1. LAW SCHOOL IS NOT LIKE COLLEGE.
Law school requires daily, focused, significant amounts of work. My own experience in college was that it was possible to put off assigned work and then work intensely for a few days and successfully complete an assignment or turn in a paper. That’s the reason that the phrase “pull an all-nighter” is associated with college. By contrast to college, in some ways law school is more like high school or a job. Like high school there are daily assignments and homework and work has to be completed on a regular basis. Like a job, you have to be there and complete required tasks on a regular basis. That’s why students who have been in the workforce for a year or two are sometimes better prepared for the rigors of law school than students who just graduated from college. However, many students have had summer jobs and part-time or full-time jobs while attending college so they are well aware of the differences between school and work. For students who have not had significant work experience, determination and discipline can substitute for time on the job.
2. DO ALL THE ASSIGNED READING BEFORE EACH CLASS.
You must do all the assigned reading in preparation for attending class. Without reading the assignments carefully and with total concentration, you cannot get the benefits you need from attending class. The reading and the classes work in conjunction with each other. Even if you read and reread diligently, there will be many things you won’t understand about the reading material. Class discussions will help you to better understand what you’ve read. However, without having read the material in advance of class, you will not get any benefit in achieving a better level of understanding from attending class. They are both essential. In addition, you cannot afford to fall behind in your reading since there will always be new assignments and you will probably not be able to catch up if you fall behind. My only advice about this is NEVER fall behind in your reading for class.
While this list of tips is focused on the substantive classes you take in your first year, classes such as contracts, torts, property, criminal law and other subjects, first year law students also usually take a legal research and writing course. Unlike their other courses, this class involves research and writing assignments with specific deadlines throughout the semester rather than readings in a casebook followed by a midterm or final exam. Also, unlike your other classes, these assignments are graded and provide you with a source of feedback as to how you are doing. This causes some students to overemphasize their work in the research and writing course and prioritize it over their substantive classes. This is a big mistake. If you add up the number of graded credits for the substantive subjects and compare those to the legal research and writing course, you will see that the research and writing course is only a small component of your first year performance. While you must, of course, complete all the required assignments for this course to the best of your ability, you cannot afford to allow research and writing assignments to cause you to shortchange your substantive subjects. Having made this point, I’ll repeat the advice I gave at the end of the previous paragraph: NEVER fall behind in reading for class.
3. READ ACTIVELY.
When you read assigned material in law school it is not enough to have your eyes pass over the words on the page. You must focus on what you are reading and develop a dialogue between you and the written words. You have to question what you’ve read if you don’t understand it. You have to read it again if you’re confused. You have to underline what you believe to be key phrases or sentences. You have to write in the margins to identify the various parts of the opinion - facts, proceedings below, the result or holding of the case, the rule of law the court applies, its reasons for the result it reaches, previous court decisions, referred to as precedents, that support the court’s decision, etc. If you question something you’re reading because it doesn’t make sense to you, you can write that down including the all important question mark to indicate your uncertainty. This level of concentration requires that you do your reading at a time when you are alert and not when you can barely keep your eyes open so plan your schedule accordingly.
4. BRIEF THE ASSIGNED CASES.
Briefing cases is a traditional part
of legal education, particularly during the first year of
law school. A brief is a summary of key aspects of a case
that you were assigned to read. It identifies the decision
that the court reached and the reasons for the decision.
There are numbers of different formats for briefing cases.
If you are provided with a format during your law school
orientation, you should certainly start out using the
recommended format, but you may eventually adjust it
somewhat for your style of learning. If one of your
professors suggests a format for their particular class,
follow that format for cases read for that class. The
active reading, including underlining and marginal
notations, described above will help you to brief a case
since it will identify many parts of the brief you need to
write. However, it is not a substitute for briefing. After
the first year of law school, many students rely on their
marginal notes instead of briefing, but this is not
something you can afford to do in your first year of law
school. The brief you write forces you to translate the
words of the court into your own words in order to
summarize facts and key points in the court’s analysis.
This is a very valuable exercise that helps you to better
understand what you have read. It is not something you can
afford to short circuit.
