Once that was put into a manageable form, I would re-read each major section of the outline a few times to evaluate whether I understood the basic concepts, but also with an emphasis on whether I understood the logic behind what was at work in that area of the law as a general matter.

It is critical to exam taking to understand how the details of this or that rule are connected to the class topic as a whole. For example, if I was in a Torts class and my outline told me the professor spent a lot of time on the doctrine of “transferred intent,” I would want to know what that doctrine was, of course, but most importantly, I wanted to be very comfortable with how it fit in with the doctrine of “intentional torts” as a whole.

In the next step I would re-read the hornbook entry on that piece of the law, with some greater attention to the parts of the law that were still foggy in my mind. If the hornbook made it clearer–and if it doesn’t, you simply have got the wrong hornbook–I might add a one or two word clarifying thought to my outline for later attention.

Rereading the hornbook sections is what you do to refresh your understanding of the law. You don’t use your outline to do that. The outline has a very different purpose, which I discuss at length elsewhere.

This whole process of developing your outline in view of your class notes and the hornbook can be finished for each class in about eight hours. At the end of that eight hours, your goal is to have an outline of the major points, the corollaries, and the variations, all of which you clearly understand.

A similarly moronic idea is that a long outline is better than a short one. Huh? The only possible value of an outline beyond the payout you receive when you put it together is the vehicle it provides for internalizing the course material. Impossibly long outlines prevent you from doing this. Your outline needs to be 15 pages of bullet points, MAX.

Every pre-written outline I saw in law school was 50 or 60 pages long. I can recall a goofy One L handing me an outline she had purchased. She had this silly gleam in her eyes: “Can you believe this outline? It’s fantastic! 75 pages with every detail imaginable. And I didn’t have to write a word!”  There is only one word that can adequately respond to this: IDIOT.

So don’t do any of that. It’s a waste of time and affirmatively harmful. Write your own outlines and keep them short.

Hornbooks are a key to the next piece of an exam-focused One L strategy.  A hornbook is a book that contains a summary of the “black letter law” on a particular topic that is covered in a first year class. A good hornbook synthesizes the cases and explains a concept and its ancillary components in a very understandable way. Sometimes a professor will assign a hornbook as a recommended reading tool.

For example, a commonly assigned hornbook in US law schools is Farnsworth, On Contracts. It is fantastic. There are hornbooks for every major subject area that you will have in the One L year. In an appendix I suggest one for each One L class, but you would do well to try to figure out which one your particular professor likes. It is very possible that he teaches his class and writes his exams almost directly out of that hornbook.

If you use them correctly, hornbooks are very powerful tools for developing your understanding of the basic subject matter covered in a One L class. A good hornbook takes the cases, synthesizes the rules from them, and then presents the rules on the page of the hornbook in the form of simple sentences stating the law. And it does this very efficiently. It distills out everything–it won’t make you slog through the cases again, or waste time in minutiae.

A good hornbook will clearly state the most important rules and the reasoning behind them in succinct terms. The hornbook will then explain the rules that flow from the main rules, the basic reasoning for the corollaries, and how they relate to the main principles. Finally, a hornbook will clearly state variations from the rules and the reasoning for the variations.

Professors love to separate out the good exams from the great exams by testing your knowledge of the most important variations from the main flow of the law of a subject. A hornbook is invaluable for making sure you know those, and more importantly, making sure you understand why they have emerged from the soup and are now “the law.”

Knowing this, one of the first things I would do in a class after I received the syllabus would be to take the hornbook I had bought for the class and locate the sections in the hornbook that covered the items in the syllabus. I would then copy those sections out of the hornbook, and staple the pages together. For a year long class, I might end up with a 30 or 40 pages long mini-hornbook that covered all the topics in the class.

I would use this mini-hornbook all year in the class to learn the material. I would also use it at the six weeks from exams mark to review an entire class as I put together the outline. Reading a hornbook as an exam approaches is like having a professor teach you the class all over again, without all the Socratic theater to slow you down.

So, when I sat down in my eight hour outlining session for a class, I started by photocopying the table of contents from the casebook (which is usually in the form of a handy outline). Next I would use a highlighter to identify what was actually covered in the class. Everything else can be pretty much be ignored. With this in mind, I would sometimes white out the lines in the case book table of contents that were not covered in class and then recopy the table of contents to erase the parts that were whited out. Doing this had a way of clearing the decks in my mind about what I needed to master. Try it; it feels great.

