Law School Fast Track
Essential Habits for Law School Success
Cover of Contents
Sample Chapters
About the Author
How to Order
Law School Fast Track

Sample Chapters

Sample Section #1: Before You Start
Sample Section #2: Habit #2: Make a Plan and Stick To It
Sample Section #3: Reading the Law
Sample Section #4: Preparing for Finals
Sample Section #5: Habit #8: Write Your Own Outlines
Sample Section #6: Keep Living Life

Preparing for Finals

For most of you—and I was in the same boat—this is the first time in your educational experience where the final exam counts for your entire grade. If you’re like me, even when we’re told this, again and again, it doesn’t really sink in.

Yes, I know I wrote that this book is for setting the right habits for your first week of law school. This topic is so important, however, that it is worth discussing, and it does directly relate to how one should start in law school with good habits.

Preparing for those monster finals ought to be your driving concern. It just makes sense: It logically follows that you need to be extremely well-prepared for each exam so that your whole year (and your future career) is not flushed down the proverbial drain because of bad study habits.

What follows is going to be hard. Not “hard” hard, but difficult because it will mean that you’ll need to break bad old habits, and adopt new, better ones.

The following habits work hand-in-hand with preparing for your finals, and you have to do each simultaneously for this to work. Also, this might sound like a lot of work, but it beats cramming a truckload of information—or, more correctly, trying to cram a truckload of information—for a test that has cost you an even bigger truckload of money and time.

Habit #7: Break The Note-Taking Habit. Take “Outline” Notes.

This is going to sound weird, especially because you’ve gone through (and been successful in) over a decade of schooling to get to law school.

Here goes.

You have to stop taking notes. At least, you have to stop taking the stacks of notes that you’re used to taking. There is simply too much for you to learn in law school, and the prospect of taking extensive notes while reading and during class is simply absurd. Unfortunately for most law students, it won’t seem absurd until just before finals, as you stare at those stacks and stacks of utterly useless notes. Why useless? Because they won’t help you study for your number one concern: acing your law exams.

Allow me an illustration: When I finished my first semester of Property Law, I had over 140 pages of notes. One hundred forty pages! In Contract Law, I had one hundred eighty pages! I had novel-length accounts for each class, and faced the overwhelming task of whittling that down to a digestible amount of material. What happened? Soon after I started to go over these notes, I realized that they were doing absolutely nothing for me. Many of them I could hardly recognize, and they were certainly not providing any magic clarity to any of the rules we had studied. Quite the opposite. In front of me were nearly a thousand pages of suddenly worthless gibberish.

“…But you have to know all this information!” you say.

“…But I only took notes on exactly what we studied in class!” you claim.

“…It’s just crazy to tell us not to take notes!!” you protest, with a look of amazement on your face.

Well, let’s think about this from a different perspective. Imagine memorizing a novel, or even just reading it several times so you know it well. Let’s make it an exciting novel (which your notes will not be). Now imagine getting to know five different novels for five different exams—and imagine getting to know each novel well enough to condense that down to 20 pages of excruciatingly detailed analysis for each of them. It just doesn’t seem possible, or if it is possible, it doesn’t seem quite worth the effort.

When it comes to studying for finals, you do not want to read a novel-length account of Contract Law. More importantly, your law professors do not want to read novel-length regurgitations that simply spill canned law onto the exam—their exam. You need more, and better, knowledge and skill. Much more, and much better.

I wish I had realized my mistake before wasting so much time. The solution is straightforward and follows the theme of this book. Law school is about efficiency—doing only what you have to, and doing it very well. To be efficient in taking notes, take only one sheet of paper with you to each class! Your goal is simple: do not write any more than that single page.

You can use the same concept when typing notes in your computer, but there you need a bit more self-control. It’s harder to know when you’ve hit one page, and it’s easier to just keep typing away. There’s no “E” for effort in law school.

One page is all you need from each class—and in many cases, it’s too much. Even one page per day equals more than 40 pages per semester, or 240 pages total. Too many notes!

Write down only what is essential for your understanding of the legal concept. After all, you have already read the material and constructed a super-condensed brief, and you’re working actively in your outlining. This habit will not only save you time and wasted mental energy, it will help with the process of outlining itself.

By now, you’ve probably heard of law school outlines. Let me describe them briefly: A law outline is a hierarchical summary of the law, including not just the many rules but also how each rule, exception, and exception-to-exception fits within the structure of every other rule, exception, and exception-to-exception. The law outline is how the law is structured, for law students and for actual lawyers.

In law school, outlines are a way to learn the law efficiently because a single sentence, or even a few words, will trigger all of the related rules within that part of the outline. An efficient law student will create an outline, read it a few times (and refer to it while working through practice exams)—and then cut the outline in half. That’s right! You’re going to chop your outline down to size—a manageable size that will actually help you, instead of adding to the fog of confusion. This process of condensing your outline will be repeated until there are only a few words or lines for each concept. This is sometimes called the summary outline.

Even then, there’s still quite a lot of information to learn. This is why outlines are so important.

One analogy, when it comes to studying for law school, applies: Studying for finals is like a rocket being launched into space. When the rocket uses up its fuel cells, they are detached from the rocket. Likewise, when you study for your finals, you first read your textbook and go to class. Once this is done, it is done—and that part of the learning process detaches and falls away. You brief the cases, and put what you need into an outline. Those cases then fall away. You then edit your outline, and every piece deleted is a bit of unusable junk. All this happens until you have created your super-efficient outline. You don’t need the other stuff—you don’t want all that other stuff—because you know it. At this point, your super-efficient outline is to help remind you of the law you already know.

So you’re going to whittle down your notes into an outline. Why not take “notes” that will go directly into your outline? This means that you read your assignments effectively—so you know what is going on in class—and you actively participate in class. You put your efforts into selective notes, which go immediately into your outline—which you then progressively edit to a super-efficient outline.

For the record, I never did read all those hundreds of pages of notes. They went right into the trash. The point of this is to help you focus your efforts in building good habits. There are important ways to study and spend your energies in law school and in learning the law well enough to do very, very well in your exams.


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