While there are many different formats for briefing cases,
they usually have a number of elements in common. A basic
sample format for the brief of a case would include:
a. The name of the case, the court that decided the case,
and the date it was decided.
b. A summary of the main facts of the case.
c. A summary of the procedural history of the case which
means earlier legal proceedings in the case before the
case reached the court whose opinion you are briefing.
d. The issue (or issues if more than one) that the court
needs to decide.
e. The holding of the case which means the way that the
court resolved the issue the court needed to decide and
the legal principle that the court relied on as the basis
for its decision.
f. The rationale for the court’s holding. This means
summarizing the chain of reasoning relied on by the Court
that lead it to reach its holding.
g. The final disposition of the case which means at the
end of the decision how did the court dispose of the case.
Which party won? If the court discusses the remedy in the
case, what remedy did the court award? In appellate
decisions, how did the court deal with the decision of the
court below? Did it affirm the decision, reverse the
decision, remand to the court below for further
proceedings, or some other disposition?
h. A short summary of the principal reasoning of any
concurring or dissenting opinions.
5. REVIEW WHAT YOU’VE READ BEFORE EACH CLASS.
You will usually have to read the assigned material for a block of classes one or more days before the class meets. In order to refresh your recollection before class, you should quickly scan the material again, looking particularly at material you underlined and notes you wrote in the margins. Lastly, you should read over your briefs for that class.
6. ATTEND ALL YOUR CLASSES.
Law school classes are not just a
rehash of the assigned reading materials. Initially, first
year faculty will ask questions that require students to
describe the facts of the case, proceedings in the lower
court, the issue addressed by the court, the outcome of
the case, and the reasons given by the court for its
decision. These are exactly what you will address in your
brief (see 4 above). However, faculty will move on to
critically examine the materials that you read. The goals
of this exploration are to focus on the opinions you read
in ways that help you to understand the reasoning adopted
by the court. Class discussion will, for example, usually
go well beyond understanding what the court says to
critically examining the strengths and weaknesses of the
court’s approach. Who benefits from the court’s approach?
Who is hurt by the court’s approach? Does the court adopt
a rule to apply in cases of this type? How will that rule
apply in cases that are similar to, but not exactly the
same as the assigned case? This will often be done by
asking the class to analyze hypotheticals, imagined sets
of facts, that change key facts in ways that may or may
not change the outcome. You will need to identify how that
set of facts would be resolved under the rule the court
adopts.
The classes you are required to attend are an important
part of the law school experience and its hard to imagine
a student doing well without attending and taking
seriously the classroom experience. This may sometimes be
possible in college, but not in law school. Just as you
need to read actively, you need to attend class with a
similar attitude and listen actively. You need to listen
carefully to what is said in class, try to anticipate the
answers to questions that are posed, take notes (see 7
below), and try to participate in class (see 8 below).
7. TAKE NOTES IN CLASS.
It is necessary to take notes in class, but this is not an easy process. You are not sitting back and listening to a lecture where all you need to do is summarize what the professor is saying. Instead, classes will consist of some setting the stage by the professor, a series of questions posed to students, student answers which may or may not be correct, some further thoughts by the professor, more questions and student responses and on and on in that way. If the professor makes a specific clear statement about the law in the area you are discussing, it is easy to decide to write that down. But what about the rest of it? When I was in law school, I used to try and write down many of the questions the professor asked as well as the answers given by my classmates and often my assessment of whether they were right or wrong, which itself might be right or wrong. If a student gave an answer and the teacher followed up with what appeared to be a next question that assumed the student’s answer was correct, I would assume that initial answer was correct. Eventually I came to realize that some students seemed to give answers the teacher seemed satisfied with so I would write the student’s name in my notes as well. If a teacher asked a hypothetical question, a “what if” question that changed the facts of the case in a key way, I would write that down since it might help me in preparing for the exam if I was able to answer the hypothetical questions and such questions might even help me to anticipate what kind of questions might be on the exam. As you can tell from this description, my notes were a kind of summary of what had happened in class, but they were not designed to provide complete clarity about the law in an area since that wasn’t something I could discern one class at a time. In addition to all of the difficulties in taking notes described above, you have to take notes while also actively listening (see 6 above) to the discussion and trying to participate in class (see 8 below). This can be a real challenge in multitasking, but it is what you need to try to do to the best of your ability. There are obviously trade offs that have to be made in this juggling act. If you are an active participant in class discussions, the likelihood is that your class notes will be less complete. You may be able to compensate for this by arranging with another student to exchange notes and/or you can make sure to review your notes (see 9 below) shortly after class to add additional material that you remember while it is still fresh in your mind.