For example, typically in a first semester contracts class, you are going to cover a very limited range of law, covering three or four major topic areas in the semester: offer, acceptance, consideration, and maybe a couple others.

Putting together the outline is just a matter of rewriting your classroom notes in a way that isolates the major points and then the corollaries to the law under each of them. Then, you will put them in a format that can be easily internalized and that makes sense as a whole. In all, your outline should not be any longer than 15 pages with a maximum ten bullet points and a few sub-points each per page. If it’s more than that, revise it again and cut it down.

The key here is that besides putting together an outline of the concepts so that you can learn them (which is what most people try to do), you also want the outline to help you understand how the law logically fits together as a whole. As I mentioned earlier, in order to effectively sort out the hypothetical stories that are the material for your exam, you must understand how the individual parts of the black letter law relate to one another as a whole.

Secret societies lurk in the woodwork of some law schools and their only purchase on One Ls is that they own wonderful and glorious outlines and provide them only to a privileged few. Why go to class, some say? We have a copy of Nino Scalia’s outline from 1972 for $40!

Of course this is all poppycock. There is no outline that is a silver bullet. A 75 page outline is worthless. With all due respect to his Honor, I am fairly certain that Antonin Scalia has no idea what you ought to be studying for your exam.

Never, never buy an outline. Never bother using an outline someone else has written, no matt er what the cost. If you have the urge to waste $40 on something, just buy two more of my books and hand them out to your friends. Hear me here: it is affirmatively stupid to use someone else’s outline, and in fact, it will make you less prepared for your exam. You can surely guess why this is.

It is not a cliché to say that the process of doing an outline is more important than the outline itself. Well, it may be a cliché, but it is an absolutely true cliché. 90% of the value of an outline is the eight hour process you go through to put it together. More juice for the exam comes from that eight hour period than in any other eight hours you have spent in the entire semester. Doing the outline forces you to revisit all the material for the exam. More importantly, doing the outline forces you to understand how each piece of the law fits into the whole system of law that your class is about.

If you subscribe to the conventional wisdom about outlining, you will go wrong with your outlining in at least two important ways: (1) you will outline your classes throughout the year, bit by bit every day; (2) you will write long, dense outlines, crammed full of every piece of information you have gathered in the cases, in the class room, and from outside reading. Each of these approaches to outlining is better than not outlining at all, for sure, but they will not equip you to maximize the way that outlines can help you succeed on your exams.

Outlining Myth #1

Most books you read and most advice you will hear is that you should outline each of your classes everyday as you move along in the class. The theory is that waiting to outline until late in the semester is dangerous, because you might just end up with way too much work to do at the end of the semester and you may not be able to get it done. Instead, the theory goes, you should do a little every day so as to not fall behind.

I strongly disagree with this advice. It never works in real life this way, and in fact, there is a much better way to outline. Instead of outlining every day, I wrote my whole outline for each class in one sitting, toward the end of the semester.

Here is how I planned my semester. Remember, above all else I had an exam focused approach to each semester. Accordingly, at the beginning of each year, for each class I had, I looked ahead on a calendar at the exam date. If it was a 16 week semester, I would plan to have all my reading and other work done for each class about four to six weeks ahead of the first exam. At the four or six weeks from exam mark, I simply stopped reading the case book, and from thereon I relied completely on going to class for all of my course learning after that point.⁴

I would then schedule a full day on a weekend, or a couple evenings during the week to do nothing but outline each class one at a time. If I had five exams, I would plan five eight hour periods where I did nothing but outline a particular class, and then move onto the next, one class at a time.

The reason to do a single class’s outline all at once has to do with exam preparation. One of the things an exam typically does is mix up a variety of the course’s concepts into a single fact pattern that involves many, if not all of them. One of the critical exam taking skills is to sort it all out. A primary difference between excellent exams and average exams is how clearly you sort these various issues out and organize your answer intelligently.

What you will find is that having a time where you take a birds-eye view of the entire body of law that was covered in class provides you with a very valuable tool to sort it all out and organize your exam answer well.  Doing your outline all at once is the best way to obtain this birds-eye perspective.

