7.20.24 - How to get mostly As in 1L and stay sane and have a good time
So, before you read this, here is my disclaimer:
I made top quintile of class overall. I got As and a couple of A-s on exams. I also just did average on the writing class, and those are different in each school, so no advice on that here. If that’s not good enough, I won’t be hurt if you look elsewhere.
If accomplishing top fifth and securing a Big Law offer for 2L while having a good time, hanging out with friends, and getting 8 hours of sleep a night is a desirable outcome for you, then maybe you’ll find this post useful. Just wanted to be honest about my performance, so you can decide how much weight to give my advice.
Some more context, to figure out how relevant my advice is for you, since everyone is pretty different. I’m not very type A by nature, I am more of an artistic type (can you tell by the strange website), and I’ve never been a good student until law school. My study strategies are adapted to me. So, if you’re a more type B, creative, intuitive student who maybe is surprised they got into law school, then I think this advice will be very useful. If not, maybe read this and make adjustments for yourself. With that, I will proceed. I write these blog posts fast, but the points of advice are ordered chronologically more than in any order of importance. —
The Summer Before
If you’re reading this, you’re likely some combination of anxious or excited for law school, and you are managing that anxiety and excitement by preparing. Like when you’re waiting for a package, and you read the reviews for the product while it’s in the mail. I get it, I’m like that too.
To be honest, the only things I would do to prepare is the following:
⁃ Get some nice outfits, makes going into school fun
⁃ Get supplies, obviously, and get stuff you’ll like using, don’t skimp, law school is already expensive. If you want a leather-bound journal and a cross pen, well hell go and buy it. Making studying marginally more enjoyable is worth it—you could probably measure it in the thousands of dollars in increased lifetime income honestly.
⁃ Set your semester calendar, I just use apple calendar, and put the Prof and classroom locations in the event details. You can even attach files and links to the events that are helpful.
⁃ Get as healthy as possible, get your appointments out of the way, get into a gym routine. Get your sleep schedule to a reasonable place.
⁃ Any bureaucratic task like renewing your car inspection or ordering a new credit card——just get it done. These waste time in the semester. I did my car inspection two months early, so I didn’t have to do it in the middle of the fall.
⁃ I think that typing notes is bad practice so work on your penmanship
That’s it.
1. Don’t stress. Just don’t.
You might be on reddit and read about how harrowing 1L is for people. Older attorneys might joke with you and say “you’re in for one hell of a year, say goodbye to your social life” or things to that effect. At orientation they will stress preserving your mental health, giving you the impression that this experience will severely impact your mental health (1L is kind of like cognitive hazing, but that’s true of any entry level to any elite organization. Finance bros get hazed. First year associates get hazed. It’s fine).
This is all horseshit, and I think KJDs are particularly susceptible to it. You know what law school is? You read some cases. You show up to class and chit chat with your classmates. Sometimes you have to answer a question in front of your mates. You go home. You repeat. You take an exam. It’s easier than the workforce. In a sense it’s easier than undergrad where you had a bunch of assignments all the time. You have basically one big assignment for each class. It’s not a big volume of tasks, but of content.
It’s a lot of reading, yes. But take a step back. It’s literally just reading. People who act like that’s insanely hard need to get a fucking grip. You are one of the most privileged people on earth if you just have to spend your days sitting and reading things. So don’t approach it like it’s going to be hard. Get in the frame that you’re going to school, you’re going to learn, it’s going to be a good time, it’s going to be a challenge, and you’ll handle it just fine.
I’m remembering this study that showed that women that believed that labor was going to be painful often had more complicated and painful labors, and when women were told yeah, it’s just something people do, they did a lot better. This is the same thing. Narratives shape your experience. Don’t adopt the narrative that law school sucks.
In short, the first step is to approach school with excitement and confidence. If you enter with anxiety, you’re already losing.
2. Keep your eye on the ball, which is the exams
The cold calls. The random events that people will make you feel like you need to go to. The extracurriculars. Networking for big law, which is for some reason earlier and earlier now. It’s overwhelming. It also doesn’t fucking matter (Big law networking matters near the middle of Spring, but I personally don’t think getting too ahead of it is that helpful).
All that matters is the exams and your final writing project. Your grades, especially your first semester grades, unfortunately carry a lot of weight. It determines your first-year job, it’s the only thing that recruiters for your 2L summer job will see, and doing it right means you’re not going to be trying to “catch up” in the Spring.