8. TRY TO PARTICIPATE IN CLASS.
One of the things that makes many law students nervous is participating in class discussions. Sometimes you have no choice in the matter. Many professors teaching first year law school courses “cold call” on students. This means students are called on without their volunteering to speak. This is something many students dread, but in some ways getting it out of the way early is helpful. I was called on early in my first year property class. While I certainly wasn’t sure I knew the answers to the questions I was asked, I did my best to answer the questions and before too long the professor moved on to question another student and I realized I had survived the experience and nothing terrible had happened to me. Being called on was never as scary once I had survived that first experience.
Some students are reluctant to speak because they don’t want their classmates to judge them and conclude that they are inadequate. My view is that you shouldn’t worry about others. If the teacher asks a question and you have an answer to that question based on your preparation for class, raise your hand. You may not be called on if other students also put their hands up. But just the act of raising your hand will get you over one of the hurdles to feeling comfortable participating in class. I’m not recommending you try and dominate class discussions by having your hand up all the time. That’s definitely not a way to make friends with your classmates. By contrast, answering one or two questions each class or every other class puts you in the group of students who have enough self-confidence to try to contribute to the discussion. My own experience was that once you broke down that psychological barrier and volunteered to speak in class, it got progressively easier as well as helping you to understand the material. It’s easy to sit back and hear another student give what the teacher acknowledges is the correct answer and think to yourself I knew that and could have given that answer. But until you actually provide the answer, you’re probably not fairly assessing your ability to give the correct answer. There is no substitute for speaking in class and I recommend getting over your fear early on in the law school experience. After all, an important part of being a lawyer is talking about the law. This is true, of course, if you appear in court and must speak to a judge or members of a jury. However, it is also true for lawyers who never go near a courtroom. They still need to talk to their clients, other lawyers at their own law firm, or lawyers representing the other side in a legal dispute. Getting comfortable with talking about the law is something you should do in law school since it is an essential skill needed in the legal profession.
9. REVIEW AFTER EACH CLASS.
I’ve had law students complain that they didn’t anticipate what I would focus on in advance of each class or understand all the material they read in advance of class. I always told them that if they could do those things, law would be something they could learn on their own and class would not be valuable. Instead, I told them that the real issue was whether they could understand the material they had read after it was discussed in class. As soon after each class as possible, I advise you to go over your notes while looking at the cases discussed and your case briefs. This may cause you to make changes or additions to your notes or add material to your case briefs or underline something in a case or write something in the margin. To the extent that your advance preparation and class attendance work in conjunction with each other, a necessary final stage is to go over what happened in class while it is still fresh in your mind. This review does not need to be a lengthy process. Even a quick review could help you to correct a mistake in a case brief or fill in an omission.
10. JOIN A STUDY GROUP OR AN EXAM REVIEW GROUP.
By working with a group of
classmates, you may be able to clarify what you don’t
understand and help your study group partners to
understand something that you already understand. This
kind of mutual assistance is one of the benefits of study
groups. A study group can also serve as a support network
to help you cope with the stress of law school (see number
12 below). Some students don’t find study groups
throughout the term helpful to them because they are not
always the most efficient use of study time and there may
be disagreements among study group members as to which
study activities should be given the highest priority.
Other students complain that some students in their study
group know less than they do and therefore the group is
not valuable. I think this particular complaint about
study groups is shortsighted. When I was a law student I
found that the most useful part of the study group
experience was the need to explain something to others in
the group. There is no better way to learn something than
to teach it to others. The one critical aspect of using a
study group effectively is to make sure that every member
of the group does all the work, such as producing an
outline for each course (see 13 below). A study group is
not an opportunity to divide up the work. Only by having
every member do their own work and then comparing the work
product of each member of the group will you be able to
improve your understanding of the subjects you are
studying. In choosing members of your study group or
agreeing to join an existing group, make sure the students
in your group have a shared understanding of how the group
will operate.
