Hi everyone! My name is Elizabeth (Liz) Kosik, and I am so grateful to be serving as the Pre-Law Society President for my second year. As a senior at Loyola, I am majoring in Philosophy with a minor in History, pursuing a career in the legal field. I am blessed to have the opportunity to be involved in many areas of campus life, including serving as a Resident Assistant for the Office of Student Life and the Digital Content Manager for WLOY Loyola Radio.
I am fortunate to be joined by an amazing all-senior board this year, with Brianna Silva serving as our Vice President, Terrene Obuah as our Secretary, and Derin Fatungase as our Treasurer. We are all excited about the opportunities and initiatives we have planned for this year, including the introduction of the Pre-Law Society’s Peer-Mentoring Program. The program serves as an inclusive community for underclassmen to receive one-on-one mentoring from upperclassmen. We hope to create a supportive environment for pre-law students to connect with like-minded individuals who share similar career paths and interests. The girls and I are extremely honored to spearhead this opportunity and hope to create a lasting program for pre-law students in the Loyola community.
Thank you for supporting the Pre-Law Society, and we look forward to a productive and exciting year ahead!
Hello Loyola Pre-Law Students,
Welcome to the second year of the Pre-Law newsletter. We will send this out a few times a semester so, keep your eyes open for future issues. The newsletter contains information on upcoming speakers and events, interviews with attorneys, and program announcements. If you have not yet joined the Pre-Law Society on the Bridge, I highly suggest you do so. That will keep you current between newsletter deliveries.
In June I attended the Pre-Law Advisors National Conference, or PLANC. This is sort of a big deal because PLANC only happens every four years. Because of Covid, the last one to occur was back in 2016. Compared to eight years ago, some core things about becoming a lawyer remain unchanged. Law is still a dynamic profession that offers a host of different ways to earn a good living while helping others. There are trends to watch such as the rise of big law and the concentration of the industry. Now it is ever rarer to become a lawyer and hang your shingle or practice with a handful of others.
In the Pre-Law space, there are changes afoot. While the LSAT remains the instrument of choice to assess the quality of a law school applicant, and thus deserving of your attention, the test has changed. You can now take it online as well as in person, it is offered more times a year, and its format is different. Recently the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) removed the logic games that vexed law school applicants for generations. These questions were, however, deemed not suitable to assess visually impaired students. Going forward the test contains only two types of multiple-choice questions: reading comprehension and logical reasoning. There is a competitor to the LSAT emerging: JD Next. It is more of a skills-based test and claims to remove racial disparities in scoring present in the LSAT. As I write this though, it has not been widely adopted. I will continue to monitor this new test but for most of you reading this you’ll still need to prepare for the LSAT. The testing environment is changing albeit at a slow pace.
To that point, the LSAT writing sample is now more important than ever. For years, myself, and frankly anyone familiar with law school admissions doubted the relative weight of the LSAT writing component. Based on what I learned at PLANC I have changed my thinking on this. Law schools recognize that an ever-greater number of personal statements and recommendation letters are composed with the help of large language models (AI). Because law school staff have read thousands of admissions packets the admissions deans can confidently determine more applicants are relying on AI assistance.
Consequently, the timed writing portion of the LSAT has grown in importance. I would not have advised you of that even six months ago. When I heard current thinking on this, I let my colleague Dominic Micer in the Writing Center know so he could also adjust his support to applicants. While the personal statement remains a golden opportunity to tell a law school about yourself and shape your admissions “theory of the case,” be aware that admissions officers are now more closely scrutinizing your LSAT writing sample. Along with its relative value, its format has changed as well - to an argumentative essay. Because the change is recent there are less examples of high-quality responses available. Knowing this ahead of time and researching it further can assure you are adequately prepared on exam day.
For now, enjoy the rest of this newsletter. Check out the interviews with Loyola alumni and Pre-Law Advisory Board members Bill O’Hare and Amanda Preller. Amanda and Bill have been a big help over the past few years in shaping Pre-Law at Loyola and share some great advice below. If you want to contact them directly, I’m glad to pass along their email addresses. Their interviews will only take a few minutes to read and are filled with wonderful insights. Thanks to Sophia Capone for putting those together. Sophia is the Pre-Law work study, and in addition to the interviews, provides information on this fall’s expungement clinic and the new peer mentoring program. If you missed this year’s clinic keep an eye out for future volunteer opportunities. If you’re left with questions about the Pre-Law Society reach out to Liz Kosik (emkosik@loyola.edu) and for advising, you can contact me (rmbeverlin@loyola.edu).
Kind Regards,
Matt Beverlin
Loyola Pre-Law Advisor
Political Science Department
Bill O’Hare graduated in 1974 from Loyola with a B.A in Political Science. He then went on to get his J.D from the University of California, College of Law, San Francisco. Bill O’Hare is a partner at Snell & Wilmer Orange County and Los Angeles offices, a full-service business law firm. O’Hare is part of the firm's commercial litigation practice group. Recognized by Best Lawyers in America and Southern California Super Lawyers, he has received prestigious awards such as the Marcus Kaufman Jurisprudence Award and the Robert Samuel Barnes Award. O’Hare also serves on the board of Public Media Group of Southern California and is a past president of Project Youth OCBF.
Was there any specific moment or experience that made you decide to become a lawyer?
I think I kind of had a vague idea going into college, that it (law) was something I might want to do. I think what reinforced or confirmed that was more of an academic exercise, when I ended up taking two case study courses: constitutional law and civil liberties. Those courses then and I assume now are fairly similar to what the bulk of law school education is, and yet very different from most of the modes by which we are instructed in other classes. Those were classes that I enjoyed a lot and did well in. So, some of it was academic, it was what I wanted to study for three years, which suggests what you might be spending a lot of time doing after that. Pick something you enjoy. When I’m talking to somebody about whether to go to law school, the top of my list is to take one of those case study courses because if you do well in it, you’ll probably do well in law school.