Obviously, plenty of people who are wildly successful in life do mediocre first semester, but there are also people with one leg who run marathons and shit. But you don’t say, ah it’s fine if I lose a leg. Sometimes you do bad, but you deal with that later. At the outset, you need to enter thinking you HAVE TO do well your first semester. I knew a lot of people who, when things got stressful mid-semester, would say “ah it’s just first semester, and the exam isn’t everything.” This is actually true, but if you start thinking like that, you’re already hedging your bets and removing some intensity. For right now, your first semester grades ARE make it or break it. This is your one shot, one opportunity. Mom spaghetti.
So, here’s what I did and here’s what you should do. In your little apartment where you go to curl up and hang your hat, find a spot——mine was on the white board in my study area——where you will put your exam dates in big bold letters. Count the weeks to it. The exams are your opponent. And the preparation for battle begins on day one.
We haven’t even gotten to how to study yet, but I must stress that just keeping the exams in mind in everything you do is the most important preliminary step. A lot of people enter a day-to-day survival mode, trying to keep up with that day’s reading, trying to make sure they don’t look stupid on the next cold call, trying to make sure the ungraded draft for their writing class is perfect——this is all idiotic. It is all about the exams (and the brief). Don’t ever forget it.
What does this mean practically? If you’re behind one day, or do bad on a cold call, or get super fixated on one doctrine that’s hard for you, don’t let it stress you or derail you. Take comfort in the fact that all that matters is the exam. Stress is cognitively and metabolically expensive. Don’t waste it on bullshit that doesn’t matter.
3. Reading effectively
The last two points were about mental posture, and I think they are universally relevant. If you adopt both those postures, you’re already in a good spot. Ready for showtime. Now here’s my advice on how to study effectively.
3a. Keep up with the readings.
You know that Drake and Josh episode where the sushi is coming on the conveyer belt, and it speeds up, and eventually they can’t package it, so they start throwing it on the ceiling? Sometimes the readings feel like that, even if you’re a fast reader.
Don’t fall behind. It sucks and showing up to class unprepared feels bad, even if it’s not a cold call class. Participating in the discussion is what makes law school fun.
Now this is not advice I followed. For a few of my non cold call classes, I fell egregiously behind at a couple of points, especially in the Spring when I was too focused on Big Law networking. If you fall behind, you need to do the painful work of catching up. Rip off the band aid on some Saturday. Drink a red bull, get through it. Use Quimbee or a study aid to speed things along, but in general, don’t rely exclusively on this (more on that later). Missing a few readings and saving them for reading week before the exam may happen, but it’s not a good idea. I might make a post on how to cram in a pinch, because I got A’s in classes where I had to cram entire units I neglected, and the truth is that especially in the Spring semester it might happen.
But really, just don’t fall behind. Even if you only have time to read it poorly, read it. Reading cases on the metro to class or the 20 minutes before was often sufficient for me to get what was going on (I’m also a fast reader), but going in blind always sucked.
3b. Read and brief for understanding
So, reading cases will be a new thing. Lots of resources out there on how to read cases. Here's a helpful link by Orin Kerr: https://law2.wlu.edu/library/documents/kerrhowtoreadopinion.pdf (sorry I'm too lazy to do the hyperlink, edit copy paste this).
That's the best resource on the subject. But here's my quick take:
A lot of people think it’s just the holding of the case, the black letter law that matters. These people are morons. A lot of time that’s the least important part! You need comprehensive understanding of four things:
(1) why was this case assigned? What theme of the class, or tension point in the law, is it illustrating? What is the takeaway or puzzle your professor wants you to leave with?
(2) What was the policy rationale for the decision? A core theme of almost every law class is that all the fancy jargon and doctrine is window dressing and a way to achieve some societal objective. Identity that objective as clearly as possible.
(3) the holding. Yes, you need to know the holding. And often, you can find this on Quimbee or commercial outlines. One thing you need to add when writing out your holding is to note how this holding may have been modified in later cases.
(4) The facts. The degree to which this is important varies wildly between classes. But it’s good to remember a bit about the situation, often just to remember it effectively. One note——read the notes that the textbook puts after the case. It’s a cheat code. They usually answer 1-3 completely if you read them thoroughly.
So here you have four big buckets of elements you should be able to answer with every case you read. You should brief cases, especially early on; I would recommend making a basic template for your briefs, and whatever format you make them, check if they are designed to answer all four categories identified earlier.