Even students who don’t find study groups helpful during the school year, usually form a group to help them study for exams. Joining with others to review your outlines (see 13 below) and, even more importantly, to review old exams if they are available or hypotheticals discussed in class is very valuable in exam preparation. Since the goal on an exam is usually to identify as many relevant legal arguments as possible and apply those arguments to the facts of an exam question, it is unlikely that working alone you will be able to practice those skills as effectively as in a small group. When you work with others to pool the arguments you can identify individually as well as explain to each other why a particular argument is relevant, how that argument was identified, and how to develop that argument on the exam, it improves the ability of each member of the study group to identify and develop arguments on their own.
11. LEARN TO LIVE WITH UNCERTAINTY.
One of the stressful things about law school is that most of the time in your first year, and particularly your first semester, you don’t know what you know. You frequently do not have any way to fully assess how you are doing for a substantial amount of time, often until the midterm, and sometimes not until the final. This uncertainty is a substantial contributor to the stress of the law school experience (see 12 below). Just understanding that uncertainty is the nature of this method of learning where things are not spelled out for you is helpful in dealing with this issue. If you don’t expect to understand everything, while still trying to achieve that objective, you will avoid unrealistic expectations while trying to achieve realistic ones.
This raises a question that many law students ask: why don’t law professors just tell them what the law is rather than torturing them with endless questions and no answers? The answer to this question is that the principal thing law school is designed to teach you is how to teach yourself. Students often think they will go to law school and learn the law. In some ways that’s correct, you will spend significant amounts of time in your classes learning about particular areas of the law. But that is not the main goal of legal education.
First, there is no way to know for sure what fields of law you’ll need to know about after you graduate. In addition, the law is not static. It is always changing. If you learn what the law is today, it could change tomorrow and you would have to learn new law on your own. Therefore, law school has to teach you to develop the skill of reading and understanding legal material. It also has to teach you to develop your analytic skills. During your legal career, you are likely to be an advocate for a particular position. To be an effective advocate, you need to be able to develop arguments for one side, arguments for the other side, and responses to those arguments. The analytic skills learned in law school need to prepare you to develop these kinds of arguments; law school can’t just spoon feed you the law and call that a legal education. During law school, you may never have taken courses in the field of law you are working in so you haven’t learned the law in that area, but what you have learned is how to teach yourself the law. The same thing applies if the law has changed since you studied the subject in law school.
12. FIND HEALTHY WAYS TO COPE WITH STRESS.
The first year of law school is a stressful experience for every law student. If someone is not experiencing stress, they are not taking law school seriously. However, how students react to that stress varies enormously from student to student and can be looked at as a range of stress reactions on a continuum. At one extreme, some students are able to shrug off the stress and continue with their work, and at the other extreme, some students are debilitated by stress so that it seriously interferes with their ability to do the necessary work. At this point in your life, you probably have a pretty good idea where you fall on the stress continuum. In addition, hopefully you have some healthy methods for dealing with stress such as exercise, listening to music, calls to a friend or family member, or playing a favorite game on your phone or tablet.
Most law schools, or at least the colleges and universities they are part of, have professional staff members that address stress management. If stress has been an issue for you in coping with school in the past, be proactive and identify sources of help in advance. Many law schools include stress management in their first year orientation and introduce you to staff members who can be of assistance. Another resource are classmates who are going through the same thing that you are during your first year. One benefit of a study group (see 10 above) is that you realize you aren’t the only one who is having trouble understanding the reading or what is going on in your classes. As an alternative or in addition to a study group, every law school has student organizations that focus on a particular constituency - such as women or minorities or first generation professionals - or a particular area of the law - immigration law, entertainment law, criminal law, and many others. Don’t overload yourself with these kinds of activities in your first year since you need most of your time for your studies, but you can certainly attend the meetings of one or two organizations in order to find a compatible group of students.
