The law school experience remains largely unchanged in the years since I graduated. Your days are filled with paper writing, horn book reading, case briefing, classroom or virtual lectures, and perhaps a little moot court or mock trial participation.

This is all good stuff! The classroom instruction you receive and the law school experience, generally, are great for helping you learn legal concepts and how to think like a lawyer.

What’s More Important than Grades?

As you likely now understand, everything you are doing in law school will impact how marketable you are to future employers.

The most obvious impact, and the one law students most obsess about, is your grades. Some folks will be selling their academic achievements to prospective employers. Law Review, top 10% of the class, top 20% of the class – assuming these folks have at least basic social skills, they are on a different employment track than those with more modest grades. If you are not in this group, you’re probably asking yourself what your path forward is in securing future employment.

To me, the answer is obvious: get as much practical experience as you can.

You Need to Learn All This, of Course

The legal education you receive from your law school has its limitations.

A thing that law schools are not very good at is providing practical, hands-on experience. This is not really the law school’s fault – its priority is to jam as many legal concepts into your brain in the brief three years it has with you.

And you really do need to know these concepts. Torts, secured transactions, con law, contracts, creditor’s rights – you may never practice in these areas of the law, but you’ll be amazed at how often your law school learning will overlap with or intersect your actual legal practice. Again, this is all good (and necessary!) learning.

What I Mean by Practical Experience

Sure, your school has clinics and moot court and mock trial, but these are of limited value.

You cannot put a price on the value of hands-on experience, especially while still a law student.

If you find yourself in a situation where you are not leading with your grades, then the thing you need to be selling to employers is your ability to step in and do actual legal work and get things done, despite being a baby lawyer.

Really, the best way to get this experience is by clerking – and beginning in your 2L year, you should be working as much as you can, taking whatever opportunities are available.

Hey, it is nice that you understand torts and you know what Interrogatories are from your civil procedure class, but nobody is teaching you how to craft interrogatory answers and proper objections if, for example, you find yourself working on a slip and fall personal injury case, nor are you being given repetitive opportunities to do that task.

How I Hit the Ground Running

As a student, I knew I wanted to do trial work, and I recognized after 1L year that I was going to have to focus on practical experience as my key selling point.

I clerked for two solo practitioners and a small firm practicing, respectively, family law, general litigation and estate planning, and disability rights. I was fortunate to have chosen well with my clerkships, because each place gave me tons of hands-on experience doing actual lawyer tasks – drafting pleadings, serving and responding to discovery, sitting in on depositions, hearings, and client meetings. I was at the courthouse so often that court staff and the folks in the county clerk’s office knew who I was and who I worked for.

It was awesome, and by the time I graduated I was basically the right-hand man of the lawyer I worked for: he’d toss me a file and tell me to work it up for him (service, pleadings, our initial set of discovery requests, etc.). Heck, he was thrilled to have someone he could trust to do the grunt work. Everybody won.

So, when it came time for me to interview with the litigation firm I ended up at after graduation, I was able to sit there and rattle off for them, in detail, all the litigation tasks I had done.

Honestly, I don’t know if they were impressed with me as much as they were surprised that I had so much experience. But I got the job, and I was able to hit the ground running on my first day. The rest, as they say, is history.

Validation of my approach came years later, after I had lateraled to a much bigger firm, when I was talking to one of the partners who hired me at my initial firm and who I am still friends with. He commented on the lawyers he had hired to replace me and another colleague who lateraled. With a chuckle, he noted that he didn’t appreciate how advanced I was, when I arrived years earlier, until he had to sit down and train my replacement on how to do basic litigation tasks.

You Can Do It

I am not suggesting to you that I was particularly smart or clever to have figured all of this out as a wee 2L. Rather, I say to you that if I can do it, so can you.

Get as much experience as you can. Learn the nuts and bolts of what you, as a lawyer, are going to be doing every day. Work, clerk, and then work some more.

And don’t sweat mediocre grades – make them irrelevant by becoming a doer. This will be a massive advantage for you and you will find yourself light years ahead of your peers, especially if you are doing litigation, because they will have to learn from scratch things you already have already mastered.

Start Today

Folks, you’ve got to build all the skills in your lawyer toolbox. Start now. It is the best investment of your time you can make at this stage of your legal career.

You’ll need these skills in your practice and you’ll sell these skills to employers (and clients, too). I say again: If I can do it, so can you.

Now, do me a favor and sketch out some objections to these Requests for Production, will you?

This article was originally published on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Law Student Blog, Just the Facts. The State Bar offers a variety of resources to help law students connect with the legal profession, including finding mentors and clerkships. Find out more on Wisbar.org.