Now briefing cases doesn’t have to be a science, and it doesn’t have to be super comprehensive. Sometimes you will spend two hours briefing a case. Sometimes it will be 15 minutes in a jam. But if you can answer (1) why this case (2) the policy rationale (3) the holding (4) the facts, you’ll be A okay to participate in class.
Now, if you’re over my theoretical discussion on briefs and everything else, I’ll give you something extremely concrete. This is how I mostly briefed Civil Procedure, where I got an A and almost always felt very prepared for class.
Facts
[this is where I would write the basic factual background of the case. In a pinch, I would copy and paste the summary from quimbee into Chat GPT, and ask it to make a narrative bullet summary of the facts. Worked perfectly.]
The Decision
[here I would just write out key quotes from the decision while reading my textbook, put notes next to the quotes giving my interpretation. This is where I used no supplement at all.]
Rule and Takeaways
[here I would usually write my interpretation of the rule and put a quote from that case that captured the holding. I would also sometimes paste the Quimbee rule here, but usually I needed more than that. Finally, I would write out a policy takeaway.]
And then I would print it out and bring it to class and mark the briefs up with my pen. These were my class notes. When I was outlining, my briefs and my class notes were just one thing, which was very nice. I think this was my best system, and I did a variant of it in other classes.
In Spring, I would just do briefing notes in the actual textbook because I got good enough at reading cases that I didn’t need to do the whole separate briefing process. But start with real briefs in the fall. The key is not to make it a time sink, but a form of exam prep——briefs should be done in a way that they very logically align with the outlining process.
3c. At some point, figure out the professor
This isn’t something you necessarily want to attempt on day 1. But a few weeks into the semester, you’ll get a sense of what they find interesting. You’ll get a sense of the questions they let hang in the air, that they relish in bouncing to students. Remember, these people are academics, and they get a hard-on for paradoxes, inconsistencies, and puzzles in the law. They are not trying to help you memorize things or prepare for the bar, they see that as your job. They want you to think about things more deeply, and they have a desperate need to share a piece of their vibrant inner world with you. There are elements to the law and the subject they are teaching that they find really fun. Since they’re human, those will almost certainly be on the exam.
Now before I proceed, I think I can’t drive this point hard enough. You don’t become a law professor if you don’t find things about the law fascinating. These people are real nerds. Maybe you’re not like that, maybe you see a spade for a spade, or whatever the turn of phrase is, but they often don’t. So think about the kind of sick person who becomes a professor, then try and think like them. Sometimes it’s fun.
Anyways, when you start to notice these things, write them down, and keep them in mind while reading, and while briefing. They’ll often answer (1) on the list from 3b.
4. Use class time effectively
Before giving advice, I’m going to be real with you and say that I often did not use class time effectively. Often I did. Many times, I did not. Sometimes I would get almost everything I need to out of the readings, and a lot of class time was just questions about what happened out in the case, and I would zone out completely, or browse the web. Obviously, it turned out fine for me, but don’t do that. It’s stupid and you’re spending a lot of money to be in school. I will tell you what I did on good days, and what I wished I did all of the time.
4a. DON’T type your notes in class
Guys. Don’t do it. Literally almost everyone does it. You will see everyone do it. Don’t do it. There is so much literature out there on how you just don’t memorize things as well when you type. And the speed at which you type is so fast that you will record way more content than necessary. Unless you have some kind of disability, which is a real thing, just HANDWRITE your notes. If you have bad handwriting, grow the hell up. Now is a great excuse to make it nicer, and in the future, you can write family members nice letters and your spouse love notes. It’s a great skill to have. Start now.
Handwriting your notes forces you to summarize information fast, to think fast, to see the forest through the trees. This is the exact skills you need on the exam, and as a lawyer. Start practicing from day one and handwrite your notes. People type because they’re anxious that they won’t “get” everything otherwise. Typing becomes a safety blanket. Well guess what. I know people who would type type type and then what it came time to review they had a 200 page google doc they were parsing through to compress into their outline. Not fun.
Just keep your class notes relatively short, listen closely, draw things, do whatever. Don’t become a stenographer. Synthesize and shorten information in real time. You’ll have to do that in your outline anyways. Trust that your memory will be jogged if you didn’t get everything. You’re in law school after all, you’re smart.
Your note-taking in class is ideally a form of outlining, you’re comprising the contents and holdings from cases into doctrine.
