63 replies to this topic

[sunshowers]

kcraigsejong said:

Thank you all very much, again. Don't let my situation upset this forum.

Not at all. You've shown nothing but true class here, and I hope our bickering hasn't caused you to feel badly.

Law school admissions are simply very unforgiving, and I'm sure that some people who would make great lawyers never make it into law school. Likewise, there are also a lot of people in law school who are complete weirdos/assholes/assclowns and don't deserve to be there, but are.

And I hope you haven't taken any of our comments as sentiments of pity. As I'm sure you're aware, law school is just one door that is closed, hundreds more are open and waiting. Best of luck to ya.

[sunshowers]

Hmmm... I should qualify that last sentence - law school in Canada is one door that is closed to you. I second what Diplock said about the UK schools.

[Anon.]

andrew2 said:

Anon. said:

That would mean about half the schools in the country, rather than the none of them you seemed to be sure about. People can't be faulted for conjecture, but come on, you can't just lie outright.

None of the schools that look at "last x years" or "last x credits" will accept post-degree credits as the exclusive basis for the GPA calculation.

I mentioned that U of A would look at the MA but the fact that they average the LSAT scores makes that fact moot.

Note the schools that say "courses at a senior level" - meaning that one can't just re-enrol in a new degree for x credits as one would be stuck taking the prerequisites for those senior courses.
The rest of those schools look at CGPA - and nothing is going to balance out a 1.0 CGPA to make it competitive.

You can argue that the point I made was worded poorly, but the point remains true. You've simply thrown out facts without putting them in their proper context.

andrew2 said:

a) is not an option. im pretty confident that there is not a single Canadian law school that will accept post-degree marks as part of your GPA calculation.

What you said, verbatim, is above. That you were confident that no single Canadian school accepts post-degree as part (not even entirely, but as part, as in, even given fleeting consideration) of an applicant's GPA. I posted factual information that, even when considering all qualifiers pertaining to that information, shows that, in more than one school, post-degree marks will be included as part of of GPA calculation. This is all the information does. It speaks to the possibility of post-degree work being included in GPA calculation. Instead of not being included. Which is what you were confident about.

I fail to see how this is merely "poor wording" on your behalf.

[kcraigsejong]

"I posted factual information that, even when considering all qualifiers pertaining to that information, shows that, in more than one school, post-degree marks will be included as part of of GPA calculation. "

As I said earlier, UVic told me this last year.

As for the overall situation, Leicester has given me a deferral till 2009. I may just leave it at that and spare myself a third application cycle.

Thank you.

[kcraigsejong]

Hi, guys. Long time no viddy. I'm back in Vancouver, Korea is all over for me. This winter I applied to UBC and UVic law but got rejected for a third time. Then I almost went and became a Social Studies teacher, but that is a different story. I have my UK visa and I am off to Leicester on Saturday to begin the 2-yr. Senior Status LLB. I hope it works out. I'm excited but nervous. Thank you very much for your advice. I may be back on here to ask for some assistance during the NCA process further on down the road.

[ubcslogger]

I know this is a thread necro, but I wanted to say good luck. I found the thread to be an interesting read.

[Tenrick]

Very interesting thread. Good luck buddy, and hopefully it all works out. (I'd rather stay in Britain than come back through NCA, but thats just me.)

Enjoy!

[kcraigsejong]

Hi, all. Well, I am in Leicester. There are a million bitter (and some not-so-bitter) Canadians here. Some of them are 25 with a 3.3 average and a 158 LSAT. There are a lot of U of T grads. None of them seem like kunuckle-draggers and most of them are excited about this, if a bit overwhelmed. Many of them are unhappy that Canada has a perceived need for lawyers but hasn't opened a single law school seat since Windsor did so in 1975 (Just an anecdote, I am not sure if this is true.) I am adjusting to the country and the workload and doing my best. The school is hardly a degree mill, it seems like the Brits take it very seriously as a law school too. I suspect you will be seeing some of my classmates coming back to Canada in the next couple of years and I hope that we get the support we need to get past the NCA. It seems as if they are making it a bit easier: I have heard that regulations have changed recently and that the number of exams we will have to write may be as low as six. I know that topic has been treated in much more detail elsewhere, and that is years off for me. Anyway, I have made my bed and now I have to graduate.

