Law School about to resume

It's been a great few weeks off, but it's almost over. The clock is ticking down what feels like the final moments before school starts up again for the Spring. I'm taking an ambitious (crazy?) 10 hours again, but this time it's four classes: Wills & Trusts, Federal Jurisdiction, pre-trial litigation and Oil & Gas. I've already got a head start on Spring office hours for Law Review, which should help. I plan to pick up some books this afternoon. I'm not excited about any of the courses except maybe pre-trial litigation. The others all sound dull. But the evening program has rather limited options.

I got back two grades--an A in Professional Responsibility, which is nice. And a B in Constitutional Law, which isn't so nice, but considering I didn't open the textbook after the first week, well, I'll take it. The unexploded bomb, Federal Income Tax, is still ticking. Getting a B after that exam would be a relief! I haven't felt that whipped since my first calculus exam.

Funny thing about courses like pre-trial litigation. They teach you the acutal skills presumably used by attorneys, yet the university considers them "non-substantive" courses and limits the number of credit hours you can get for them.

People ask me why don't I consider going into Intellectual Property law. Well, I'll tell you. Based on talking with people in the field (unofficially of course), copyright attorneys are the grunts and the patent attorneys are the royalty. To be a patent attorney you have to take the federal patent bar. To qualify you have to have a college degree in engineering. If you don't have an engineering degree, you can still qualify if you have 30 hours of engineering physics or 24 of engineering-level chemistry. Yeah, like there are a lot of liberal arts majors out there with that! In other words, I couldn't take the patent bar if I wanted to. It's possible for people to do well in IP without taking the patent bar, but I'm already operating at a disadvantage because the big firms are prejudiced against hiring part-timers and people over 30. Why make it worse? So I'm leaning towards finding something else.