The T.C. Williams Legal Essay Contest Catalog
TO: The Wise Among You
FROM: Professor John Paul Jones
RE: A Word About Your Competing In A Legal Essay Contest
A while back, a first-year student asked why he should be interested in what we publish on our web site about student essay contests. That information is published at my request. I urge students to enter such contests because
- writing will make them more marketable,
- competing can be a shrewd expenditure of their energies, and
- winning enhances our reputation.
Writing a legal essay makes any student a better employment prospect. An interview can satisfy a potential employer's curiosity about an applicant's poise, personal appearance, and conversational skills, allowing inferences about the applicant's ability to interview and counsel clients, negotiate with judges and other lawyers, and persuade a jury. What an interview cannot reveal is an applicant's skill in performing the other tasks that largely preoccupy a new associate and second chair: legal research and writing. Law firms want to know whether a student or fresh graduate can conduct thorough and efficient legal research, intellectually process the results to form correct conclusions, and then communicate those findings clearly and persuasively. To find out, some employers request writing samples; others are content to infer such skills from law school grades or other evidence, such as publication of an applicant's written work in a law review. A third attribute about which law firms are interested is industry; the capacity for sustained hard work. From a resume and a transcript, an employer can infer about an applicant's industry; one who earns a certain GPA while otherwise busy with law related projects outside class (e.g., moot court, JOLT, Legal Forum) is presumed more industrious than another who earns the same GPA having concentrated exclusively on class work. A prize winning essay is the best evidence of research, analytical, and writing skills, and good evidence of industry when accompanied by steady or improving GPA. An essay that doesn't win a prize is nevertheless the contestant's best legal writing to date, surely a much better example than would be a memo or brief required for Lawyering Skills, which are more learning experiences than completed demonstrations of skill.
That the prize is usually an attractive amount of cash is worth mention, but more important is the prestige of winning a competitive event and of gaining publication in a journal. Most essay contests are sponsored by bar groups and judged by panels of practicing lawyers or sitting judges, not professors. The essays are judged only against one another, so the judgment is about relative excellence, that is, about excellence in a year group or potential job applicant pool. The judging is by potential employers. Publication often comes in a journal edited by lawyers rather than students. Traditionally, notice of publication is set apart in a prominent way on a resume, so that winning an essay contest produces two impressive entries: success in the contest and publication in the journal afterward.
Writing for an essay contest is not an opportunity reserved only for the elite of your class. Anybody can compete; anybody can win. As you can confirm by polling your own circle of friends, most students think they have enough to do already, so that not many take on the lonely and additional work of preparing an essay for contest submission. This means that essay contests do not, normally, attract large numbers of entries. Moreover, the contests which set a larger number of pages or words as their limit attract fewer applicants than the contests which imply a preference for shorter essays. A few contests recognize the best essay submitted from each law school. There are literally dozens of such contests annually, with deadlines throughout the year. Some challenge contestants to write on a single issue or topic selected by the sponsors, like gun control, affirmative action, or child custody; others grant contestants wide latitude to write about what interests them in a general field, like bankruptcy, legal ethics, or Native American law. Information about all of them can be found here in our catalog.
I often invite a student considering this sort of venture to reflect on the elasticity of time, especially as it relates to class credits and therefore to grades and GPA. There is no starting point or kickoff for an essay contest, except that presented by its announcement. But, for a contest repeating every year only general guidelines regarding the same topic, this year's announcement is no surprise. Thus, when the umpteenth annual legal writing essay contest on government contracts law is finally announced next term, the careful observer with a historical perspective will notice that only the date has changed. This means that a student with the long view may begin preparing an entry even before a contest is announced.
Consider the cost effectiveness of combining a contest entry with a supervised independent study, seminar, or paper course. In effect, you are paying yourself to prepare for a prize. Whether you win or not, you still get academic credit. Your work is supervised by a faculty member and the "structure" of an independent study or paper course assists you with the discipline necessary to pen several drafts. The rules of most contests allow this sort of collaboration. Here, too, time is elastic: while credit is associated with a particular semester, nothing about an independent study or course requires you to forego working on your project until classes begin. Were you to labor hard over Christmas or in the summer, your three-credit essay and contest entry could be well in hand when your attention first must be diverted among other classes. An essay entry that is also earning credit allows you to arrange your credits vis a vis your labor so that you earn fifteen in a semester while really working on only twelve, since you've done the work for the other three already; meanwhile, your classmates must work on all fifteen to earn fifteen. Writing for a legal essay contest early in your law school career gets you the earliest market advantage; writing for a legal essay contest later gets you at least a chance at an extra return on the third-year paper you must complete for graduation. Nothing stops you from competing in both years. Indeed, some essays may be suitable for more than one contest in the same year.
Finally, consider researching an essay this summer as an alternative, in case you don't find a place as a summer associate. That you were busy researching and writing for publication is a better answer than most for the employer noticing that, during your school vacation, you didn't work for a law firm. Besides, having studied a legal issue sufficiently to write about it at length enables you to thereafter discuss it confidently, even when interviewing with lawyers practicing in that field.
As more T.C. Williams students enter and win national law student competitions, the law school's reputation is bound to grow, and with it, our ability to attract career placements not only for the contest winners, but for their classmates. If there is no such thing as bad publicity, what could be better publicity than repeated announcements that the students at the University of Richmond School of Law are producing prize-winning legal writing?
Who knows, you might just fall in love with research and end up a professional legal scholar!