[Tenrick]

kcraigsejong said:

Hi, all. Well, I am in Leicester. There are a million bitter (and some not-so-bitter) Canadians here. Some of them are 25 with a 3.3 average and a 158 LSAT. There are a lot of U of T grads. None of them seem like kunuckle-draggers and most of them are excited about this, if a bit overwhelmed. Many of them are unhappy that Canada has a perceived need for lawyers but hasn't opened a single law school seat since Windsor did so in 1975 (Just an anecdote, I am not sure if this is true.) I am adjusting to the country and the workload and doing my best. The school is hardly a degree mill, it seems like the Brits take it very seriously as a law school too. I suspect you will be seeing some of my classmates coming back to Canada in the next couple of years and I hope that we get the support we need to get past the NCA. It seems as if they are making it a bit easier: I have heard that regulations have changed recently and that the number of exams we will have to write may be as low as six. I know that topic has been treated in much more detail elsewhere, and that is years off for me. Anyway, I have made my bed and now I have to graduate.

U of C recently increased their class size to 100.

All in all though, good luck and keep up updated.

[Uriel]

kcraigsejong said:

Hi, all. Well, I am in Leicester. There are a million bitter (and some not-so-bitter) Canadians here. Some of them are 25 with a 3.3 average and a 158 LSAT. There are a lot of U of T grads. None of them seem like kunuckle-draggers and most of them are excited about this, if a bit overwhelmed. Many of them are unhappy that Canada has a perceived need for lawyers but hasn't opened a single law school seat since Windsor did so in 1975 (Just an anecdote, I am not sure if this is true.) I am adjusting to the country and the workload and doing my best. The school is hardly a degree mill, it seems like the Brits take it very seriously as a law school too. I suspect you will be seeing some of my classmates coming back to Canada in the next couple of years and I hope that we get the support we need to get past the NCA. It seems as if they are making it a bit easier: I have heard that regulations have changed recently and that the number of exams we will have to write may be as low as six. I know that topic has been treated in much more detail elsewhere, and that is years off for me. Anyway, I have made my bed and now I have to graduate.

Congratulations, and best of luck!

We actually are opening a new law school in B.C., with some consideration being given to another in northern Ontario --- though that one remains speculative at best.

[kcraigsejong]

Done! 65.375% overall on a 2-year LLB from Leicester (on a scale where 70% is the top grade available). Mid-(high? Haha.) 2:1. Now for the NCA. The books arrive tomorrow. Thank you all for your advice. I'll let you know how it goes.

Edited by kcraigsejong, 28 June 2011 - 12:08 PM.

[SchOZ]

Good luck. You seem determined, I'm sure it will all work out.

[Bure10]

I should read the year. Deleted.

Edited by Bure10, 28 June 2011 - 12:32 PM.

[sweet_tooth]

Interesting thread! Thanks for keeping us posted OP & g'luck with the NCA process! Let us know how it goes.

[iCan]

Thank you for coming back to update, and congratulations on your success! I wish you the best of luck with the NCA process, and hope that you keep updating here as there are a few people who are considering the route you've taken. Congrats again, I really admire your determination.

[kcraigsejong]

Where are my manners? Thank you all.

[Lionel.Hutz]

Grats dude. This could prove to be a very valuable thread if you continue to update it.

Best of luck on your NCAs!

[schroed]

Congratulations! I remember visiting this thread a few times during the past couple of years and always left with a sense of curiosity as to how your story would play out. Glad to see that you graduated. I wish you the best with the NCA process. Further updates regarding your experiences with the NCA would definitely help many people on this board, so please do continue to keep us in the loop .

Edited by schroed, 26 July 2011 - 01:01 PM.

[legal lemur]

Be VERY careful if you go the England route. A couple people I know almost did it and told me that it would have been a huge mistake if they weren't the type of people who real all the details before jumping at something. Apparently there's a LOT of fine print involved and it's not as easy to transfer as the U.K. recruiters make it sound.

[kcraigsejong]

Thank you. I have indeed gone the England route, still in the UK as a matter of fact. It has gone well so far, but I agree that it is important to read fine print. I am just learning about the transfer game now. I'll let you know how it goes.

[Diplock]

Damn, this is a necro thread but well worth the read. I'll also be extremely interested to hear how things pan out for you. Sanada is our resident UK expert now when it comes to transfer situations after first year. But however this pans out your insight and experience will be very useful for those completing their degrees in the UK, or needing to hear what it's like.

Wish you all the best, as I did long before. Class act to come back and update us folks.

[kcraigsejong]

The NCA results arrived. Incredibly early, they had only promised to get them back to me by Sept 15th (I set up my account at the end of June). They are giving an extension to a group of us until the 12th of August to enrol in October exams in Canada. This is much earlier than I had expected. Read as much into that as you like.