Now, here’s something not to do. Your classes are probably recorded. Some students would leave class and say things like, I didn’t really get that, I’m going to have to watch the recording. In my head I would think, are you out of your fucking mind. Every second in law school is precious if you want to get good grades and stay healthy and spend time with friends and family. Rewatching lectures is just so insanely boneheaded. This is another thing that acts as a safety blanket and reduces your performance and efficiency. Don’t have it in the back of your head that you’ll be able to rewatch later. Just pretend it doesn’t exist. Those recordings exist for emergencies like getting sick. They are not review material.
I only ever rewatched a couple lectures when it was closer to exam time, it’s a fine tool in that context if you want to clarify something. Not to cover for you if you didn’t pay attention or were too shy to ask a question. This leads into the next point.
4b. Participate in class
What makes a lot of people anxious are the cold calls and the public speaking. While I get it, sort of, the truth is you’re at least 22 years of age and need to get over it. Everyone is in the same boat. Be prepared, show up, and perform. Be nice to people if they falter and generally, you’ll find that people don’t judge you all that hard if you do. At my school whenever someone got cold called for the first time in the fall people would make it a point to congratulate them after class or tell them they did a nice job. You should do this too. It’s nice and you’ll feel good if people give you words of reassurance after being in the spotlight.
Anywho, cold calls are a minority of your classroom experience. It’s mostly voluntary participation. You pay a lot of money, or at least time, so if you don’t understand something, just ask. Chances are people have the same question. Don’t worry about what other people think, ask your question, even if it is objectively stupid. You deserve an answer.
Now, the problem is that often law professors don’t give answers. They give you questions back. This is because they’re professors and they think in fucking riddles or whatever. Sometimes it’s actually because at the heart of your question is a paradox or some currently very contentious or theoretically difficult issue in the law. If you ask these kind of questions, you’ll often know because your professor will sometimes smile or chuckle. Sometimes your question is so good that, little do you know, there are whole journal articles about that subject.
So, if you don’t get an answer, don’t get frustrated. It could mean that you’re actually thinking about the questions in the right way. Knowing the right questions are as important as knowing concrete answer for law exams, and life. Just ask questions.
I guess this comes with a caveat that you shouldn’t waste your classmate’s time, some people talk to hear themselves speak. Don’t be that person. Sometimes I would catch myself doing that. It’s fine, many people have a weird fetish. Nothing to be ashamed of but nothing that you should exhibit in polite society. If yours is talking in class, try and keep it in your pants.
5. Start Outlining from week one
So, this is the most important point, and I probably should’ve put it at the top, but I’m thinking of this chronologically, and theoretically all of the things I’ve talked about before happen during or before day one and your first crack at outlining should happen maybe the first weekend after classes.
You may be asking, what the hell is an outline? It’s a study guide. That’s all it is. It’s a study guide. I don’t know why the hell it’s called an outline. But yeah, it’s a study guide.
Now, there is no fixed formula for outlining, because everyone is different. Some people type class notes throughout the semester then whittle that down. Some people make handwritten flow charts, which I always thought were neat. Some people use an old outline that’s available from their SBA or a 2L or a commercial supplement, and just modify it. I think each of these methods have gotten people As.
I’ll start with the general advice and share what I did specifically at the end.
5a. Start by thinking about Course structure
Think about the big picture and how all the information can be synthesized from the very first week. Look through your syllabus and your textbook week one, listen to your introductory lecture, and get a sense of the landscape of what you’re learning about. Use that to make a table of contents or sections for your outline. Do some googling, get a very cursory sense of each unit’s content.
For instance, a contracts course should have a structure vaguely like this:
1. Formation 2. Promissory Estoppel and Quasi Contracts 3. Defenses 4. Problems with Boilerplates 5. The Uniform Commercial Code 6. Remedies and Damage Calculations
Different professors will have different orders, labels, they may remix and mash different sections together, but it’ll be something like this. Look at your professor’s syllabus and textbook. Look at other textbooks. Look at outlines for other classes. You can get a sense of the course in a very “platonic” sense——what a basic contracts course looks like——and then see how your professor and textbook authors have made it their own.
Once again, try and get a sense of what the GENERAL content of a course is, what would be there no matter what school or what professor you have, and then take note of how your professor has structured it. This should also give you some indication of how your professor sorts the doctrine in their head, which is actually very useful when preparing for an exam.
If you don’t get what I mean, think about a subject from school that isn’t necessarily best taught chronologically, like biology. Think about how you would teach it, what order you would present ideas. Would you do evolution first, the most important foundational concept? Would you start with cells, then go big to small? Would you work through the tree of life?
You’ll realize there are probably several good ways to do it. Law classes have a bit of that too. Your professors choices in course structure are very informative. That’s a great first step to outlining.