One source of stress, particularly early on, is feeling intimidated by your classmates. Some students you meet will have extensive knowledge about the law already. Perhaps they worked as a paralegal before law school or have parents or other relatives who are lawyers. Whatever the reason, there is a tendency to doubt your own ability compared to students who seem so much more knowledgeable. However, whatever advantages come from this kind of knowledge usually turn out to be very temporary. Within a few weeks of the beginning of law school, the focus of learning has moved beyond the kind of knowledge anyone brings with them to law school.
A related source of stress is the
credential comparison. One of my first memories of law
school was in one of our first classes waiting for the
professor to arrive. People around me starting asking each
other where they had gone to college. I went to Stony
Brook University, then a relatively new school without any
national or even regional reputation. However, sitting
next to me was someone who went to Princeton, behind me
was someone from Harvard, in front of me someone from
Dartmouth, and on and on. I remember thinking how am I
ever going to compete with all these people from all these
elite schools. However, within a day or so I realized that
credentials aren’t everything and they don’t predict law
school success. A student from an Ivy League school was
just as likely to feel embarrassed in class because they
gave wrong answers as someone from a relatively unknown
school and someone from an unknown school was just as
likely to give correct answers as someone from a highly
prestigious school.
By avoiding comparing yourself to others, you can eliminate a significant source of stress. Just focus on you and whether you are doing everything you can to succeed in law school. Are you working as hard as you can? Are you thoroughly preparing for class, attending class and doing everything you can to follow the discussion, reviewing after class, and all the other suggestions on this list of tips? That’s all you can expect of yourself and thinking about how others are doing is only a waste of time. Besides, you may well be wrong in your assessment. Some of the students I assumed early on in my first year of law school would do well because of their educational backgrounds struggled in the first year and didn’t do that well. Just do the best job you can.
13. PREPARE AN OUTLINE FOR EACH COURSE.
All of the advice above about
preparing for, attending, and reviewing after class
focuses on class by class learning. However, there is
another level to what students must do to succeed in law
school. You must translate those individual classes into
general principles that can be applied to other factual
situations that raise similar issues. Law school exams
don’t ask you to rehash the cases that you’ve read. It’s
not a process of regurgitation. Instead, essay exams
typically provide you with a set of facts and ask you to
discuss the issues raised by that set of facts. To do that
effectively, you have to understand what issues are raised
by those facts in the context of a particular area of the
law, what general principles or rules of law apply to the
resolution of those issues, and how to apply those
principles or rules of law to a set of facts provided on
the exam. To be able to do this, you must translate what
you’ve learned class by class into a set of more general
rules or principles. This is accomplished in large part by
creating an outline of the subject matter you have studied
divided by the issues addressed and the principles used to
analyze and resolve those issues. The outline will include
some information about specific cases, but only as
examples of a general principle you have described. An
outline is not a summary of each case you’ve read. Such an
outline would not be useful to prepare you to take an exam
in a course.
There are many commercial outlines
that you can purchase or outlines prepared by students in
previous years that are available at no cost. However,
these are not a substitute for making your own outline for
each of your courses. The outline has to prepare you to
take the exam written by your professor and not some
unknown outline writer. What counts is what you’ve learned
from the casebook you’ve been assigned to read and how
that material has been addressed in the classes you’ve
attended. Even an outline prepared for the same class
taught by your professor a few years earlier is not
enough. What if the professor has assigned a different
book or changed their approach to some of the subjects
taught? Besides, it is the act of preparing the outline
that forces you to look at the material studied from this
more general perspective. You have to learn to understand
how related, but not identical factual situations should
be approached. To truly gain this understanding, you need
to do this work yourself.
If there is material you are simply
not able to master no matter now hard you try, there are
several things you can do. One is you can go to see your
professor during the professor’s office hours to ask about
the issue you are having trouble understanding. Another is
to talk about the issue that is confusing you with the
members of your study group if you have joined one. A
third is to identify a treatise or hornbook in the area, a
discussion of an area of the law by an expert in the area.
That book is likely to be in the law library and you
should read the relevant section of the book and see how
it compares to your understanding of the area of the law.
It may provide some insight that helps you to figure out
the source of your confusion. These methods are not
mutually exclusive and you can do all three.
