I’m great at lying—for better or worse. I’ve been performing magic my entire life, which is to say, I’ve been deceiving people my entire life.

(I bent the fork with my mind, by the way.)

I regularly look people right in the eye and say, “Now, I have no idea what your card is,” when I know that their card is the three of clubs…because every card in the deck is the three of clubs.

I keep my deception separate from my law school career, but last week in Negotiations, I was encouraged to merge the two.

We had a simulation in which I was playing the role of a landowner who wanted to buy an easement running through a neighbor’s property. I was planning to develop the land and build 8 condos on it….but if the owner of the neighboring land found that much out, they’d likely refuse to sell me the easement or charge me an arm and a leg for it; they didn’t want a lot of traffic running through their land.

The point of the assignment was to get the easement for as little as possible…only I wasn’t allowed to directly lie about my plans to develop the land. (The Model Rules of Profession Conduct prevent that.) I was encouraged to provide half-answers and dodge questions and that sort of thing.

Long story short: I struck the best deal in the class. By far. Here are some bits of conversation from my deal.

Land Owner: What are you going to use the land for?
Lawyer Boy: If we strike a deal today, I can promise to use it for only residential purposes.

LO: How much traffic will there be on my road.
LB: Is traffic a big concern for you?
LO: Sure is.
LB: Me too. My last house was on a main road and there’d be cars going by at all hours…

During the post-negotiations wrap up, the professor, who had been monitoring all the negotiations, said, “Mr. Lax, you were doing everything you could to avoid the issue at hand, and it seems as though you succeeded in doing so.”

I hope my time spent doing magic will help me in my legal career…but I also wonder whether it might get me into trouble one day…

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So…I just got a cease and desist e-mail from Kenyon & Kenyon LLP telling me I could no longer blog under the name “LawSchoolBlogger.” Being April 1st, I assumed this was an April Fools’ Day joke set up by one of my classmates. Long story short: it wasn’t.

Here’s what happened: I just got off the phone with Kenyon & Kenyon attorney David Darschlaw, who told me that a guy named Phillip Roth, who owns and operates LawSchoolBlog.com, owns right to the name “LawSchoolBlogger” too.

My dad says he’s not so sure that Roth has a valid claim against me, but that this is a battle not worth fighting. So right now, I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to blog under a different name or whether this order is maybe a sign that it’s time for me to stop blogging and focus more on school, the Bar Exam, and promoting Lawyer Boy.

Either way, this will be my last post on “LawSchoolBlogger.com.” So let me say, thank you so much for all the time you’ve spent on this blog. Thanks so much for reading, and thanks so much for all your great comments. In writing them, you’ve actually helped me a lot with lots of things.

That’s all for now.

-Rick Lax

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Wills, Trusts, and Estates class was canceled. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until after I showed up for class and nobody else was there.

I called my friend and asked if class had been canceled. She said that it had been and that our professor said so at the end of last class. So I opened up my notes from last class and read, “NO CLASS NEXT WEEK!!! DON’T FORGET!!!”

I showed up to class ten minutes early because I had nothing else to do, I hung around the classroom to see if anybody else might have forgotten…which would have made me feel a little less incompetent.

Finally, two minutes before class was (not) set to begin, somebody showed up and said, “Where is everybody?”

“Class was canceled,” I said.

“Really? I don’t remember Prof. O saying that.”

“Who’s Prof. O?” I asked.

“Wait a second. I’m on the ninth floor, aren’t I? Wrong floor! Never mind!”

She had meant to go to room 805, not 905…leaving me the only student in a class of 100 who had forgotten about the cancellation.

(By the way…I’m reading through the Cartoon Caption Contest entries…I think y’all can do better….)

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Kicked butt in Negotiations yesterday. I feel guilty, almost. I partnered up with the guy I negotiated against last time, and before we began our negotiations with the other side, we agreed that I’d be the “good cop.”

Within 20 seconds of our negotiations, the girl on the other side said, “So you’re the good cop, eh?”

Here’s the situation: we owed the other side money. Somewhere between $1,900 and $3,400. So if we went to trial, we’d lose $1,900 at the least and $3,400 at the most.

We ended up settling for $1,902.

It was the lowest number in the class by far. During the wrap-up discussion with the professor, the girl on the other side called us “sleazebags,” but the professor told her that we were just doing our jobs.

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Last week in class my professor broke the students up into discussion groups of three and gave us a handful of problems to work out. We were given 30 minutes to do this. About five minutes into the exercise, somebody in my group said, “We’re thinking about this too hard. It’s possible to over-analyze something, you know.”

“Well,” I said, “the professor did give us thirty minutes to do this stuff, so he probably wants us to do a real thorough analysis. We’ve still go twenty-five minutes, too.”

“But at this point we’re just splitting hairs,” my groupmate continued.

“I think that’s the point of this.”

The third group member agreed with the other guy and we spent the last twenty minutes talking about the weather.

Anyway, the case we were discussing—a real case from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals—had the following quote in it. I’ll give you the quote, you try to guess the context:

“The plaintiff’s Jew is quite unlike the defendant’s.”

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Most of you LSB readers don’t know me personally. And most of you, I suspect, don’t go to law school. So you’re probably wondering what it’s like to hang out with me for a minute or attend a real law school lecture…

(This footage came from today’s Copyright class.)

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Today in Negotiations I was paired up against this kid named Don, who I went up against in Trial Advocacy class last semester. We were trying to settle a $450,000 lawsuit against my client and a $450,000 countersuit against his. Don asked me for $950,000–factored interest and inflation into the number–and, to his credit, he did it with a straight face. I offered him zero. After ten more minutes of negotiations, he dropped to $750,000. I again offered zero. And negotiations ended there. The end.

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Exams are three hours long each. For me, three hours is a real long time. I generally don’t even see any movies longer than two because I know I’ll be bored.

I swear, my three-hour Business Organization final was the fastest three hours of my life. I was totally in the zone. I have no clue what I wrote and no clue if any of it made any sense, but I do remember FEELING like I was answering the questions correctly. Guess I’ll find out in about 6 weeks.

Next final: Intellectual Property. It’s a 24-hour take-home exam, and I plan to take it home on Wednesday afternoon.

(And by the way, my posts will get exciting again when school starts back up on January 14th)

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My Business Organization final is in less than 48 hours. I took 120 pages of notes (Times New Roman, 12-point, single-spaced) in that class. They’re a mess too. That’s why this blog entry sucks.

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Tonight I got notes from my professor on my overall performance in Trial Advocacy II class.

He said that I improved throughout the semester, and that the thing I most need to work on is being more formal. Smile less, straighten my tie—that sort of thing.

He said that during my opening and closing arguments, I frequently said things like “you guys,” “you all,” and “know what I’m talking about?”

The funny thing is, before the class started, I made a conscious decision to be less formal. In Trial Ad I, my professor said I came across as too polished. Clearly my attempt to be more “real” and “raw” didn’t go as planned—know what I mean?

My Trial Ad II professor definitely knows what he’s talking about and I take his opinion real seriously, so I do plan to be more formal in future trials….if I ever have any…hope I do…

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