Law School and the LSAT in Your 30s

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Going to law school at 30 or above can be a daunting decision for a myriad of reasons:

  • Social ostracization – no one is looking forward to being “the old person” in their class.
  • Opportunity cost – you might be making a decent living by this point, so sacrificing that income while you spend three years in law school is a steep cost to factor in.
  • Kids/mortgage – you might have way more obligations of time and money than you did in your 20s.
  • Neural plasticity – you might worry that you’re becoming an “old dog who can’t learn new tricks.”
  • The LSAT – some stupid test plays a huge role in your admissibility to top law school programs.

But there is good news:

You’re not actually old. I’ll be the old person, or someone else in their 40s or 50s will be in your law school cohort and give you cover. Also, having taught people in their 20s throughout my 30s, I can tell you that it’s very easy to relate to them. You can take a non-judgmental curiosity in how times have changed, without becoming the person who complains, “In my day ….”

Your brain is still capable of miracles. People who have entire regions of their brains removed will often later regain that lost functionality as their brains rewire to cope with the new reality. You are actually probably doing something wonderful for the future health of your brain by challenging it to grapple with new ideas, new rules, new ways of thinking. Many studies suggest that one big way to reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s later in life is to avoid falling into a mental rut. Continue to learn new languages, read challenging books, and develop new hobbies.

The LSAT might be your golden ticket into law school. Because law schools take LSAT scores to be very effective predictors of law school performance, you can potentially allay any fears that the admissions office (or you) might have about your ability to “keep up” with law school by doing great on the LSAT. Also, since you’ve been out of school longer than most law school attendees, studying for the LSAT will felicitously get you back into the rhythm of wearing a backpack, going to a coffee shop or library, and spending a couple of hours with your face in a book and your mind enthralled in the state of learning.

You are an “atypical” law school candidate! Law schools usually have rolling admissions, with the first round deadlines being in late Sept/early October, the second round deadlines being in late Dec/early Jan, and the third round deadlines being around March. The gist of these three different rounds is that 1st round gives you the best chance of getting in and getting financial aid, 2nd round gives you less chance to get financial aid but still a good chance to be admitted, and 3rd round is a very low probability of being accepted unless you’re an atypical candidate. At this point in the admissions cycle, the admissions board is taking a look at the diversity of its incoming students and using its 3rd round picks to flesh out its diversity. While ethnic diversity is one consideration, diversity of experience and point of view regardless of ethnicity is highly valued. By being born in a different era than most other incoming students, by having more real-world work experience, by having had more chance to travel, and potentially by having already entered the role of being a parent, you will be bringing a wiser and more practical perspective to your studying and thus helping younger students to consider things in ways that might not occur to them yet.

If you have kids, you’ll set a great example for them, in terms of ambition and determination. Depending on your goals in the field of law, you might even inspire them to also try to make the world a better place. Yes, you will see them less (which to most of us parents is, at least initially, a blessing). You’ll have some guilty moments when you miss out on being there for something because you’re in class or studying. But you’ll also be able to bond with them over the shared burden of doing homework. If they’re old enough, they may even be able to play the Logic Games with you (just don’t get freaked out if they end up having an easier time learning them than you do).

At any age, deciding to go to law school is a calculated risk, since you incur a lot of debt and invest a lot of time, and there isn’t any guarantee that you’ll be able to make back that money or even necessarily enjoy the lawyerly career that awaits. But that complex calculus is for another article. Let’s just focus on what Manhattan Prep knows best: preparing for the LSAT.

Studying for the LSAT in Your 30s: What You Need to Know

  • The test is administered at least six times a year (LSAC is currently playing around with its scheduling). In 2020, there will be a test in Jan, Feb, March, and April (these are the only announced dates so far), but there will presumably also be tests in June, September, and November.
  • To go from LSAT newbie to “this is probably the highest LSAT score that I am capable of” takes most people about six months of regular studying.
  • In a perfect world, students would do a little independent studying before taking a class or getting tutoring, and they would have a month or two following the class to get in some more practice. It’s nice to learn some intro stuff on your own (ideally by drilling the fundamental skills from the 5 Lb Book of LSAT Practice, by taking a brisk first read through the 3 Manhattan Prep Strategy Guides, and by doing the LSAT Interact Self-Study). The shrewdest play is to sign up for a Manhattan Prep class that wouldn’t be starting for a month or two, so that you can get access to the books and online lessons immediately and start working. It’s not important to develop mastery on that first pass, but getting an initial foundation of exposure to the test and to the relevant test-taking strategies will make your class or tutoring experience much more valuable. 
  • In total, about 20% of your study time should be passively absorbing instructional books, online lessons, or in-person lessons, while 80% of your study time should be actively doing, deeply reviewing, or re-doing official LSAT problems (or other LSAT drills). At the beginning of your studying, the passive stuff may occupy half your time or more. But you should always intermingle active practice, and you will segue within a month or two of beginning your studying into a routine that is predominantly practice, review, redo.