Another issue is the timing of preparing your outline. You cannot wait till the end of the semester. There will never be enough time to do this while you study for exams. Instead, after every unit of material, such as a chapter in your casebook, you should work on your outline. Each time you have new material to add you should also go over what you’ve already included in your outline. Many times there is a delay period in your understanding of material you are studying in a particular course. For example, it may be that it’s only after you’ve studied the material in the next chapter that you can go back and truly understand the material in the previous chapter. Therefore, you want to go back to the earlier parts of your outline and make appropriate adjustments when you add new material. In addition, this kind of periodic review will help you to remember the points in your outline. This is critical because first year exams are frequently closed-book exams so you will not have your outline with you.
14. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF EVERY WAY
YOUR SCHOOL PROVIDES TO PREPARE FOR EXAMS.
Law school essay exams are different than typical exams in
college. They usually provide you with several
hypothetical fact patterns, usually ones where the outcome
is uncertain, and then ask you to spot the legal issues
raised by the fact patterns and discuss those issues in
the context of the facts provided. They also usually
require you to argue both sides of contested legal issues
and provide alternative arguments if they are available.
In addition, these exams are usually taken under time
pressure and often in the first year are closed-book exams
so students cannot bring their outlines with them to the
exam and will have to rely on their memory. This is not
always the case, but open book or partially open book
exams where you can bring limited material with you to the
exam are still taken under time pressure where there will
be little time to consult materials you have available.
It’s usually only after the first year that you will
experience a take-home exam or other required writing such
as papers or legal advocacy writing that do not have to be
completed under the same level of time pressure as a timed
exam taken during the exam period.
Because many students are confronting such exams for the first time, law schools often provide resources to help students to prepare for exams. Much of the work, reading, briefing, reviewing, and outlining, precedes these exam preparation sessions. However, some schools have more extensive programs throughout the first semester to help students succeed in law school and one of the aspects of such programs is to help students succeed on exams. Another very valuable resource is the availability of old exams often available in the law library. A principal use of exam study groups is to have every student in the group answer old exam questions and then compare their answers to the answers of other members of the group so hopefully all members of the group will improve their exam performance. In addition, some professors also make available sample or model answers for some of their old exams. These can be invaluable in spotting patterns in the kinds of questions asked and the kind of answers required. A number of professors schedule review sessions to go over the material covered in their course and you should always attend such sessions. Some professors even provide you with the opportunity to answer a practice question and provide feedback if you turn in your answer by a stated deadline. Such an opportunity is one you should definitely take advantage of, but not all students do. When I have offered students a chance to write a sample exam answer, I have usually been amazed at how few students take advantage of the chance. I assume it’s because students are overwhelmed with other work, but it is really a mistake not to hand in a sample exam answer and take advantage of the feedback you get to improve your performance on the actual exam. Whatever resources there are, please make sure to use them all so you can do as well as possible on your exams.
15. REVIEW YOUR EXAMS AFTER YOU RECEIVE YOUR GRADES.
Different law professors provide
different levels of feedback after you receive your
semester grades. Some are very helpful in explaining the
deficiencies in your exam and others are not. Some provide
information in a written form by posting model answers to
the exam questions or using a grading sheet that
identifies the issues for which credit was given, while
others provide feedback by meeting with students to
discuss their exams. Take advantage of every opportunity
to review your performance. Even if you hear from second
or third year students that meeting with a particular
faculty member is not a useful source of feedback, meet
with the professor anyway.
One of your objectives in gathering
as much feedback as possible is, of course, to understand
why you got the grade you did. This is true if you did
well in your first set of exams because you want to make
sure you understand why you did well so you can duplicate
that performance on future exams. It is also true if you
did less well because you want to figure out how to avoid
a similar performance in the future. Another objective,
and in my view even more important, is to identify a
pattern in your performance on multiple exams. Do you have
problems with time management on exams? Did you allocate
your time badly so you spent more time on minor issues and
less time on major issues? Did you make substantive
mistakes by relying on incorrect rules of law? Did you
fail to spot important issues? By identifying a common
failing on multiple exams, you can figure out ways to
improve your exam taking no matter what the subject of the
exam. For a discussion of using your past exams to improve
your performance on future exams, see http://wneclaw.com/improvingyourexamperformance.html.