As you build the outline piece by piece from the table of contents in your course book and your class notes, you will be able to obtain a “holistic” overall understanding of the system of that subject in the law, and how each piece fits together. Doing your outline throughout the year, bit by bit, may have advantages as well, but one thing it would not do is provide you with opportunity to obtain an over-arching view of the law of the class in one sitting.

There are a couple reasons. First, and most importantly, whether you know it now or not: you are not a great writer.  I know, I know, you were an English major and your teachers always told you that writing was the best they had ever seen. I know, I know you won some undergrad award for poetry or journalism or whatever and the town Kiwanis Club gave you a dictionary with your name engraved on it.

I’ve heard it all before.  It never fails: guess the E.T.A. of the first time anyone tells a typical One L “as a matter of fact, you aren’t exactly Ernest Hemingway”? It happens about mid-October of every One L year, when I return their fi rst legal writing memo assignments with grades. I grade in red ink, and it’s a bloodbath.

How do One Ls take the news? Let me just say that I make a habit of wearing a bulletproof vest the next time I show up to class. Sometimes I think this is why they hire adjunct professors like me to teach this class: it’s a risky business to deliver the bad news.

But it is true: One Ls come to law school with terrible writing skills. They write everything in passive voice. They don’t know how to write a topic sentence. Comma splices abound. Fragments? But, of course! Transition? What is that?  Accordingly, it falls on us to put them through a year long writing crash course to get them straightened out, and that course is usually called Legal Research and Writing.

Look: it’s OK. No one expects you to be a great writer at this point. But it is very important that you get your writing in shape quickly, because clear, well organized writing is a key component of an excellent exam answer. Your legal writing class is your best chance at getting the frank personal feedback you need to improve your writing. My first piece of advice as a legal writing instructor for 13 years? Check your One L ego at the door, and completely submit to your writing instructor. It does absolutely no good to hold on to misconceptions about your ability now.

It is not possible to show a person how to transform his writing into what it needs to be without working with the person directly. This is why your legal writing professor is the most important person in your life in the One L year. Every One L who does not know better wishes that they had that popular adjunct that gives out high grades like they are candy, and never “discourages” students with “negative” feedback.

Trust me, this is exactly the legal writing instructor you don’t want. You need an instructor that will be savagely honest with you. Your ego will take a few uppercuts and you might end up bruised and a little bloody.  So what? You get a legal writing professor that kills you with kindness and you might end up dead.

The content of one first year class, however, is critically important.

Some law students are surprised when I tell them that it does not matter what classes they take in law school. Apparently they picked classes in undergrad based on their personal interests, and they assume that they should do the same in law school. There could not be anything further from the truth. Ask any practicing lawyer if any of their real law practice relies on anything they learned in a law school class about an area of the law, and most lawyers will look at you like you have just spoken in Portuguese.

No offense is meant to the law school classes. Law school subject matter classes are meant to teach you (1) how to reason as a lawyer, (2) to prepare you for subject matter that may appear on the bar exam and (3) some of them are also intended to teach you law that you will use in your practice. These classes certainly do help you learn to reason as a lawyer. Still, it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is to do this.

Perhaps law school classes help prepare you for the bar exam. They didn’t for me. The only classes you take in law school that are tested on the Bar—for the most part—are classes you take in the One L year. But taking Bar Bri® or one of the other bar exam prep classes and memorizing your outlines are more than sufficient to get ready for the Bar exam.

Some classes may be intended to prepare young lawyers for practice, but in fact this almost never works this way in real life. Young lawyers rarely have any influence on what sort of law they start out practicing. Young lawyers do whatever they are told. By the time that you are practicing any law you choose to practice, you will either have forgotten what you learned in law school, or the disputes you are dealing with are well beyond the class room material. If they aren’t, they would probably never end up in a lawyer’s hands in the first place.

All of that being said, there is a One L class that has content that really matters: your legal research and writing class. In my next post we will talk about why that is.

This is terribly wrong. You want to be in a study group? Get a group together and chant this a hundred times: “Exams are the only things that matter.” “Exams are the only things that matter.” Exams must be your focus. Class room preparation is about 20^th on the list.

Don’t misunderstand me, attending class and listening in class is critically important. And you know what? That takes almost no energy, and no prep time. All you do is show up with some coffee and I am sure you can manage that. In fact, listening closely in class is the biggest bang for the effort buck that you can get in law school. You do virtually nothing, and get a lot of payout for it.

