted in the past year, however, that attempting to rank the programs from best to worst in a strict, hierarchical order is at best counterproductive and at worst unrepresentative. As Dean Holloway has been known to say, that we are lucky in Canada that you will receive a quality legal education at just about any university you attend – it is only a matter of finding the right school for you.

Precedent

A quarterly publication written by recently minted lawyers, Precedent’s applicability to applicants will be similar to that of Canadian Lawyer, that is, it will be a source of information by osmosis. That said, they do cater more specifically to new lawyers and law students than the month-to-month issue of Canadian Lawyer does, with articles covering topics from how to survive a cocktail party to law student makeovers. A note of warning, however, it tends to have a Biglaw, downtown Toronto feel to it that might not appeal to everyone.

Faculty Websites

This one really goes without saying, but faculty websites should not be overlooked. This is really the only place to look for admissions standards and the like. By only I do not mean you will not find this information elsewhere, but rather that any such information found elsewhere should be circumspect if for the only reason that it might be out-of-date.

Wikipedia

Though not likely to provide you a step-by-step guide on how to apply to Canadian law schools or what to expect once you get there, Wikipedia can be an invaluable secondary resources for understanding what it is that you have just read in another one of these resources. What, exactly, is articling? Or what is the difference between an LL.B. and a J.D.? Wikipedia can also help provide you with a larger view as to the faculties and/or universities that pique your interest. As always, however, any endorsement of Wikipedia comes with a hefty caveat emptor (and no, the irony has not escaped me).