5b. Fill in your outline every week or so
Every week you should have a fresh set of briefs and class notes. Shorten this content in some way and load it into your outline. Doesn’t have to be perfect, especially in the beginning, but just put it in that document every week and don’t let it pile up.
A few weeks into the semester, you’ll see ideas and cases start referencing each other, ideas build off each other, and you will find ways to relate them. At this point, the consolidation process begins. Following our contracts example, if you’re doing defenses you’ll see how promissory estoppel is a way for a plaintiff to bypass a defense that formation never occurred, and you’ll start to see a flowchart in your head, different pathways an agreement can take. As soon as that spark of intuition hits your mind, draw it, write it out in your outline. Bring it to class. Revise it.
You’ll end up with a little bit of a mess overtime, the outline may be unwieldy, but the key is to add things and clean them up iteratively. Don’t be focused on being too neat. Law isn’t neat, and the first semester it’ll be an enormous volume of ideas and content. The crystallization will happen naturally, don’t force all of your content all into too rigid of a structure too soon.
I see people do this with outlines, where they have their little headings, and subheadings, and sub-sub headings, and try and force pretty nuanced legal ideas into something very robotic. I don’t find that useful personally, unless you’re at the very very end of the process.
Basically, let your outline be a living entity that reflect your evolving and improving understanding of the law throughout the semester. Let it breathe. But keep feeding it new content. Near the end of the semester, when you have a more bird’s eye view of everything, you’ll be able to really whittle it down.
5c. Get it clean before reading week
Now, thus far, I’ve said that you should take it easy and let the outline breathe for most of the semester. Well that changes when you get closer to the finish line. When you’re around three or four weeks out from reading week, you should look at your outline, then look at yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself, is this war-time ready? Am I war-time ready?
Chances are it’s not; it might be missing content (it’s certainly missing the last units). It might be too long. It might have things you know are wrong now. Misunderstandings. Confusion on doctrine that has been clarified by newer content in the course.
I had a very strict goal for myself: I should have somewhat complete document, printed in my hands, before reading weeks even starts. That is, I should be reviewing my outline during reading week, not making it.
This meant I had to be polishing my outline in the last few weeks of classes. This is a harder point in the semester, where you’re not even done with content but you’re synthesizing the whole course for finals. Well, you’ll have to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time.
This is a point of the semester that should be actually a little bit stressful, but it will be fine because you didn’t stress about the small stuff during the semester, and you’ve been getting 8 hours of sleep until now so you can afford a bit of crunch.
One way to do this is to just “quarantine” off all the content after a certain unit and decide you’ll add that on the day after the very last day of classes, and make your outline based on everything before that. That’s sort of what I did. In my head, there was a class I already finished, that covered units X-Y, and I had this other class with unit Z that I was still working on. Just a mental trick.
The point is, you need to have something DONE before reading week. You need to be reviewing your outline when other people are frantically making theirs while going through their 200-page typed google docs. You need to get ahead of the curve by any means necessary.
You need to do visualize it like this. There are two versions of your reading week before exams. One is where you’re doing the intensely laborious work of synthesizing content, and then only having a few days to review it. The other is one where you have a nice little packet in your hand, you’re sitting outside with a cup of tea and your little pen, and you’re calmly reviewing it, marking it up, and then taking practice exams in the evening (more on that later).
You want your reading week before finals to be relatively calm! So front load the pain and get as much of your outline done before.
5d. Bonus - my actual process
So, enough abstractions, this is how I outlined that got me most As and some A-s, slightly modified to reflect what I will do in 2L that I am certain will bump that to As and A+s.
I start with what I described in 5a, going through the textbooks and syllabi the weeks before the semester starts, and getting as much sorted into word document as possible. Now this word document doesn’t really become my outline, because it would be too long, but it will have everything I need for the course in it. This word document will have unit headings, space for the respective cases if I have knowledge of them already, and anything else I know will be in the course.
Using the briefing principles in 3b and my note taking principles in 4a, every week I have new content to add into the outline. I spend the weekend updating the outlines accordingly, I spent maybe one full workday each weekend doing this.
Now, for me it’s important that as fluid as the outline is content-wise in the middle of semester, that its extremely pleasing to the eye. Mine have always been extremely formatted, with a gorgeous array of serif-fonts, diagrams that I would either draw and scan or create in apple free-form, nice high-resolution images next to cases to jog my memory, textboxes with extra notes on the side. I made it look like my own mini textbook.
