Many people come to law school because it opens a lot of doors. Recently graduated from college and can’t decide if you want to work in politics or private equity? Go to law school and figure it out later.

It’s true that a law degree provides a lot of options. But most people take the exact wrong lesson from having those options. They think that having options means that they should avoid closing doors while they figure out what they’d like to do. 

That’s might work okay for making some kinds of career decisions, but it’s a pretty risk averse strategy to adopt if your goal is to land a job with very few openings. A better way to think about options in that case is that a law degree is an insurance policy that mitigates the downside risk of decisions that don’t work out. If you want a legal job that’s hard to get, you should go for broke and assume that having a law degree means that you’ll be able to figure out a back-up plan later if it doesn’t work out.

This brings me to what to do in law school if you want to be a law professor. The sooner in law school that students decide that they’d like to become a law professor, the more likely they are to achieve that goal. Law schools are full of people and resources that can help students become good legal academics. It’s best if the students are able to take advantage of those resources before they graduate.

At this point, I’m sure people are asking: how can anyone know they’d like to be a law professor early in their law school career? Well, everyone that starts an anthropology PhD Program has figured out they want to be a professor before graduate school. So you don’t have to take graduate classes before you can decide to be a professor. And I meet plenty of prospective law students that know they are interested in being a law professor. There are many people that think they are interested in potentially being an academic early in their legal education.

The problem is that those students rarely get good advice. The things most people will tell you to do if you are interested in being a law professor—get good grades, get on law review, clerk for a good judge—are outcomes. Students don’t need to be told that it would be helpful for them to do well at law school if they want elite jobs. That’s obvious. What the need to be told is what to concretely do with their time and how to direct their energy.

Imagine an economics PhD student asking their advisor how to get a good job, and the advisor responding: write a good job market paper. Sure, that’s the most important thing they can do. But telling the student about the targets they should be shooting for isn’t that helpful. The students already knew that they need to write a good paper. The helpful thing is guiding them through the process of writing it.

And in the law school context, exclusively focusing on the targets to shoot for is not only unhelpful, it’s actively harmful. This is because it causes people to delay getting focused on preparing themselves for an academic career. The only advice students hear is that certain targets are helpful to hit, so they hold off deciding if they want to be a law professor until they know if they’ve met those targets. And by doing so, they lose valuable time that they could be spending preparing themselves to be a great scholar. 

So how should you spend your time in law school if you want to be a law professor? Spend it figuring out yours answer to these five questions: (1) what subject do you want to (initially) research; (2) what methods will you use to research it; (3) who are the leading people currently researching that subject; (4) what has been said about the subject; and (5) what’s an important point that hasn’t been made about the subject.

What can you do to figure out the answers to those questions?

• As soon as possible, go ask a professor to recommend a recent law review in a subject you think you might be interested in. Actually read that article, think of some thoughts about the article, go talk to the professor about it, repeat.

• After 1L year, when picking classes, always take at least one class where you are writing a paper instead of a final. Spend your time during the semester on the paper, get feedback, make it better. Your goal shouldn’t be to write a paper that meets the requirements of the class (e.g. a 25 page paper on a topic that’s really well trodden). Your goal should be to use the seminar to write the first draft of a paper that will one day be publishable. You don’t have to actually publish the article — you’ll throw away plenty of drafts. But no one gets good at producing scholarship without practice.

• Take every academic workshop (e.g. public law workshop, law and economics workshop, law and philosophy workshop) that’s offered as a class. If these workshops aren’t offered as a class, figure out a way to get permission to attend anyway. Workshops will expose you to more scholarship and more scholars, and let you see what it takes to give a successful talk.

• Unless there is a clinic in your area of academic interest (e.g. you’re interested in criminal law and your school has a criminal defense clinic), avoid clinics. And even if there is a clinic in your area, still consider avoiding it. Clinics are extremely awesome ways to do interesting legal work and to get very close to clinical faculty, so for most students they are excellent options. But for someone focused on producing research, the opportunity costs are too high. [note: much of the advice on this post doesn’t apply if you want to be a clinical professor, but obviously this one doesn’t apply at all.]

• Work as an RA, but don’t do too much work as an RA. Working as an RA is a great way to get to know professors and get to know their research, but as quickly as possible you should be scheming about how to start your own projects.

• Get to know the youngest professors at your school; they have the freshest advice.

• Attend lunch talks whenever possible. Even if it’s not in your subject area, the more you know about law, the legal system, and legal research, the better.

• Take grad school classes in other departments in the field(s) closest to your research interest. Think legal history is interesting? Go learn what they are teaching aspiring historians.

• Take major black letter law classes in a range of areas. Concerned about the history of originalism? You should still be taking classes like Corporations or Antitrust. You’ll get more ideas, and also importantly, be able to talk intelligently to a wider range of people when you’re actually on the job market.

• Make friends with people that have similar goals. These friends don’t have to be in your law school, or even law students at all. But it’s helpful if you know more aspiring academics. Like I said before, peers give the best advice.

I’m sure there are more, but those are a few of concrete steps that people can take in law school to get to the cutting edge of research in a particular field. Even if you don’t “win” law school (e.g. your grades aren’t great, you’re not on law review, you don’t land a clerkship), you can still break into the legal academy if it’s clear that you know what it takes to be a leading researcher.

What if you’re already past law school and didn’t take these steps? Don’t worry; it’s not too late. We’ll talk tomorrow about what to do after law school.