Crafting good questions is an essential legal skill, whether you’re interviewing a client, conducting a deposition, cross-examining a witness in court, or resolving an impasse in a complex negotiation.

The key to this skill is asking the right questions to the right people. Think carefully about what kinds of useful information the person you’re talking to can provide, given their expertise, perspective, biases, and comfort level with you.

So naturally, the questions you ask law students and graduates should be different from the questions you ask admissions officersto determine whether a Law School may be the right choice for you,

Students and alumni tend to have less knowledge about the school than admissions officers because they can only speak from their own experience, which can be limited or even misleading. Students and graduates are also more likely to respond offhand, while admissions officers are much more deliberate and practiced in their responses.

On the other hand, law students and alumni can give more honest, unfiltered answers than admissions officers because they are less invested in your decision to apply or attend.

With these considerations in mind, here are a few types of questions you should ask current law students and recent graduates who attended the law school you are interested in:

It’s hard to know how to feel after spending three years in a place if you can’t imagine what life is like there. So ask open-ended, specific questions about students’ experiences.

How is the social life? How do students treat each other? How competitive or cooperative are they? Where and when do students tend to socialize—mostly with each other on campus or mostly outside of school?

What was good, bad or surprising about their experience?

Be careful when asking similar questions to graduates from many years past. The law school experience changes so quickly that it may not give you a reliable impression of what a law school is like right now.

While law school admissions officers can provide you with aggregate data on graduates employment outcomesstudents and graduates are in a better position to tell you how their job search was.

What resources at school were most helpful? How willing were the graduates to help? What do they wish they knew before law school about their careers?

The challenges and rewards of law school are not always what law students expect. It’s great to get students and alumni to think about what they’re most proud of, what they regret, and what lessons they’ve learned.

What proved to be their biggest obstacle and what helped them overcome it? What advice would they give to someone just starting out in this experience? What skills are most important to practice? What should a new student do to make the most of their time there?

It can be easy to focus on the differences between you and the person you’re talking to, and these differences are worth keeping in mind. For example, if you want to pursue public interest law, advice from someone who follows a a career in the private sector may be less relevant.

Instead of exaggerating those differences, focus on the potential similarities. For example, if you both studied law right out of collegeask for advice on how to make this transition easier.

Even if your interview with a law student or alum provides only a small part of the overall picture of whether law school is right for you, it may still be worth your time. After all, the specific details you learn can help you explain your interest in the school in an essay or interview. By doing so, you’ll show admissions officers that you’ve done your due diligence—just like a good lawyer would.