ABOUT | legaleagle

Welcome to Legal Eagle

When you first get accepted into law school, it’s an amazing feeling.

No, forget amazing...it’s euphoric.

The doors of wealth and power are going to open for you.

You...are going to be...a lawyer.

It’s a feeling that never gets old...until law school actually starts.

And that’s when the reality sinks in:

Law school is hard

Not only that...

Law school is different.

Everyone is smart. Everyone is hard working. The case load is crushing. And the homework is endless. You study for hours and hours, but you never feel like you’re ready for the final exam.

But imagine if it didn’t have to be that way. Imagine if you could cut out the busy work—cut out the bullshit—and get A’s while working less than your peers.

Imagine if you had the key to an academic backdoor—one that let you get on the fasttrack to an A+.

How great would that feel?

The thing I hate about most law school advice is all the bullshit – all the superstitions, the platitudes, and the worn-out clichés:

"Keep up with the reading! Work hard! Brief every case!"

Gee, thanks.

"It worked for this one student in my class!"

Uh, maybe that person succeeded in spite of that advice they were given, and not because of it.

The bottom line—it’s all new to you and it’s not clear what works and what doesn’t.

Finals are the only grades that matter, but you get zero feedback until after your finals are over. So you end up having to study everything, doing hundreds of hours of useless crap work that won’t help on the final, because you don’t know any better.

I can’t stand that.

I can’t stand the amount of B.S. busy work you and every other law student insist on doing for no reason.

Why do the maximum amount of work to maybe get an A, when you could do the minimum amount necessary and definitely get an A?

Hi! I'm Devin.

I'm the head instructor and founder of Legal Eagle.

When I was accepted to UCLA Law, I was ecstatic.

This was the BIG leagues of law schools, and my first step toward becoming a big-time trial attorney.

What Kareem Abdul Jabbar did for UCLA basketball, I would do for the UCLA School of Law.

There was just one, small problem:

“Common wisdom” said I was going to crash and burn in law school.

Here’s why:

I read very slowly. You might call it glacial. Reading 10 cases per night 3x each, wasn’t going to happen.
I cherish my free time. It’s my favorite kind of time—in law school, you’re not supposed to have any of it.
I wanted to be a lawyer not a scholar. Academic research is my version of hell.
I wasn’t willing to give up my personal life. I’m willing to work hard for short bursts, but I refuse to give up my sleep for months at a time—law school doesn’t want you to sleep, doesn’t want you to eat, it just wants you to read.
My health is important to me. I wasn’t going to become a lawyer only to shorten my lifespan—and that’s what the stress of the law school environment does, especially in your 1L year.

Most of my friends and family thought law school would be a disaster for me, based on what conventional wisdom said.

But that’s because “common wisdom” is crap.

(Winning 1st place in Mock Trial

during my 1L year)

“Law school success is just a matter of working hard,” the professors say, “work hard, and you’ll emerge at the head of the pack.”

Really? Because it sure seems to me like every law student “works hard.” Didn’t we all work hard to get into law school?

The law school curve dictates – no matter what –only the top 20% of the class gets A’s, the middle 60% get B’s, and the bottom 20% get C’s.

You’re telling me only the top 20% works hard? Bullshit. Tell the B-students they “didn’t work hard enough to get an A,” and you’ll get punched in the face. Rightfully so, I might add.

If “hard work” was all that mattered, the sure-fire way to get to the top of your class would be to eat caffeine pills like tic-tacs and sleep when you graduate. But law school doesn’t work like that.

So, how does law school work?

That’s a question I asked myself when I was standing in your shoes years ago.

Like you, I didn’t know what to really expect.

But, fortunately for me, I got the most important lecture of my entire life right before I started 1L.

One of my college professors—a retired lawyer—liked to give his graduating students some advice about law school, advice I’m going to share with you. His few tips ran contrary to the standard law school advice I had been getting (for example he told me to outline my classes from day one – most people wouldn’t do it but by outlining from the start I would be way ahead of everyone else when finals started. If you’re interested, I go into more detail here).

His insights blew my mind wide open. They were the foothold I needed to buck all the generic advice I had been given, and do something radically different.

So, I threw Law School Confidential in the trash and started testing.

I stopped making assumptions about law school—“because everyone else is doing it,” would no longer be good enough. I was going to forge my own path and built an entire law school study system from the ground up.

So I did, and it worked.

Here is the proof from my first semester at a Tier-1 law school (crim law, torts, civ pro):

(this is my actual report card from first semester: straight A’s, 4.0)

My GPA was so high, I got a scholarship after I started law school (they gave me a scholarship between my first and second semester to prevent me from transferring).

My system worked all three years and I graduated with an A- average that led to my dream job as a trial lawyer in one of the best firms in the country.

I’ve been a practicing big firm lawyer for 10 years now, am a member of the bar in 5 states (including California and New York) and have successfully argued in front of the 4th and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeal. I’ve practiced in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. My work has been covered by Law360 dozens of times.

My grades also gave me the flexibility to do ALL the extra curriculars: