Blog

California Desert Trial Academy College Of Law

Forgot Something in Your Notes? CDTA Offers Ongoing Access to Lectures

lectures

Law school is centered around lectures, reading assignments, and case briefing. The workload can be great, especially in your 1L year as you adjust to a new way of thinking and writing. Your professors will expect you to be able to read voluminous amounts of material for each class, learn and memorize new legal rules and concepts and most importantly, learn how to apply the law to the facts. The volume of classwork can be daunting for even the best and the brightest of  law students entering their first year. You may find yourself in a panic at times, trying to...

Continue reading

First Year Students: CDTA is Laser Focused on Your Success

Law school begins with a great deal of trepidation for many first year students, and although anxiety levels may run high, this type of intensity often leads to an intense motivation to succeed.  Prior to law school orientation, you will likely be bombarded by well-meaning friends and family members regaling their horror stories of their own cutthroat law school experience. They will direct you to watch films such as The Paper Chase  or One L , depicting first-year law students going to any length to push their fellow classmates “down the curve”.  You will hear about professors hell-bent on seeing...

Continue reading

The Benefits of Attending CDTA Through Our Distance Learning Platform

learning platform

California Desert Trial Academy, College of Law, has the solution to make your dreams a reality with a distance learning platform. Perhaps you have dreamt of being a lawyer since you were a child, envisioning yourself commanding a courtroom in front of a jury and seeking justice for others as an advocate. You may have put those dreams on hold as the demands of family and career took precedence. At CDTA, you can earn your J.D. in four years, while still maintaining your full-time employment and managing the needs of your family. Our classes are held in the evening, three nights...

Continue reading

Success in the Legal Field: Do You Have to Be Aggressive?

legal field

As a law student, you probably spend a lot of time imagining what it is going to be like to actually get into your career in the legal field and practice as a trial lawyer; after all, this is the whole point of law school: gaining the skills you need to maneuver in the legal system, and hopefully either work for a firm later that challenges and rewards you handsomely, or strike out on your own, perhaps hanging your shingle in your hometown or a neighboring area. Although quite confident in your identity already, you may wonder if you should alter...

Continue reading

Don’t Lose Sight of Important Personal Interests During Law School

personal interests

The summer before law school begins, you may find out that personal interests don't seem quite as important, as suddenly you are consumed by two main things: thinking about going to law school and passing the bar so you can get on your way to creating a successful practice as a trial lawyer. You may be consumed with scouring any available coursework, reading all possible materials ahead of time, and feeling some anxiety about the weight of the impending journey ahead. The best gift you can give yourself before beginning law school is to square away every detail possible and start...

Continue reading

Battling Burnout During the First Year of Law School

burnout

While there are probably many reasons you want to become an attorney, from helping people to seeing justice served, to using your analytical skills in court and enjoying the excitement of being a trial attorney, you may have more than a little trepidation about attending law school, and may worry about issues that come up later such as burnout. Law school is the next level, and one step up from the undergraduate degree (which may have seemed stressful already). Now, mingling with the cream of the crop in law school, you may worry about how you will measure up—along with many...

Continue reading

Streamline Studying By Understanding Your True Learning Styles

learning styles

Most of us have different learning styles, with the brain functioning in a very complex manner to memorize and retain important information. It can become easier to understand how to study, though when you begin paying closer attention to how you seem to learn best. Throughout the years, this may be on a trial and error basis, and your learning styles may vary depending on the content or degree, but as you enter your first year of law school at CDTA (looking forward to sizeable amounts of reading assignments and coursework overall), consider some factors: You may be an auditory...

Continue reading

Preparing to take the California State Bar

State bar

For most students attending law school today, and for those enrolled at California Desert Trial Academy College of Law, taking the California State Bar Exam is the end of a long educational journey, testing would-be lawyers before they head out into the legal world to take on clients and hopefully flourish as well-rounded trial attorneys. The California Bar Exam is the test of all tests, although it certainly is not unheard of for a bright student to fail and have to take it again under what is usually significant stress; in many cases, students who find exciting job opportunities in...

Continue reading

Setting the Scene: How Comfortable Should Everyone Be During Negotiations?

negotiations

While some negotiations are cut and dry, and everyone is happy in a surprisingly efficient amount of time, those will probably be the bonus rounds in your career—the cherries on top. Other times, negotiations may be long, drawn-out, excruciating—and even heated; and after all, if the parties involved were able to agree easily, they would not need your services, and the other side would not have needed to retain legal counsel either. You may be a natural born debater and usually the one to come out on the winning end of any argument, but successful negotiators usually evolve through experience and...

Continue reading

First-Year Law Students Must Budget Time Wisely

While the first year of high school is a serious time of adaption, leading to that exciting first year of college, upon entering the first year of law school, law students are taking their education—and the challenge level—to an exponentially higher degree. You will be reading voluminous amounts of material related to legal cases and coursework, and you will be expected to retain more information than ever before. Along with that, you must also devote even more time to your studies than ever before; in fact, if you’ve ever had a rigorous job where you worked overtime too, expect that...

Continue reading
Font Resize