Houston, Here We Come!

Hey, we’re ready to mess with Texas!  We’ve added a great teacher to our ranks, Joey Ndu!  He’s a true test whiz with years of teaching experience and a really great demeanor in the classroom.  He’s a natural fit with our team, as he works hard to get students to figure out things for themselves.

We’re looking for a class location around University of Houston, and we’ll announce when we’ve found our home.  Stay tuned, Texas!

P.S. Austin is next . . .

As the February LSAT quickly approaches, I have been fielding many calls from worried and anxious students each day here. To be fair, test anxiety is real and we all want to excel in areas where we have invested considerable time, mental energy, and money. The LSAT and all of its test-takers are no different. However, what I have been recommending to students is to keep in mind the concept of attribution theory, especially for all you Type-A students out there.

What this means in lay-man terms is (pardon the language):  Suck it up. Know what you can and can’t control. Be honest about your skills and your ability to excel. Be prepared for the worst because Murphy’s Law is alive and kicking.

I realize that this is much easier said than done, but cultivate your own fearlessness. Successful people do not believe in external attributions. Successful people believe that their successes are a result of 3 things: Read more

This past weekend the New York Times had a sobering article explaining that law school is “No Longer the Golden Ticket.”  Many people somehow assumed the the legal field was immune to the economic downturn.  “Well, Wall Street is dead for now,” people thought, “so I’ll go for law school.  Not as glamorous, but at least the money’s there.”

Turns out that big law firms are laying off big time and are not hiring many if any new lawyers.  In fact, we’re seeing a lot of resumes of law school grads that are looking for something to do during their “gap year.”  Overall, these folks are not making the Atlas cut, but many are quite bright.  Interestingly, often they’ve been hired by some law firm and then told to not show up for a year and instead do something community-oriented (and these folks receive half their salaries, which is still a nice chunk of change).  This sounds like a pretty good deal considering what many large law firms have young associates doing for the first couple of years (cue shot of Igor, the hunchback in old Frankenstein film creeping in the basement).  As we see it, the problem is that when the economy picks up and folks start suing and merging with each other with gusto again, law firms will probably pick up their half-way house hires and hold off on taking new ones for a year or so.  Basically, there’s a lawyer log jam.  [Yes, that sounds like the end of a good lawyer joke.]  Particularly since there’s been a 20% increase in LSAT test-takers this year! Read more

Good question! First off, we’ll be discussing this in our upcoming workshop in which we’ll review the December LSAT.

If you’re just looking to take an LSAT, it doesn’t matter which one you take — just take it after you’ve prepared!  But if you already have taken the LSAT and are wondering whether to re-take, there’s a lot more to say.  The question of whether you should re-take in June, Sep/Oct, or Dec  has one set of answers.  If you are wondering whether to re-take in one of those non-February months, take a look at some previous posts – should I re-take the LSAT & how to improve your LSAT score.   But for February you get a special set of answers just for you!

In general, the answer is NO.  Here’s why (and thanks to Ann Levine for some help on this one):

1. It’s hard to improve an LSAT score significantly in one month. Caveats: if you truly had a bad day on test day, and having such a day is completely out of the ordinary for you, sure, a re-test could conceivably show serious improvement.  But, so you know, most people don’t improve that much.  For example, the average person who re-takes the LSAT with a score between 150 and 160 improves only 2.4 points on the re-take (and the re-take improvement gets worse as you go up the score ladder).  For most people, those 2.4 points are not enough to significantly alter your application — and for most folks, those 2 and almost a half points definitely do not warrant a re-take because . . . Read more