But listen to me: Most of the time in each of your classes is going to be spent on what will end up distilling down to one concept. Do you understand the significance of that? Law school professors spend most of every class focusing on one or two ideas. That’s it. As I explain in the book: this is why we love the Socratic method. The Socratic method dramatically limits how much ground is covered in any particular law school class.

Think about it, brother: If the professor spends the whole hour or two of class today on one idea, don’t you think you are going to understand that idea no matter how well you prepared for class today? You don’t have to be Perry Mason to figure out an idea that a Professor spends a full hour explaining. Truth is, if you don’t understand what that concept is after sitting through an hour of discussion about it, you are probably in trouble and there is very little I can do for you.

All of this adds up to one practical step: the first thing you need to do is change your study focus as such for the One L year. Instead of focusing on class preparation as an end in itself, reorient your intellectual focus regarding the class time itself towards how that class time helps you prepare for the exam.
Ok, Gary, I know that class is important for exams. What does this mean in practical terms?

First, read the cases for each day. But please understand that the reason for going to class is not to demonstrate that you have read the cases. It’s not to look knowledgeable to your professor or your classmates. (By the way, its not the place to check your Facebook® highlights either.) The reason to go to class is because class is where the professor reveals to the class what is important to understand for the exam. More importantly, perhaps, class is also the place where the professor reveals what is not important for the exam.

Think about it this way: At the beginning of the semester, you bought a casebook that has about 650 pages of cases in it. It may cover, if you read the whole thing, 50 or sixty full-bodied legal doctrines. But are all those doctrines going to be covered in class in depth or appear on the exam? No. Not at all. What you are going to find out is that most professors cover about one-half or less of those doctrinal concepts in class. And unless you have the grandson of Joseph Stalin as a professor, you are not going to see something the professor never covered in class on an exam.

So what does this mean for you? Here is a how to think about class: the primary purpose of every law school class period is to signal to you the scope of what legal doctrines may appear on an exam. In this way, any particular law school class is best understood as a limiting exercise. Therefore, the primary reason to go to class is to catalog the concepts that you need to know, and—better yet—to discard the material that you don’t need to know.

Hear me. Whatever the fear of your particular Professor Kingsfield might suggest, it is not important what preparation you have done prior to class.  Day by day prep for class – what you do before class– has very little practical payoff.

What is critically important is the understanding you have of the topics that are covered in class by the professor, after the class is over.  Hear me here: What you do before class is not near as important as what you do after class. In fact, what you do before class sometimes gets in the way.

The exam was set up in two sections. In the first section there was a fact pattern and three questions, with a suggested time of an hour and a half a piece. Then, there was a final question with an allotted time of an hour.

“How long did it take you to finish the first section?” I asked her.

“Three and a half hours, and I thought I was ahead of schedule.”

And then it dawned on me: She hadn’t read the instructions.

“You were only supposed to answer two of the three problems.”

It got very quiet about then.

What is the point? The point is that almost all time One Ls spend during the semester are spent on things that don’t matter, and almost no time is spent on what really matters: the exam itself and how to take it. There are simple things you can do that you can get ready for any exam in any law school class, and almost no one does them. Except you, because you want to focus on the right things to succeed. The purpose of my book, and this blog, is to teach people to master them.

There are 16 weeks in the semester before exams? I know, I know.  Trouble is, most of what you are doing during that 16 weeks won’t matter at exam time. In fact, about 90% of the time One Ls typically spend during a semester impacts nothing. 10%, maybe, shows up in the grade. Why? Because the only time that matters for your grades in any semester is that three or four hour period and the ink you manage to get down on the page before you turn it in on the day of the exam. I repeat: the four hour block at the end of the semester is the only thing that matters for any class you take.

You may know about the singular importance of exams, conceptually. But most One Ls don’t live like they understand this. You can faithfully brief every case every day and never miss a day in your outlining.  You can hunt down all those obscure references the professor throws out in class and read them twice. Knock yourself out. You can be Alan Dershowitz and Johnny Cochran all wrapped in one.

Game day comes? You blow the whole exam because you didn’t read one sentence of the fact pattern. The clock starts and you get confused at the wrong moment in an exam and panic. Or—and this happened to me once—your handwriting is so bad after an hour goes by that the professor has no idea that you are writing the best exam in the class.

Repeat after me: exams are all that matter. Exams are all that matter. Exams are all that matter.