Packaging: Your Key To the Top Law Schools

LONG BEFORE Harvard Law School was even a twinkle in some Puritan's eye, Shakespeare wrote, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

Unfortunately, all the lawyers survived They were fruitful and multiplied, and they became very, very rich.

So Richard Yao, author of Packaging: Your Key to the Top Law Schools, now gives us a new philosophy: Let's make everybody a lawyer. Or, at the very least, let's get everybody into law school.

The problem with Packaging, however, is that if you really need Yao's advice, your chances of getting accepted to one of his "top-ten" law schools are probably slimmer than his book (127 pages). Packaging is very serious about being remedial. The book is typeset with letters large enough for Dr. Seuss captions. And it is written, according to Yao, "like a good legal memorandum..lean, basic, and in plain English" I don't know about the "legal memorandum" stuff, but Yao isn't kidding about the plain English. A sample: "Misspellings and typos often overlap. It is sometimes hard to tell if we have a typo or a misspellings. Typos and misspellings can be very distracting and irritation."

The level of discourse in Packaging gets only slightly more complex. Yao does suggest some good strategies for gearing applications to specific types of law schools, and he also gives some decent advice to "minorities" (a word he inexplicably insists on putting in quotation marks). Yao compiled Packaging, he tells us, by interviewing successful and unsuccessful law school applicants, and by basing "some part of it" on his own experience (he got into "about half" of the law schools to which he applied).

Packaging, in general, should be a helpful set of guidelines for students applying to less-than-selective law schools, especially if those students have a weak background in competitive applications.

But the meat of Packaging is straight out of my eighth-grade Warriner's grammar book. "Use the active voice." "Use parallel construction," and "Use paragraphs as basic building blocks" are some of Yao's rather commonsense suggestions Yao's thesis that most qualified law school applicants don't spend enough time on major mistake." The solution? Packaging of course. But be careful. Yao warns "You are not packaging yourself so that Aunt Molly will hire you to clean her yard once a week, nor are you packaging yourself so that your father will let use his new car." Assuming you can read the front cover of the book, you are packaging yourself to get into law school.

You'd probably think that future Felix Frankfurters wouldn't buy such a petty primer. Wrongo Yao told The Crimson last week that advance sales of the book--available only by writing the publisher--"have been incredible, and I don't think that's an accident." The Coop expects Packaging (which will hit the bookshelves next month) to sell "very, very well." The phenomenal thing is that there are already half a dozen similar books on sale at most area book stores (one of the best guides is Your Ticket to Low School by Harvard Law School student Lawrence Graham). Yao says, however, that his volume--with its focus specifically on law school applications--is different enough from the others to "fill a gap." He seems to be right.

Yao said that on the day he talked to The Crimson he had phone interview with 15 other colleges, including number of Ivy League Schools. Although, as Yao, writes. The competition is tough out there," people any crawling all over each other to find the edge for getting into prestigious School. It's rather obvious why there such a demand for this type of book money. But nobody will admit to that not even Yao, who said. "Money was not a primary consideration for writing this book. I just want to help people get into law school. "How altruistic.

According to his book, Yao is an associate at a "major"--but un named--Wall Street law firm Curiously, two of the people who plug the book on the back cover are also associates at "Major Wall St. Law Firm." And I suspect that thousands of people who will buy Packaging are prospective associates at "Major Walk St. Law Firm. "Many of them probably didn't know (before they read Packaging) that they should not under any circumstances, "sprinkle" their applications with "typos, misspellings and grammatical errors." Nonetheless Yao wants them to join the legalistic lemmings.

May be Shakespeare was right.