Transcript
00:00
– And as time was up
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and she turned in her Contracts final exam,
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she realized she was in the wrong law class
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and she had done the wrong final (gasps).
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Today, we’re talking about real life
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law school horror stories.
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(imitates ghost)
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Scary.
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(light music)
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Hey, legal eagles.
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D. James Stone here teaching you how to think like a lawyer
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so you can crush law school.
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Law school can be a really scary place.
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It’s three years long, and in that time, a lot can go wrong.
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So I thought I’d share some of the scariest things
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that actually happened to me in law school.
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So let’s dig in to some of these scary stories.
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One of the first things that happens
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when you get to law school
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is that you are surrounded by some of the smartest people
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you’ve ever met in your entire life.
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I don’t really care which law school it is.
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You’re gonna be surrounded by A type personalities.
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And some of those people are what are called gunners.
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Gunners are the people that always raise their hand,
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they always seem to have the answer.
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And when you first get to law school,
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they can seem really intimidating
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because people don’t like to answer
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the professor’s questions.
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So I had a few gunners in my class.
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Hopefully, I was not one of those gunners,
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even though I liked to answer on occasion.
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But there was one particular gunner in my class.
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For the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Alan.
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Alan was hardcore.
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He would answer every professor’s question.
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He had a background in mathematics and philosophy.
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So he was able to talk about the philosophical underpinnings
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of different legal doctrines,
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he was able to think logically,
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and he always seemed to have the answer.
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So after your first semester,
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you are given a slip of paper with your grades in it,
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and I happened to be sitting behind Alan in class,
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in between classes when we were getting
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our grades for the first time.
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Basically, you open up a slip of paper
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and that’s your report card.
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And I happened to see that he got all Cs his first semester.
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I was shocked.
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I had never seen anything like it.
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One of, if not the smartest person in class got all Cs.
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Let it be a lesson to you
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that, just because someone is very good in class
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and seems to be one of the smartest people in the room,
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it doesn’t mean they’re gonna get good grades in law school.
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And this person eventually became a friend of mine,
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but man, it was quite a shock to see that this person,
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who seemed to know all the answers,
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got straight Cs his first semester.
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Another horror story that happened to me
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relates to my mock trial competition.
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I was on the mock trial team
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for all three years in law school.
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It was one of the best experiences that I had.
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Mock trial is where you pretend to be a lawyer,
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you conduct a trial, and you are scored by judges
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based on how well you do.
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It’s just like mock trial in high school and college.
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And part of the mock trial competition
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is traveling to different cities.
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Well, one of the competitions was held in Las Vegas.
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In fact, it was one of the national finals
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for this pariticular mock trial competition.
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And after my team had done their round
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and we had actually conducted a round
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in front of a real judge
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who actually tried cases in Las Vegas,
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the mock trial judge started to brag
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to my team and the other team
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about what happened one night
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when a burglar tried to break into his house.
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So this sitting judge regaled us for about 15 minutes
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about how an intruder tried to break into his house
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and what he did with this intruder.
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Well apparently, to hear this judge tell the tale,
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he sat the intruder down on a chair,
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tied him up, put him in a small bathroom,
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and then for the next hour or two,
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proceeded to threaten him with a gun to his head
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and told him never to come back to his house.
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I’m guessing that, if that actually happened,
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that that burglar never burgled that guy’s house again.
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And this is, again, a sitting judge.
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I don’t know if that’s a true story or not.
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This was Vegas, after all, so I probably believe
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that this judge is an insane person
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who threatened a burglar with a firearm.
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So that was an interesting experience.
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Another horror story that happened to me
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was that, when I was sitting for the California Bar Exam,
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it was at a hotel in West L.A.
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Not just in the regular part of the hotel,
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but three floors down in the basement.
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And this was a huge cavern.
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I mean there must have been 500 people, at least,
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sitting for this exam.
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And so, on day one of the exam,
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we were into the second essay portion of the Bar Exam,
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and all of a sudden, as what happens in California,
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everything started to shake.
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There was an earthquake.
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I later learned that it was over a 5.0 on the Richter scale.
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So it was enough to get the chandeliers
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in the basement to swing back and forth.
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And all of the people who were not native Californians
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hid under their desk and were shaken,
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literally and figuratively,
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and they lost some crucial time on the Bar Exam.
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I and the rest of the native Californians
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just simply couldn’t be bothered
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and carried along writing our essays.
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I actually feel that that gave me an advantage
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on the Bar Exam because I think the people from out of town
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were a little bit frazzled,
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whereas, being a native Southern Californian,
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it was just a normal Tuesday afternoon for me.
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So I give partial credit to the earthquake
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for helping me pass the California Bar Exam.
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Another horror story that happened to me
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was that my computer crashed right before finals.
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So this was over 11 or 12 years ago.
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So this was back in the day
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when computers didn’t have solid-state hard drives
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and Dropbox and Google Drive did not exist.
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So I was relying on the files
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that were physically residing on my computer
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and my hard drive just stopped working.
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There were clear signs that something was going wrong,
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so I had the wherewithal to transfer
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some of these files to, I don’t know,
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a floppy disk or a Zip drive
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or maybe I burned it to a CD.
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I’m not sure, but I was able to get my notes
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off of the computer probably about 45 minutes
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before the thing just stopped and never started up again.
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So I got really lucky.
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It still was very frazzling.
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I lost a lot of files just before finals
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in my second year of law school.
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But that’s why I am very adamant
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to current and future law students
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to always use cloud services, backup your files.
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There’s a chance that you will never get them back.
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Laptops fail.
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They’re stolen all the time.
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You never know when your computer’s going to crash
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and you can bet that it’s probably going to happen
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at the worst possible time.
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So do yourself a favor and backup your crucial files.
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And my final law school horror story
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is that, after three years of law school,
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over six semesters, I graduated with over $160,000 in debt.
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Yeah.
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That’s more than a lot of people’s houses cost.
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That’s three BMWs’ worth of debt.
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And that was over 10 years ago.
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Now, law school tuition has gone up even more,
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so I really feel for all the current law students
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that are out there who are racking up law school debt.
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It’s crazy.
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It’s everyone’s personal horror story.
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It took me years to pay it off
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and it really impacted my quality of life.
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I don’t regret going to law school,
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but all of the debt that you accumulate
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really does build up and, man, it’s tough.
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So those were just a few of the horror stories
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that I personally experienced in law school.
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If you want to hear more stories about law school,
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check out this short playlist that I put together
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that includes my personal experiences with law school
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and, even better, strategies on how to beat law school
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once you get in and how to get As in law school.
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Also, please subscribe, really appreciate it,
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and I’ll see you in the next video.
