Future attorneys Greta Atchinson '06, Amy Clearwater '06, Andrew Clearwater '06 and Jordan McColman '05 share the stresses and successes of life in law school

Story and photos by Marc Glass (Fall 2007 issue)

Peruse the American Bar Association profile of the University of Maine School of Law and you’ll see that its approximately 250 students are no slouches: 75 percent achieved a cumulative GPA of 3.65 or better in college, and the same percentage scored a 158 or better on the Law School Admission Test. (Designed to measure one’s analytical reasoning skills, the half-day standardized exam features a scoring range of 120 to 180.)

What you won’t see on the profile is where Maine Law’s students come from. And that’s a shame, because UMF is well represented with Jordan McColman ’05, Amy Clearwater ’06, Andrew Clearwater ’06 and Greta Atchinson ’06. (At press time, three more UMF graduates, Michael Burian ’05, Chelsey Martin ’07 and Elyse Wilkinson ’06, were known to have matriculated in fall 2007.)

No longer “1Ls” (law school parlance for first-year students), McColman, Clearwater, Clearwater and Atchinson say UMF provided excellent academic preparation for the cognitive demands of law school, although nothing could have steeled them for the tempo and volume of work. Their stories provide a glimpse of an academic world alien to most of us—a place where, for instance, a lone student can spend a half hour of class time answering a professor’s withering inquiries and students play for all the marbles with a single test.

Jordan McColman ’05

9/11 marked the start of Jordan McColman’s career transition from flight attendant to law student. McColman and his wife, Mary, had been working as United Airlines flight attendants for 15 years. Sensing the airline was bound for bankruptcy in the aftermath of 9/11 and hoping to diversify their income stream, the couple relocated from Los Angeles to Mary’s hometown of Readfield, Maine. While they continued working domestic routes from Boston several days a week, McColman began to pursue a degree in history at UMF on a part-time basis.

“I tried to schedule weekend flights, and used a lot of paid and unpaid leave time so as not to miss classes. I still missed a class now and again, but I was hooked. I knew this was my way out,” he said. “I loved the classroom setting at UMF and the intellectual challenge of the whole endeavor. When graduation loomed large, I asked myself, ‘How high can I set this bar?’”

Thus, McColman made passing the Bar the next bar to clear. And, given his current trajectory, he’ll do so with ample altitude. At Maine Law, McColman was ranked among the top 10 in his class of 70 second-year law students. He won a coveted faculty invitation to serve as an editor of Maine Law’s “Ocean and Coastal Law Journal,” which publishes scholarly articles on marine resource regulation, coastal zone management, marine environmental protection and other ocean and coastal law topics. Stellar first-year marks also helped him secure a highly sought-after internship with Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe during summer 2006.

In his first semester of law school—long before setting a precedent for academic success—McColman said he gave Maine Law’s former director of admissions the third degree (couched in good-natured ribbing) about some particularly injurious evidence: McColman was the lone UMF graduate at Maine Law when he started back in fall 2005.

“I remember asking her, ‘Are there any UMF applicants in the pipeline for next year? They’re extremely competitive and worth a serious look,’” said McColman, who believes relatively low rates of law school matriculation among UMF graduates reflect a deficit in interest rather than aptitude for earning the Doctor of Law degree. “I think a lot of UMF graduates have the skills and grades to go.”

In fact, he said, the UMF curriculum was the perfect primer for law school.

“UMF professors pushed me to become a better writer. Liberal arts courses are ideal preparation because they emphasize reading, researching and writing critical analyses on what you’ve read,” he said. “When I got to law school, I was ahead of the game. I’m using the same techniques I learned at UMF to research and critically analyze cases.”

However, McColman said the undergraduate learning experience could not possibly have prepared him for the mental calisthenics required for parsing legal cases. With intense scrutiny, pages are turned at a glacial pace, meaning the typical law school day comprises 14 hours of in- and out-of-class work.

“In a college course you probably have three tests and two papers to earn a grade, plenty of opportunity to gauge how you’re doing and what you need to work on to improve. In law school your grade is based on the final exam. There are no other graded assignments for feedback along the way. It’s like teaching people how to swim by rowing them out to the middle of a lake and tossing them out of the boat. You basically spend the first semester scared to death,” said McColman, who defends the unrelenting onslaught of work with compelling logic: “You walk into a courtroom either ready or not. You cannot say to a judge, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I needed to know that for the case. Can I have another week to prepare?’”