As I expected, they have recognized my program and the number of years taken to complete the degree. Also, interestingly, they have recognized as "other experience" my being an English teacher in Canada (but not in Korea. Hm). I need seven subjects "to compensate for the shorter program": Canadian Administrative Law, Canadian Constitutional Law, Canadian Criminal Law, Foundations of Canadian Law, Evidence, Corporate Law and Professional Responsibility. They outline two ways to demonstrate competence: through NCA exams, or by taking courses in these subjects in a Canadian law school or by a combination of the first and second. No surprises there. In October there are challenge exams. Registration is now open and payment must be received no later than August 12th, 2011. Reg. forms are available online, to be printed and mailed in with payment. Each exam is about $450 CDN, as was the assessment fee. The books outlined in their syllabus (see below) were about $900 CDN.

I applied in the NCA category for UNB, UVic and UBC this year, but got rejected at the beginning of July because the NCA hadn't assessed my exams yet. Frankly, they had barely been marked at Leicester. Oh well. If the NCA exam prep blows up in my face, I can try again next year and my transcripts and reference letters are on file at the above schools. I hope I am well clear of the NCA by spring, though. I am aware that the Canadian courses are a whole different ball game, but it's nice to have at least some of what I hope is working knowledge of the first year courses. Corporate and Evidence and Professional Responsibility are a whole different kettle of fish, completely uncharted territory and something I will surely have to wrestle with over the winter (and no longer, I hope). I am unsure of how many exams to register for in October (or January?) and am unsure of how to prepare for an exam that now allows you to bring as much of your own material into the exam as you like. This is so unlike the exams I just did in the UK, that I cannot even begin to describe my confusion as to where to begin in preparation. I know you all have projects on the go in Canada, but if any of you could give me any advice on how to begin this process I would greatly appreciate it. I would be happy to bite off Con&Ad in October, but if I could add Foundations and Criminal that would be fantastic and would leave me with 3 in January.

I have the latest versions of the Hogg Con&Ad, the DeLisle Evidence: Principles and Problems, Craik on Public Law , Van Harten on Admin, Harris et al on Partnerships and Canadian Business Corporations, VanDuyzer on Partnerships and Corporations, Hutchinson on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility and Coughlan's Criminal Procedure as well as the Canada and BC Business Corporations Acts. I still need the Constitution Acts and the Criminal Code. (And surely a Criminal Cases and Materials book! No?)

Any tips?

Edited by kcraigsejong, 02 August 2011 - 10:08 AM.

[kcraigsejong]

If any of you want a source for my above statement on the NCA exams and materials:

Notice of NCA Policy Change
Issued June 2, 2011
Please note that the NCA has changed its policy regarding open-book exams. Starting with the August 2011 NCA examinations, candidates will be permitted use of personal notes (handwritten or typed) during all NCA examinations. All other reference materials (textbooks, cases, legislation etc) will continue to be permitted into the exams pursuant to the current policy.

http://www.flsc.ca/e...nca-advisories/

[West Coast Express]

kcraigsejong, on 02 August 2011 - 10:19 AM, said:

If any of you want a source for my above statement on the NCA exams and materials:

Notice of NCA Policy Change
Issued June 2, 2011
Please note that the NCA has changed its policy regarding open-book exams. Starting with the August 2011 NCA examinations, candidates will be permitted use of personal notes (handwritten or typed) during all NCA examinations. All other reference materials (textbooks, cases, legislation etc) will continue to be permitted into the exams pursuant to the current policy.

http://www.flsc.ca/e...nca-advisories/

The Sossin and Flood book for Admin Law is quite good, fairly short, and decently easy to follow along with. It doesn't touch on Dunsmuir very much (it's a very recent case that was released right before publication) but brush up on that case in addition to the blue book and I think you'll be good to go.

If there's now an open-book policy for exams, you should start checking out the CAN databases on the websites for the law students society at each of the schools (UBC has them, for instance). These will help you study and give you a rough guide for making your own outlines to bring into the exams. Good luck!

[almostnot]

kcraigsejong, on 02 August 2011 - 10:02 AM, said:

I am unsure of how many exams to register for in October (or January?) and am unsure of how to prepare for an exam that now allows you to bring as much of your own material into the exam as you like. This is so unlike the exams I just did in the UK, that I cannot even begin to describe my confusion as to where to begin in preparation. I know you all have projects on the go in Canada, but if any of you could give me any advice on how to begin this process I would greatly appreciate it. I would be happy to bite off Con&Ad in October, but if I could add Foundations and Criminal that would be fantastic and would leave me with 3 in January.

I have the latest versions of the Hogg Con&Ad, the DeLisle Evidence: Principles and Problems, Craik on Public Law , Van Harten on Admin, Harris et al on Partnerships and Canadian Business Corporations, VanDuyzer on Partnerships and Corporations, Hutchinson on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility and Coughlan's Criminal Procedure as well as the Canada and BC Business Corporations Acts. I still need the Constitution Acts and the Criminal Code. (And surely a Criminal Cases and Materials book! No?)

Any tips?

