Remember Why Law School Sucked

As law school fades into the past, it will increasingly seem like a golden era, full of leisure and intelligent conversation. As you slog through boxes full of random documents and emails that might prove the billion-dollar corporation your firm represents failed to do a good job of covering up the fact that a few of their 11,000 employees are not as politically correct as they should be, you may look back longingly on your time in law school. You might even begin to think of it in the same category as some of the truly great times in your life.

When this happens, you should look back and remember the things about law school that really sucked. And lots of it did.

• Money. Those of you who are going to work for BigLaw will make lots of this. Good for the three of you. Everyone else will be making somewhat less than they did if they worked before law school. This will suck. But keep in mind what you made during law school: negative $160K. That is worse than positive $40K; it really is. So when you are writing out those monthly loan checks, remember that you are still making a LOT more than you did in law school. And still paying for that mistake.
• Finals. And everything that goes with them: outlining, practice exams, study groups, the library. Finals were an exercise in mental self-flagellation. If you make yourself sit in front of your laptop long enough, what, hopefully your exam will end up at the top of the staircase when your professor "grades" the stack? Sweet.
• Unpaid internships. Remember struggling to get these for the summer after first year? And then having to borrow money from your parents so you could live in some dump with three random people your roommates found to sublease to while they interned back home so they could live with their parents? At least you weren't given anything that resembled real work.
• Books. For almost every class, you got to spend $160 on some shitty book full of boring cases so your professor could transfer a bit of wealth from the poor (you) to the rich (him).
  
• People. Law school was full of less than ideal people. Most of the professors were self-centered, egotistical theorists who had little knowledge of actually being a lawyer. And your fellow classmates were the same, but worse. They were not as smart as the professors, but didn't realize this fact. Many of them thought they could look smart by making inane comments or parroting the professor. Most lacked a sense of humor, and all of them liked to argue. Unfortunately, few students were actually good at arguing. More likely, they took things far too seriously, and tended to attack those who disagreed with them. They would commonly assert that others had ulterior motives for everything they did, even when there was a much more obvious reason for the other person's actions. And when students thought they had somehow been slighted, they would go out of their way to attack others, generally in public.*
• Dating. The dating pool consisted largely of the above mentioned people.

*This link, like this post, was definitely not written solely as an excuse to attack one of our commenters. That would be childish.