So, I sort of lied earlier, by the end of the semester, I would have not really an outline, but a mini textbook, around 40 pages or so. This would have my own prose, long excerpts from cases, and really extensive explainers on things for myself. But it would be printed, spiral bound, and ready, and I would use it to make a two-page “attack outline” during reading week.
Unlike my larger “course outline” I developed through the semester, which was really just self-indulgent, my attack outline was entirely for exam purposes. It was different for each class, depending on whether it was open book or closed book, etc. But it has taken the following forms:
⁃ A few pages of “pre-writes” or exam-shells and flow charts, to work through any conceivable exam question
⁃ A more traditional bullet-form outline, the kind you usually see on outline banks
⁃ A table of cases with columns for a “rule” and a memory jog next to them (e.g. International Shoe | Minimum Contacts | Salesmen operating in state but HQ elsewhere - didn’t matter, state still had PJ)
So as far as outlining, I would have two products, a course outline, and little attack outline. During reading week, I would use both on practice exams, see where they fell short, make revisions with pen, revise, and reprint.
That actually raises another point in my processes overall——they were very physical. I would print briefs for class to mark up (usually, sometimes I would forget and mark them up on my iPad). I would handwrite my notes. I would type my outlines, and then I would print them out and edit the hell out of them by hand, then retype it.
This back and forth between digital and print may seem tedious, but it forced me to iterate and encounter the content A LOT. There is a redundancy to printing, editing, and retyping, but that’s the point. I think this is labor intensive but part of the reason I got the grades I did.
TL;DR
⁃ Made the outline pretty
⁃ Made a long one and a short one
⁃ Used a lot of visuals
⁃ Printed them and worked with them physically, for added redundancy
6. Take exams and write answers to questions all semester
Writing about this one actually makes me angry, because I had friends who would refuse to this and insist it was a waste of time, and then they did mediocre and complained later. Most people are nervous about law school being ~oNe ExAm~! Oh my god that’s so unfair, that’s so crazy! How could our whole grade just be on oNE exAm!!
If you’re thinking about it like that, you’re silly! You can take exams all semester! You can write out questions and answers all semester!
Your textbook has questions in the notes, if you get supplements it will have practice questions (your library will have the Examples and Explanations series), your professor will probably ask you questions and maybe write them on your reading assignments, you might have a midterm, and you’ll certainly have access to past exams from your professor or another. Hell, if you’re really in a pinch, ask chat GPT to generate some exam style questions after feeding it your outlines and notes.
For most of the semester, in small doses, you should practice writing out cogent answers to hypotheticals. A lot of times you can come to office hours and ask your professor to look at them, and ask them what they think. Depends on the professor. You can also do this indirectly by just asking what they would think about X scenario.
The final exam should not seem that daunting if you’ve been writing and writing all semester. A lot of students just read and read the content and don’t generate anything all semester, saving their writing for the writing class. Don’t do this. Writing is a skill that needs to be practiced. From the basic physical mechanics of typing fast to the cognitive power required to translate your thoughts to words fast, it’s good to keep your capabilities in that area strong.
You should write little exams all semester. ALL semester!
7. Treat reading week like scrimmages, not like practice
Now, ideally, you’ve entered reading week with an 85% complete outline for all of your classes. You may have a short outline ready if you follow conventional advice, or you may have a longer style one like I did. Doesn’t matter, but you should have a finished product in hand.
You should have written out some exam answers, have done a couple of full practice tests by now. Have a stack of briefs and handwritten notes near you.
Now what? To me, reading week isn’t about learning, it’s about practicing, and conditioning. It should be a time of rest and recovery. You should sleep a lot, eat very healthy, get a lot of exercise, spend a lot of time outside.
Now these are all ideals to strive towards, and one I’ve met about 70% of the time. Listen, I had days where I fell asleep with the lights on, woken up in a sweat, skipped breakfast, and got back to work. It's law school.
But the advice is to not to do that mostly. For the most part, reading week looked like this for me: I would eat a big breakfast, sit at my desk, take practice exam questions, then take a break and go outside, exercise, whatever.
Then I would come back, print those answeres out, grade them, compare against answer keys or model answers if I had them, and sometimes try again. Then I would revise my outline if I needed to. After that, I would take a break, see my friends, repeat the process until exam day. On exam day, I would just pace around campus with my printouts and a copy, listen to music, but mostly just burn off the anxious energy with walking.
The big takeaway is that reading week shouldn't be a time where you're learning things wholesale. Please don't plan to do that.
