How To Struggle Through Law School In The Right Way

If you ask most law students, law school can be really tough, especially during your first year!

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If you ask most law students, law school can be really tough, especially during your first year! As a 1L in particular, you’ll probably feel like you struggle on some level on a daily basis. That’s good! Struggle is crucial to this kind of learning. After speaking with many, many law students over the years, though, we at the Law School Toolbox have found that many people are struggling, but in all the wrong ways.

Let me be clear. Law school should involve some discomfort with material. If you’re doing it right, there should be days where your brain physically hurts from wrapping your head around new concepts, new questions, and re-training yourself to be a student in a way you probably never have before. That’s not to say that the actual substantive material in law school is impossible to understand — it’s not! You just have to know how to tackle it.

Along these lines, here are some examples of what we have seen as “the wrong kind of struggle” and what you should do instead to struggle in a better way. You’ll notice that a common theme here is that doing well in law school doesn’t have as much to do with how many hours you’re putting in, how much minutiae you absorb, or what you sound like in class. Succeeding in law school has much more to do with how well you see the big picture, how often you put what you’re learning into the context of your exams (rather than prioritizing feeling successful in the moment), and really, at the end of the day, how much practice you do.

What we typically see:

If you’re wondering whether you can get by without reading the cases, unfortunately, the answer is no. However, getting a handle on how to read cases and extract what information is useful is a learned skill. It’s not easy, but it’s something you need to get good (and fast) at as a practicing attorney. Most law students put a premium on the time they spend on a case before lecture. They try to excise out every last detail. They write briefs that are long and cumbersome without a clear direction, and they quote the case book directly at length. Don’t do this.

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What we recommend instead:

Instead, think of the time you spend on a case as split between before class and after class. Maximize the after-class time rather than the before-class time. Think of your case preparation as “giving it your best good faith shot.” You probably won’t get marked down for participation if it’s clear you read the case, you just falter a little bit with the understanding—that’s okay! Rather than front-loading time reading cases and trying to squeeze out every drop of importance before class, focus on what the professor emphasizes about the case during class, and then go back once lecture is done to try to straighten all the pieces out on your own. The important thing is that you figure out the bottom-line take-away point each case is trying to give you. Why was it assigned? Why does it fall in this particular topic on your syllabus? Sometimes this is tough to discern before class. This is why your after-class review is crucial.

What we typically see:

Most law students are border-line obsessed with what they sound like in class. Will they get called on? What do they say? What if they make a mistake!? If you feel like this, it’s time to shift your perspective. As long as you’re not missing your basic class participation credits, none of this actually matters. I know it can feel overwhelming and nerve-wracking, but making mistakes in class is not the end of the world. Remember, you’re here to learn, and learning means making mistakes. It’s okay! Also, taking a couple of missteps in class (as long as you’re putting in your best effort) usually has no effect on your final grade.

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What we recommend instead:

You should be focused much less on your performance in lecture, and much more on your performance during your final exam. Lecture is not the end all be all, lecture is a means to an end. Lecture is the place where you find out if your understanding of the cases you read was right or wrong. Use class time to gauge your ability to get what you need out of the material on your own. If you’re surprised by what your professor thinks the take-away point of a case was, this means you need to work on your reading and briefing some more to make sure you’re boiling down the information in the way you need to be. Start trying to predict what your professor thinks matters from each case. See how well you can pinpoint it. Think of lecture as a place to confirm the rules you’re extracting from cases. These rules are what you will use as building blocks for your outline. You may also scoop up some interesting policy and party arguments, and tips for attack plans as well, but the bulk of what you do to prepare for your final will actually happen outside of lecture and outside of reading for class.

What we typically see:

A very typical scenario is one in which a new student comes to us very disappointed with their final grades, and more often than not, confused about how they performed so poorly since they worked so hard. We get it. No one tells you how to do law school! You can be an intelligent person and put in a tremendous of time and effort and still fall in the middle or bottom of the pack. Why does this happen? Well, it’s not just about studying “hard,” it’s about studying “smart.” Studying smart means practicing for your exams as early in the semester as possible. The vast majority of the time, students who are unhappy with their grades either did not practice at all, or waited until the middle or end of the semester to do so. There’s no substitute for practicing hypos, and we’ve seen all the excuses. I promise you, none of them is worth it. Just do it. Bite the bullet and force yourself to practice today. You’ll be glad you did.

What we recommend instead:

Practice early, practice often! This really is the best thing you can do for your grades. The minute you finish any topic in class, that is the perfect time to begin practicing exams and hypos on that topic. Take a look at your syllabus, find where one topic ends and the next begins. Mark these on your calendar. Find as many hypos as you can. Use supplements like the Examples & Explanations books and pull past exams from your professor if you can find them. There are lots of materials you can use to practice. Why does practice matter so much? Well, we have seen time and again that there are nuances and questions that you never truly see until you write out a hypo or try your hand at some multiple choice questions. The dangerous trap most students fall into is that by waiting to practice until the end of the semester, they also wait to see all these nuances and how the pieces of the puzzle fit together until it’s too late. You need to catch these questions early while you still have time to iron them out with more practice, and ask for clarification during office hours.

What we typically see:

The law students who come to us after performing poorly generally either did not make their own outlines, or they made their own based on someone else’s (and by “based on,” I mean they essentially copied down someone else’s outline and changed some wording so it made more sense to them). That, or, they made their own outlines but included way, way too much information. Many students also don’t begin their outlines early enough. If you’re planning to start outlining in November, that’s too late.

What we recommend instead:

You should make your own outlines from scratch. I know it’s hard, and sometimes, you may not even be sure what an outline really is. The most important thing is that you create a study document that captures the relevant information in whatever format works for you. It doesn’t need to look like your standard “outline” with A, B, I, II, etc. There are lots of ways to do this. In addition, you need to outline early and often—just like with practice. Similarly, as soon as you finish a topic in class, not only should you be practicing that topic, you should also be outlining it. The steps you go through to make a good outline will raise ambiguity that is hard to see in lecture and the readings. It will cause you to ask questions about how what you’re learning really fits together in the big picture. It’s crucial that you start wondering about this stuff now so you have time to figure it out before you’re tested on it.

Struggling with attack plans.

What we typically see:

Most law students who are disappointed with their grades didn’t use attack plans. Plain and simple. Save yourself the trouble and figure out what these are and how they work.

What we recommend instead:

Attack plans are one of those things your professors probably won’t talk about. You may never even hear the phrase “attack plans” at any point during law school. However, they’re one of the best tools you can have on an exam. So, what are attack plans? Well, they’re basically a roadmap you make for yourself to help you answer a question. You should be coming up with attack plans concurrently as you outline each subject. Ask about them in office hours (your professor may call them something different), use them when you practice hypos. They really can save an exam!

Ariel Salzer is a Tutor and Mentor Tutor for Law School Toolbox, Bar Exam Toolbox, and Trebuchet. Ariel has taught everything from conjunctions to calculus on four different continents. A primary and secondary school educator in the U.S. and abroad before law school, Ariel has always had penchant for teaching and editing.