What motivated you to pursue a career in litigation and what drew you to that particular legal field?
When I got out of law school, one of my favorite courses was business planning, not a typical law school course. It was basically modeled off of Harvard business school, a different kind of case study where they pause transactions and (more in a seminar setting) you and somebody else would work through them to figure out how to structure it under the applicable corporations' codes. As I came out of law school, I was thinking I wanted to do litigation, and then I found this corporate transactional exercise very interesting. My first year out, I was mostly doing litigation, but I was willing to take some assignments from corporate lawyers in the firm I was with then. Ultimately, I ended up in primarily business litigation practice. I was able to work on disputes and controversies that mostly related to business matters or competitors.
What strategies do you employ when preparing for a trial?
A lot of it is to be prepared. I’d say that it is around 90% preparation and 10% execution. You’ll never anticipate everything, but the more you can reduce the unexpected, the better able you’ll be to deal with it in the moment. If you’re figuring everything out on the fly, you’re going to be overloaded. The idea is to prepare as much as you can. Talking about preparing for exams in college and law school, the skill of cramming is actually a useful skill, certainly in the practice of litigation. While there's a lot of preparation occurring in months, sometimes years to trail, when you come down to the home stretch there's a lot of cramming involved. It could be massive amounts of information that you're trying to absorb, whether it's on the law or documents in a case (what people are going to say, who's testifying etc.) Preparation is #1, in terms of execution, you’re trying to find the voice of your client. Hopefully a genuine and sympathetic one to cast your client in a good light. Every trial is about a story, a bunch of scattered facts is pretty hard for a court of jury to absorb, unless they're held together by a narrative. Within that story there are themes, and you certainly want to come back to that in every case, whether it's an opening statement, the questions you're asking witnesses and whatever cloning argument you might want to do.
What aspects about being a lawyer do you find most fulfilling?
In the real world, 90 sum percent of the cases are settled before the trial, whether it be by settlement or pre-trial. I would say, going to trial is the most intensive part of the work but also rewarding. It’s like an actor when they are about to go on stage and think they’re going to be horrible, but everything turns out fine. It’s interesting and rewarding to bring all the parts and pieces together to present something to a court or jury. There are two things to win, winning the trial meaning you effectively executed a plan to tell the story, get all the evidence you needed, and deliver persuasive arguments. The other thing is to win the case. It’s more satisfying to win by challenging yourself than by luck.
Amanda Preller, a Senior Fiscal Law Attorney at the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the General Counsel, specializes in appropriations and Federal property law. She holds a J.D. from the University of Baltimore School of Law and a B.A in Philosophy from Loyola University Maryland. With a diverse legal background, Preller's career spans amongst private practice, public service as an Assistant State's Attorney for Baltimore City, and roles in the Department of Interior providing counsel on trust and estates for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Was there a specific moment or experience that made you decide to become a lawyer?
I don’t know if there was a specific instance, but my father was a lawyer, and he still is. When I was younger, I would watch him in court, practice law, and I would love to go to the office with him and see all his law partners working together on various cases and I thought it was so interesting. I really was drawn to seeing my father and his co-workers, how they helped people and how they could be a voice for people who didn’t have one to make sure their rights were heard. I would definitely say my father influenced me heavily and just learning through history class that I have a great love for the Constitution.
How do your personal values align with your particular practice of law?
I always think of it kind of broadly. My personal values, of course, were instilled by my parents when I was younger. When I attended Loyola College, I feel like I really was instilled with the Jesuit values. I work in the Federal Government, and I think those Jesuit values align very similarly with the values of being a civil servant and working for the government. Having dignity, seeing the value of each individual person, community service, service to others, kind of a call for excellence, all these things I learned at Loyola. They are fundamental Jesuit values; they translate and work beautifully in a career for civil service and those who work in government. I find a lot of satisfaction in working on behalf of the country and your community.
What challenges have you faced in your legal career, and how have they shaped your perspective?
The biggest challenge I had in my legal career was kind of early on, and it was staying in a job that was not the right fit for me. I was a prosecutor in Baltimore City for a couple of years. That job was amazing, and I had two of the most amazing bosses I have ever had. Even though it was a great job, it was not the right fit for me. I stayed in that job thinking I could and should make it work, because who wouldn’t want to go to court every day, and isn't this how you be a lawyer? I had to realize that that job, though a great job, wasn’t right for me. Most of it was that my personality didn’t line up with those of a prosecutor. A prosecutor has to be very comfortable public speaking, they have to think quickly on their feet, react quickly, and I am someone who is an introvert. I prefer writing versus speaking, I like to take my time and think about my answers to questions. Once I acknowledged my personality was a better fit in another place, I was able to overcome that struggle and find a place that fit well for me. I went from not wanting to practice law anymore to waking up and being excited to go to work every day. I always encourage young students by saying if the first job doesn’t fit, always be willing to try something new!
Can you walk us through a typical case that you handle?
I focus more on advising and counseling clients. What usually happens is that a client in our finance department that is a client in a government agency will bring to us a question on a legal issue. We’ll review what the question of the problem is and identify the law that is related to that issue. We’ll explain to the client, either in a Zoom meeting, or often we write a legal opinion. We identify the law that applies to the situation, explain what the law says and the parameters of that law, and tell the client whether their proposed course of action is legally permissible or defensible. If what our client wants is a viable option, we give them a level of risk assessment. We get to kind of write these advisory opinions that educate the client about what the law is in that area and help them discover possible courses of action they can take. While we don’t make the decisions we help and guide our clients, so they can make decisions that are right for their agency.