***BONUS CONTENT*** - The real truth and how I dealt with it
Thusfar, I’ve mostly talked about ideals and best practices. But no one does that. Not even the best students most of the time. I did not.
The truth is that most of us are kind of goobers. We know what we’re supposed to do but don’t do it. We might procrastinate, spend 4 hours on Tik Tok, have too much faith in our ability to cram. So, the truth is that there is usually more stress and pressure involved because of imperfect decisions piling up. Here are the general ways I dealt with short coming:
Missing Readings
⁃ If I missed readings, I would usually mark time to cram and catch up. If I simply could not make it happen, I took the L for a unit and just started fresh when we got to the next one to keep moving. If I had any missing readings by the time the semester ended, I would take care of that for the FIRST day or so of reading week. Both semesters I needed to dedicate maybe 12 hours to just catch up. Which wasn’t ideal, that was time I could have spent either relaxing or writing practice answers. But that’s the reality.
Shitting the bed/taking the piss
There was one class, Con Law, where I completely failed to follow any of my advice in this blog post. It was in the evening and there were a lot of networking events in the Spring, so I missed it a lot. And I was often really tired or hungry during that class so I would zone out (I have ADHD so that happens to me a lot). Near the end of the semester I essentially gave up and realized this was a class I had to cram during reading week, but thankfully I was in a good spot for other classes.
After taking the piss for that class——as in literally no reading for months and completely absent for the course——I did the following to get an A- on the closed book exam and maintain my GPA in the spring semester.
⁃ When I realized that I would need time to cram con law, making sure my outlines for all my other classes were in good shape became an even greater priority. I spent a lot of time getting things really tight for my other courses, so I only had ONE major crisis to deal with. There’s a lot of inefficiency in switching between tasks, and I knew I would be more efficient if I didn’t have to prep much for the other exams. ⁃ I started by making a list of every case, and pasting the quimbee summaries, shortened by chat GPT into it. This was exhausting, but an important first step. ⁃ I looked at old outlines to figure out what the basics of the course were ⁃ After this, I actually read the cases I needed to have a richer understanding of, taking a lot of notes. It was so many cases and so much reading. ⁃ I made a lot of hand drawn diagrams to understand the line of cases and how they developed the law. ⁃ I took a lot of practice exam questions and graded myself ⁃ At the end of this process, I forced myself to sit with no materials, and write everything I remembered from the course from MEMORY on a word doc. As if I was giving a lecture. ⁃ I printed that, checked it, and used it to review.
This was probably the most intense exam prep I did, and it only got me an A-. So don’t do it like that. But if you end up in that situation, this proves that hope is not lost. If you are strong enough.
8. Conclusion/global lifestyle and study advice
Too many people talk about law school being so grueling and ruining their health and sleep and whatnot. I’m really a believer that you should not do this, and that it’s not necessary, mostly. Especially during fall semester, where I wasn’t worried about jobs, I was able to stay pretty sane (part of the promise of the title). It was the spring where I faltered a bit, and now that I’ve had the experience, I feel qualified to give advice from my success as well as my mistakes:
8a. Make health non-negotiable
Law is a very intense field, and you really shouldn’t be starting with strategies that wreck your body. I know a couple of former big lawyers from a previous job, and one of them just looked like someone who ran themselves ragged. Not worth it.
You’ll notice some people gain weight, get a bit more disheveled, people with dark circles around their eyes, falling asleep in class. Some people even take pride in abusing themselves. Literally don’t let this happen to you.
Start from the very beginning. All-nighters are not cool. Skipping meals isn’t cool. Just eating ramen noodles is not cool. Eating and sleeping is infinitely more important than getting the entire reading done, I think. If it was between being a bit behind and getting a full night’s sleep, I would almost always pick the latter for the bulk of the semester.
Now this meant that near the end, it was relatively easy for me to break these rules and not face repercussions. I had a few days where I sat at the computer with a Celsius and a cigarette and freezer meals to just hammer through work. I had SOME late nights. But that was just a handful of days, so it didn’t cause me damage. What ruins you is the chronic, everyday neglect of your body. Treat yourself nicely, keep some gas in the tank for emergencies.
To hammer this point home, law school has a big performance element to it, its as much a test of sheer physical endurance as it is of knowledge. If you were an olympian, you wouldn't get all sore before the competition. You would take care of yourself. Also, think about how stupid you would feel if you let yourself go physically just to get like a, B average. Both victory and defeat are easier to deal with if you look and feel good.