To spend unfettered time with his wife on the weekends, McColman crams seven days of law school work into five. During summer 2007, when the living should have been easy (or at least somewhat easier), he took on a paid internship with the Portland law firm of Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon.

Despite clocking hours that defy normal circadian rhythms, McColman has given himself one other important, albeit cheeky, task before graduating from law school.

“I’ve got to break in a new director of admissions,” he laughed.

Amy and Andrew Clearwater ’06

Even before he started his first year of law school, McColman had an influence on at least one UMF student considering Maine Law. Amy Clearwater was working in the UMF Office of Financial Aid in the summer between her junior and senior years. Law school was at the fore of her post-UMF planning, so it was especially fortuitous that she happened to take a phone call from McColman, who had some financial-aid queries prior to his first year at Maine Law.

“We talked through his decision-making process and realized we had a lot of the same stresses and issues to consider,” she said. “The conversation made the entire application process and endeavor of going to law school seem real. Not so much doable, but very, very real.”

After the first semester at Maine Law, Clearwater was the top-ranked student in her class, which means a coveted invitation to join either the “Maine Law Review” or the “Ocean and Coastal Law Journal” is in the offing if her marks hold up. Despite her superlative academic success, Clearwater is not immune to the pressures of law school. In preparation for her first semester Constitutional Law final exam, she sat down to peruse a sample test provided to the class as a study guide. And, given what happened next, it’s a good thing she was seated.

“I looked at the first question and absolutely blanked. I was pretty sure I was prepared for the exam, but one look at the first question in a completely no-stakes situation and I became dizzy and almost passed out from the anxiety,” said Clearwater, who, a few days later, did just fine on the actual final exam. “There’s a lot of stress associated with law school.”

A former Maine Public Policy Scholar who self-designed a major in “Critical Social Analysis” and graduated magna cum laude, Clearwater was hardly the party maven at UMF. But now, she spends what precious little free time she has away from learning the vagaries of constitutional law by co-leading Maine Law’s mentoring program and coordinating social events to help “1Ls” (first-year students) assimilate—and, more importantly, cope.

“With hours that keep you working from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., you really do have to schedule your fun when you’re a law student. Making time for fun is critical just to relieve stress and stay functional,” she said.

Like all first-year students at Maine Law, Clearwater had the option of working with an upper-class mentor to help with adjustment issues. However, Clearwater found ample mutual support from one particular classmate, her husband, Andrew.

“It’s difficult for people in law school to explain to people not in law school just how much time it takes,” said Clearwater, who recalled first-year orientation programming rife with cautionary tales about the stressors of law school on non-matriculated partners, spouses and significant others. “Sometimes I think we’re crazy to take off as much time as we do for simple things like grocery shopping or getting the oil changed in the car. I can’t imagine what our lives would be like if only one of us were in law school.”

“Amy and I understand what we’re going through and help each other study. I wouldn’t have wanted to stagger our experience with one finishing law school before the other,” he said. “Helping each other through the challenges of school and starting our careers has made the process far more manageable.”

With a year of law school under his belt, Andrew Clearwater is finally able to chuckle, albeit ruefully, about the new dimensions of anxiety he experienced during his first year. He began by explaining the alien process of law school testing: after a semester of preparation, students earn their entire course grade with a single three-hour exam. Students who scribe answers to exam questions are segregated from those who type their responses to exam questions on laptops outfitted with test security software. (Apparently, according to accepted law school practices, test takers are more productive when surrounded by complementary clamor: the sound of scrawl offends the typists, while the din of laptop tapping distracts those who prefer the pen.)

“In addition to the stress of preparation, and all the work that goes into constructing an exam answer, there is the added fear that the technology could fail,” he said. (Fortunately, the exam software, which, in addition to blocking Internet access and use of ancillary programs during the test session, allows students to wirelessly submit their exam responses, has proven to be reliable.) “The program saves a copy of your responses on the laptop, but the fear of not having it go through when it’s supposed to is no small source of panic.”

