First year of Law School- Part 3: Scare Tactics

The first week of law school was an orientation for first years. One evening was spent with then new 2nd years telling us how horribly hard law school is. They never saw their families, they spent 8 hours a day on weekends with their study groups, they spent 20 hours or more writing each paper, etc. They made it sound like we were idiots for even being there. They made me go home and question why I had decided to go to law school. But the longer I went, the more I realized that the "scare tactics" were but part of the game. If you get freaked out by talk, how will you react to actual work? If you're like me, you'd RATHER just work, because you know your work will prove your value. Once I got to the point of turning in a paper, and getting that feedback, I knew there was nothing for me to be worried about. Sure, I may fret some over my perceived ill performance on a test here and there, but confidence in myself and my schoolwork has never been a weak point of mine. It just was the matter of realizing that I wasn't going to let anyone pull any mind games on me.

Not that it's not a lot of work, or a lot to learn. It is. But that doesn't scare me. I enjoy that kind of challenge. I guess I didn't realize that they would try to weed some of us out before we really even got started.

Other than the "non-pep talk" we got from second years, there was all this mysterious talk about briefs and outlines. Everyone talks about them like we were supposed to know what the heck they were referring to. I suppose if you know another law student, you would, maybe. I didn't. I had taken one business law class when working on my business degree years ago, and I vaguely remember doing briefs for that, but I honestly couldn't tell you what they consisted of.

In plain language, a brief is just a summary of a case from one of your casebooks (text books). It contains the pertinent information (who were the parties, what was the issue, rule of law, decision, etc.) about the case, to help you remember it and enable you to discuss it in class. Apparently, in some schools, briefing is more important than at my school. First of all, only 1 of my 3 substantive law class professors really called on people to brief cases in class. (I would have never shown up to class without all the cases for her class briefed.) Secondly, my school focuses on black letter law, so it's not like you have to read the cases and try to figure out the law yourself. The professor is going to tell you what you need to take from each case. Not that you shouldn't brief the cases, but it's not like you won't understand the law if you don't. To me, briefing the cases was more about learning to read the cases, and understand the elements in them. Lesson: don't be afraid of briefing cases. Think of them as just a summary. If your professor doesn't give you a format to use, there are plenty online sources to give you some help.

Outlines were even more mysterious than the briefs. At least the professors gave us samples of how to do briefs. What the heck were all the outlines everyone kept referring to? (It seems to be a way of life in law school to talk about something without ever really explaining the basics. I think it is just something else to get used to. Just think, we can do it to the first years in August!)

Anyway, I like to think of outlines as your own personal textbook for each class that you create from your notes. The casebooks are not really designed to help you study for exams. They just give you cases from which you can pull the applicable laws and principles. You need a format to save all of these to study from. Thus, the outline! Some people use their laptops to take notes in class, others, like me, take handwritten notes. I would type in my class notes every night into an ongoing overall outline for each class. Personally, I think rereading my notes and typing them in reaffirmed what I had just learned. (An extra step in the learning process over just using the laptop in my class.) However, the notes from class are not particularly organized. At the beginning of the year, my study group made a decision to create joint outlines, which we all contributed to. These outlines were done in an exam flow structure, to aid in approaching exam questions. (I will address study groups in a separate post later.) Really though, you need to figure out what kind of format works for you.....how do you learn? what helps you memorize? what do you need to see/not see? do you prefer full descriptions or elements? That kind of thing. You need to work on this outline AS YOU GO THROUGH THE YEAR so that you aren't overwhelmed with creating it at the end, and then trying to study from it at the same time. It's hard at the beginning, because you have no idea about anything. After a couple months though, you can start to figure out some of it and put some of it together. Then you just keep adding to it and modifying it.

I think my outlines for my classes this year ranged from about 30-45 pages per class. If you think of that as your book for the year, it doesn't seem too long. However, if you think, more realistically, of it as what you need to have memorized, it becomes a little more scary. But, putting them together is not all that hard, AS LONG AS YOU DO IT ALONG THE WAY AND TAKE DECENT NOTES IN CLASS. Don't think you can pick up a generic outline on the internet and use it. Most of the professors seems to have preferred ways of wording things. You're going to be much better off taking notes and constructing an outline of the class if you use the format and wording they use. (I will talk more about outlines in the post on study groups.)

In the end it comes down to the fact that you will have to learn a lot, but nothing is really beyond you or your capabilities. (You got into law school, didn't you?) You just have to keep telling yourself that and not let them or the system get to you. Realize that part of the game is to weed out the weakest, so just don't let the scare tactics work on you. It's really not that hard once you get the hang of it. It's just a lot of work.