8b. Spend a lot of time with friends
The people who I know that did the best were actually quite social. The one friend of mine who thought it would be a good idea to be recluse and really “focus” did just okay. Call your family a lot, call your friends from back home a lot, get drinks and meals with your classmates. That’s what life is all about. I did better when I did.
When you’re miserable, you just don’t perform well. Take breaks while studying, keep yourself happy. For at least most humans, rich connections with others is what keeps you happy.
8c. Study groups are mostly overrated
Study groups are fun and are a good way to spend time with people. But they’re usually a waste of time. I used them, but it was generally just to blow off steam and review stuff I knew. It’s more likely for misunderstandings to permeate a group than real understanding of the law. I've overhead people sharing plane errors with eachothe rin the library and committing it to their outlines.
If you do study grups, smaller is better. I’ve had very effective study sessions with like one to two people at a time. Once you’re with five you’re basically at a high-school cafeteria table.
If you do find a couple people you really vibe with, I think study groups are a good place to work through a very CONCRETE misunderstanding. For instance, I worked through some confusion around battle of the forms with a group of three, and it was very helpful. But we marked the session to be only about that.
In short, go ahead and study in groups, it’s good for your brain to socialize, and sometimes it does help, but block it as social time in your calendar, not a substitute for self-study.
8d. Avoid drama
Spending time with friends comes with a caveat. I won’t get into this too much, because this isn’t a personal confessional style blog, but grade school style drama can really distract you. It’s all fun the first few weeks, the gossip and the new people and all that, but it gets old real fast, and it can hold you back. Law school is more like middle school than like college. If you notice middle school type dynamics emerging in your friend groups, just politely create some distance. Ideally, you’re in law school to achieve something, not to waste time.
8e. Keep things to yourself.
Law school has a lot of comparing and contrasting. It’s a curve. I think it’s generally best to not talk about grades, to be competitive but within the confines of your own mind and have a polite and sportsman like attitude with your peers, being congratulatory and kind.
If you did really bad on a midterm, you don’t want to hear someone gloat about their perfect score. If you get a 2L summer job, you don’t want to talk about it in front of someone who has been hopelessly searching and is striking out at OCI. Just be mindful.
Competition can make people act really catty and awful, you don't want to give people reasons to be jealous or resentful of you. I have learned some of this the hard way, and if I were to go back and do anything differently, it would be to act a bit more lowkey.
8f. Chunking things is good I think
Law school can feel like there’s a lot of balls in the air all the time. Three classes with a writing project due turns out to be a lot. What I did, and I think other people did less, is really chunk tasks. I would spend a couple days at a time mainly only thinking about one course, and just keeping up with the other courses.
It was a bit insane and seemed ill advised but it really made me more efficient. Every time you switch subjects or between types of tasks it takes time. Doing three subjects in one day seems stupid to me. Immersing yourself in one class for longer stretches means you’ll have more epiphanies and make more connections.
8g. Supplements are not a replacement for reading
Some foolish student may tell you that you only need to read the short and happy guide, or the Emmanual crunch time, or something like that. Don’t do that. It will only get you to average in almost every case.
On Quimbee, I think it’s a useful tool, but it’s too tempting to use to replace the hard work of reading and getting insights for yourself. Like internet pornography, try and use it in a very limited sense or not at all. I used it for real crises, or to pre-fill out sections of outlines for units we hadn’t done yet. Basically, don’t avoid hard work. It doesn’t work for a curve system. No shortcuts.
8h. exam answers
I think that this is the most important thing, that merits another post, but one that I think other people are qualified to write about. Again, I got some A-s, which means I’m not an authority on the subject.
In general, very much like I’m writing right now, I would write exam answers with a good deal of structure but think out loud a lot to show the professor I knew what the real issues they were getting at were. I ran towards ambiguity.
I might write more on this, especially if I manage all As this fall (then I would feel more credible to give advice), but I would really recommend reading “Getting to Maybe” and checking out this post by Orin Kerr, which is the most helpful thing I have read on the subject.
https://volokh.com/posts/1168382003.shtml (again too lazy for hyperlink sorry) —
Anyways, that’s all I’ve got. I might rewrite this and re-upload in the future to be neater. Or write about other topics that people may request. I think that spring semester is a very different beast with pre OCI, job hunt, and extracurriculars, so I will make a separate post about that. Feel free to DM me on twitter, reddit, or send me an email. My goal for this site is to just have some useful information for students like me, and to contribute to a culture of informal long-form writing, like you see on reddit or newsletters and stuff.
- knxnts