How to overcome cold call anxiety in law school?
Cold call anxiety in law school is real. You may have heard first day horror stories about law school cold calling. Maybe you’re anxious about a cold call in law school because you only know about it from Elle Woods. Mastering your cold calling anxiety can help your mental health and lead to better law school success.
In this quick tutorial, we will look at how to overcome cold call anxiety.
Here’s how to do it:
How to Overcome Cold Call Anxiety
- Figure out the upcoming cases for next class based on the syllabus
- Read the cases while you highlight and annotate in your textbook and brief them
- Bring your textbook with the case, your notebook with your case briefs, and your laptop to class
- Turn the casebook to the first assigned case
- Open your notebook to the first case brief you made during your reading
- Pull up the case summary from Quimbee on your laptop
- Follow along and advance through the textbook, your briefs, and Quimbee as the professor lectures through the cases
- When and if you are called on, you have Quimbee to provide the answers to simple questions like procedural history, background facts, or the courts analysis
- Your brief will provide you with a deeper understanding of case facts and legal analysis you may have noticed aside from the main analysis in Quimbee
- Your textbook with highlights and annotations will provide a safety for if the professor asks something obscure
Luckily, a cold call is nothing like what you see in the movies about law school. You can relax. It is simply your professor asking you questions about the assigned case that you knew you had to read for homework. Your first law school cold call can be a little anxiety inducing, but with these steps you’ll be more than prepared. Just remember, it is a conversation with your professor.
Conclusion – Overcoming Cold Calling Anxiety
Remember, there is no substitute for reading the cases. The tips above help you prepare for when cold calling in law school occurs. But, nothing beats a full understanding that comes from having read the entire case. If you read the case law, you know at the very least, the structure and layout of the court’s opinion and where to look for answers.
Fine-tune this strategy further by having multiple Quimbee summaries open at once in case your professor likes to jump around between cases. Also, once you get a feel for a professor’s style, you will know what sorts of facts and analysis to highlight in your reading. For example, some law professors are cut and dry and only want to know how the court ruled. Other law professors are looking for the policy reasonings or asking about the dissenting opinion. With each legal case you read and brief, you will become better until this is second nature. Then, your law school cold call anxiety will be eliminated.