You don’t need to carve out large uninterrupted blocks of time. How fortunate, since parents of young children almost never have such a thing! 15 – 30 minute spurts are great. That is enough to load a meal’s worth of content into the brain, at which point we need to actually STOP studying the LSAT in order for our brains to digest and encode what we just worked on.

Prepping for the LSAT in Your 30s: Study Calendar

According to learning science, the best way to learn many things is through “spaced repetition”–the act of seeing the same thing several times, at increasing intervals of time. So rather than trying a handful of challenging questions and then reading explanations and re-reading explanations, straining our brains to understand, we should instead try 10-15 minutes of material in the morning. Look at it again that night. Look at it again 3-7 days later. Maybe look at it again 1-2 weeks later.

How are you going to keep track of which stuff is “due to redo”? You should start a Redo Calendar. It’s the most important organizing tool for studying standardized tests. When we try new problems, we’re essentially auditioning them to see whether they’re easy, a medium struggle, or a big struggle. The easy stuff will get filtered out and we won’t bother redoing it, unless we’re resolved to do it again faster. The medium and big struggles should all be redone, at least once but usually two or three times.

If you sit down and try 10 Logical Reasoning problems, you will probably find at least five of them are lower-confidence answers for you. Unless you’re feeling 90% or better confidence in the answer you’re picking, you should “flag” a problem for review/redo.

The Phases of Review / Redo:

  • PHASE 1: Try the problem again, untimed.
  • PHASE 2: Check out the answer choice and, if you were wrong, try to figure out how to arrive at the correct answer.
  • PHASE 3: See an expert’s explanation and identify any thoughts / moves / anticipation modeled by the expert that you think you should add to your skillset or understanding.
  • PHASE 4: If there’s something you learned from this problem that you could quiz yourself on via flashcard, make that flashcard. Either way, schedule a redo appointment in your redo calendar to see this problem again. You can use the shorthand of PT67, S2, Q10 to mean “test 67, section 2, question 10”. Or even 67/2/10, if that’s easier. Be very arbitrary about assigning this to yourself one or two more times. Usually, if it was only a medium struggle, then you would schedule one redo appointment on a day 7-14 days later. If it was a big struggle, schedule two redo appointments: one of them 3-5 days later, and the other 7-10 days after that.

Juggling the LSAT and Parenting

If you have children, one of the most daunting aspects of going to law school in your 30s is the simple realization that you will have to find a lot of time to study, and that will almost certainly rob you of some of the time you’d otherwise be spending with your kids. To combat that, let’s get creative at ways to hang out with our kids while still deepening our prowess at the LSAT.

How Can You Involve Your Kids?

  • If your child can read, have THEM quiz you on your flashcards!  It’s good reading practice for them, and they’ll find it fun to be quizzing you for once.
  • If your child is 7 or older, they can probably play some LSAT logic games with you (especially the more straightforward Ordering or Grouping games). While that may sound deflating – “These games are crazy hard for me … you’re saying my kid could do them?” – we’re not talking about full speed LSAT games. The kid is going to be slow at first, and you’ll need to explain the rules of the road to them. But that process is incredibly powerful. Most pedagogical schools of thought agree that being able to teach something or being able to write creative “spin-off” problems is the highest stage of mastery. In medical school, there’s a well-known sequence called, “See one, Do one, Teach one”, which succinctly captures the three stages of Initial Exposure, Functional Competence, and then Mastery.
  • At the end of the day, instead of reading them a bedtime story, read them a “Reading Comp story.” Naturally, they would fall asleep in boredom were you to read the actual academic prose of an LSAT reading comp passage. So, don’t! In fact, don’t read it to them at all. Tell them about what you read in your own words. They’ll humor you because you’re letting them inside your studying world. Your job is to make it interesting. The topics are often interesting legal questions, scientific discoveries, social science experiments, and glowing articles about lesser-known artists (with a big multi-cultural bent to it). This is your chance to practice reading RC passages with the goal of processing and encoding the passage so well that, hours later, you can express the meaning of what you read in terms of your own choosing (we would like to internalize the meaning of a passage in the easiest, most causal, slangy language we can). If you can find what’s interesting in an RC passage, remember it, and dumb it down so that you can discuss it with kids, then you’ve actually mastered three of the biggest skills in LSAT RC!

Although there are certainly likely to be bigger challenges for older students, going to law school in your 30s is a bold, brave, but realistic idea. And in case you’re feeling like you’re “running late” in terms of your legal career, just remember this – if you live as long as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then you still have 50 years in front of you to practice law. Good luck!


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patrick-tyrrellPatrick Tyrrell is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Los Angeles, California. He has a B.A. in philosophy, a 178 on the LSAT, and relentless enthusiasm for his work. In addition to teaching test prep since 2006, he’s also an avid songwriter/musician. Check out Patrick’s upcoming LSAT courses here!