I'm a big fan of the Irwin Law series. The evidence one (Paciocco) is partiularly good.

As for open book exams, my strategy was to have a ten to twenty page summary of the course organized by topic. I would have the topics severable so I could pick and choose which ones I wanted to have on my table at any given time and get rid of the extra ones. That was my first line of defence. My second line of defence were my class notes. If I had to use these I got a bit sad. My third line of defence was my text. If I got to this I was not a happy camper and things were not going my way.

[kcraigsejong]

Hi. If you are in the UK right now and want to do the UBC LLM CL:

Make friends with the hardest-working people in class that attend all tutorials and lectures, join mooting competitions and win them (not that I made it out of the second round)- failing that win the debate competiton or whatever else they have. Get elected to the Law Society- failing that set up a Canadian Law Society at your university and join it too. Make friends with the academics that organize these competitions; come to all tutorials well prepared and don't re-schedule them in order to keep those academic staff members onside too. Make tonnes of notes, review them as much as you can. Stick to hand-outs, try to avoid going off on tangents. Socialize with the profs, even if it means a few late nights. Get at least a 60% in everything, you are probably going to drop below that once so be able to compensate for it with a few 70s (this puts you in the top 4% of the class in some courses). Remember that the NCA will not give you credit for anything less than a 50%, this might mean having to take Canadian Contract or Property. Yikes. Rote memorization of lists of case names is...weird. Get a white board, copy things onto it obsessively. Get a dictaphone and read out your course summaries onto it at night. Listen to these on headpones. Or don't. Up to you. Use the Q and A books for sample answers, but remember that these were not written by profs at your school so will go in different directions. Visit Magistrates Courts and Crown Courts to put faces to names in the procedure courses. Mention all of this on your CV (not the talking to your dictaphone part). Play up the returning home to ailing family members element. Request three reference letters for the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC as soon as your grades are available- let Joanne Chung at UBC know they are coming. Send them a resume too. The document checklist is: two official transcripts, three reference letters and a resume/CV. No LSAT, no personal statement.

Make sure your law school has arranged to send all of the required documents of all of the Canadians there (if there are any) to the NCA as soon as the grades are released, there is no need to wait until graduation but they all have to (should?) be sent there together in one courier package. Decide how many NCAs you will actually write; you are going to be back in Canada for a while so you might as well do some and be able to choose some courses more widely at UBC. If you got more than 7 NCAs, it will be hard (impossible?) to take all of these courses at UBC in the 30 credits on the LLMCL- although you can take as many courses that year as you like. (Check this with Joanne. Try Doug Harris too.) The deadline for applications for May start is October 1st. Applications are made online and decisions are given by email with a letter following.

They say they are going to let in 'some' people in September and throw them right into Canadian upper year courses and then allow them to do the accelerted first year in the following spring. Wow. This will involve getting conditional early acceptance based on UK first year grades. If this is not the way you want to go, remember that this involves cooling your heels for 11 months between UK law school and UBC and you are going to get thrown the fark out of the UK 3 (maybe 4- it was for me but has been reduced) months after you graduate. Anticipate an indecisive Christmas waiting for UBC to make up their minds as this will not happen until January (26th in my case); prepare for this to get really complicated as your friends enrol in the October and January NCA seatings and write multiple exams, others go into LLMs and JDs and you don't and you wonder about whether or not 28 grand to UBC is really worth it.

If you get the 7 NCAs that I got, I think it will look this this in terms of courses:

May- Sept Law 505 Public Law (5 Credits), Law 525 Crim (5 Cr).

Sept- Dec Law 210 Admin (3 Cr), Law 230 Corporate (4 Cr), Law 270 Civil Proc (3 Cr).

Jan- April Law 280 Evidence (4 Cr), Law 399 Advanced Criminal Law (2 Cr) and Law 560 which is a paper based on a JD 300/400 seminar or workshop course you take. I will have to see how that plays out. Law 260 Advanced Criminal Procedure (2 Credits) (maybe take a Graduate Seminar/Tax Law or Advanced Legal Research?)

Remember also: Professional Responsibility Law 468 (3 Credits) [although I have already written the NCA exam for this].

All of these except the last one are given in your choice of semesters one and two (someone please correct me if I am wrong).

Other than that: write the exams, kiss the girls and say goodbye to real beer.

[kcraigsejong]

Hang on: admissions for the May start opens on Oct 1st and closes on Dec 1st.

[johnalm]

You can always try for Bond?

[lawstudent00]

But what about articling? Many Canadian law students are unable to find articling positions in Canada. I know the allure of studying law and becoming a lawyer but just when you make it past one obstacle you realize there are even more ahead... Any advice on how to find articling as a foreign-trained candidate?

[kcraigsejong]

Ask me after the LLM CL.