Clearwater, who majored in sociology/anthropology with a minor in philosophy, conducted research on the social implications of new technology while at UMF. Now, he’s parlayed his knowledge into an appointment as the webmaster of the Maine Association of Law and Innovation.

“I have had an interest in intellectual property law for several years, and at Maine Law, there is a strong program in this area,” said Clearwater, who supplements an array of traditional courses by participating in Maine Law’s intellectual property clinic. During the summer he worked to create and strengthen connections among the legal and technological resources the University of Maine System provides to the public.

Although he was academically well prepared for the challenges of law school, Clearwater said nothing could have readied him for the Socratic method of inquiry popular with law school professors and perhaps best illustrated by actor John Housman’s portrayal of Harvard Law School Professor Kingsfield in the 1973 coming-of-age film “The Paper Chase.” With a barely discernable shiver, Clearwater recalled day one of law school:

“The professor in my Constitutional Law course pointed to a student and said ‘Give me the facts of Marbury v. Madison,’” he said. “When the professor asks you a question in college, you can usually give a brief answer, and you might face one follow-up question before the thread of the exchange is picked up by other students in a larger class discussion. In law school, one person responds to a line of inquiry for 15 minutes or longer. The questions keep coming and you aren’t given time to consult notes, so your command of the cases going into class has to be very strong.”

Escaping the scrutiny of the Socratic method would seem to be a prayer answered, but Clearwater said being thrust into the spotlight actually provides critical opportunities for feedback.

“With only one exam at the end of the semester, their questions are important to know if you’re on the right track,” he said.

Greta Atchinson ’06

Greta Atchinson recalled the same opening-day exchange between the constitutional law professor and the hapless classmate fingered for intense questioning. But what stuck in her mind was how the Socratic method established a singularly counter-collegial tone for the classroom.

“If you don’t know the answer, no one chimes in to help. There’s no cushion at all,” said Atchinson, who has seen the professor-pupil repartee consume nearly an hour of a Civil Procedure II class. Despite the disparity in class sizes at Maine Law and UMF, she said the small, intimate upper-level classes at UMF were good conditioning for the Socratic method.

“When classes are smaller, there’s no place to hide so I was used to being called on a lot by professors at UMF,” she said. “This hasn’t made me feel comfortable, just less anxious about being on the hot seat.”

Atchinson, who majored in history at UMF and passed on an offer to pursue a graduate degree in Russian History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, called the first year of law school the “great academic equalizer” as “everyone, regardless of their undergraduate preparation, struggles with the volume of work.” What does differentiate students, she said, is financial wherewithal. To contribute her share of pricey Portland rent split with sister Cadence ’03 (who earned a master’s in library science and now works as reference librarian at the University of New England), Atchinson spends school vacation weeks working as an overnight residential relief worker for Tri-County Mental Health Services. The job, which involves modeling life skills and dispensing medication for group-home-based adults with mental illness, allows her some undisturbed nocturnal hours for studying.

“American Bar Association rules discourage law students from working jobs outside law school at all and prohibit students from working more than 20 hours per month, but I need the money,” said Atchinson, who did similar work for Tri-County Mental Health Services while at UMF. “I was a social science kid at UMF, so I was stunned to pay $896.57 for my first semester books.”

In addition to dealing with the magazine interview, Atchinson planned to spend some hard-earned down time during vacation of spring 2007 filling the larder. Her goal was to prepare and freeze re-heatable meals (macaroni and cheese, chicken curry and stewed cabbage—a nod to cuisine she enjoyed while studying abroad in Russia) to reheat during exam week. The grind seemed a far cry from the life of fictional law school ingénue Elle Woods (portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the film ‘Legally Blonde’), but Atchinson—treasurer of the Women’s Law Association and secretary of the Maine Law Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild—was content, if not comfortable, with the work load. When asked if the silver-screen depiction of law school did reality justice, she laughed—and not just a little derisively.

“My little sister likes the ‘Legally Blonde’ concept of law school and wants me to live up to it. She was very disappointed that I didn’t wear pink on my first day of law school,” said Atchinson, referring to Elle Woods’ opening day fashion statement: a pink outfit paired with matching pink purse, pen and notebook. “I don’t think there’s any portrayal that shows you how much time it really takes. Any true picture of law school would be very boring. It would be a film filled with nothing but books.”