Let’s face it, very little about law school actually prepares young lawyers for how to practice the law in life after graduation. We enter the profession with a framework for analyzing the law and a baseline knowledge of its substance after enduring three years of the Socratic method and suffering through the hell that is the bar exam. But while new generations of juris doctors may be able to recite the holding in International Shoe by memory, when it comes to doing the actual legal work, no matter how stellar our academic credentials, most of us start with a blank slate. And it’s not just how to lawyer that is excluded from the law school curriculum.

Many young lawyers are also unfamiliar with the dogma unique to the profession. There is an unspoken code of mores and taboos, with which successful lawyers become well versed. Even after several years of practice, lawyers must learn the culture of their particular firm or office— the all-important unwritten rules that aren’t included in the orientation paperwork, such as how to get ahead in a particular department, what’s really involved in progressing through the partner track, and what you need to do to be selected for the cases you really want to work on. On a smaller scale still, they must learn the nuances of an individual partner’s preferred writing style, a certain judge’s notorious pet peeves, or the idiosyncrasies of a tricky client’s expectations.