Preparing for Law Exams

Read your master outline. Read it. Don’t skim it, don’t memorize it. Read it. Then reread it. Don’t bother to underline (if you’ve followed the LCM system in creating the master outline, everything you’ve written is important). Read the outline, visualizing the facts and understanding each rule, until you’re sick of it.

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For longer courses, it may take eight hours or more to plow through the material the first time. Subsequent readings will be faster; eventually you’ll find that you need only glance at a topic heading or subhead to know exactly what the fact scenario and the rule of law are without looking at your textual discussion of the rule.

Time Management

You should allow yourself at least three days of studying per course. It’s best if these days are contiguous but this is often not realistic, especially if you have several exams within a short time period.

If you find that you have two exams on the same day or on consecutive days, don’t study for them at the same time. Do your complete studying for one test, then put that outline aside and study for the other exam until you’ve learned the material.

Here’s an example: Thursday at 4 P.M. is zero hour for your contracts exam; Friday at 10 a.m. is your date with torts. You should spend Saturday, Sunday, and Monday studying torts, and Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday studying contracts. Thursday night (after a rest) look over the torts outline several more times.

These days of study must be free from interruptions from the outside world. No distractions. Disconnect your phone. Put a “Quarantined” sign on your door. Buy earplugs.

Don’t Panic

If, for personal reasons or the logistics of your exam schedule, you cannot fit in three uninterrupted days, don’t panic.

One word of reassurance: All law school administrators understand the pressure on first-year students around exam time. They generally schedule examinations at the expense of upper-class students to make certain that there are large blocks of time between the first-year exams to give students adequate time to prepare. Remember too that your school will also halt regular class work about a week before the exams to allow you extra study time.

Step Two: Create the Exam Outline

Reading your master outline, then, is essentially the study process. By doing this, you will pass the examination. But to ace a law school exam, you need to recognize all the issues a professor pours into the questions: Who’s going to sue whom? For what? What are the defences?

To identify these issues and to be able to write about them in a lawyerly way you must create another outline, the “exam outline.” This outline is very short—just a single sheet of paper. It contains most of the major topics (excluding the general principles sections) in your master outline, arranged according to the most logical order of presentation on the exam.

Here is an example of an actual exam outline.

• Intent
• Causes of action

1. Battery
2. Assault
3. False imprisonment
4. Intentional infliction of emotional distress
5. Trespass

• Defences

1. Defence of self & others
2. Justification
3. Consent
4. Necessity
5. Privilege
6. Mistake

1. Duty
2. Breach
3. Causation
4. Damages

1. Contributory negligence
2. Comparative fault
3. Assumption of risk

1. Defamatory statement
2. Inducement and innuendo
3. Colloquium
4. Publication
5. Damages (if required)
6. Fault (constitutional privilege)

1. State law privileges
2. Truth

1. Duty
2. Cause
3. Damages

1. Comparative fault
2. Assumption of risk
3. Misuse

• Duty issue in negligence law
• Public policy behind strict products liability
• Professor Jones’ views of constitutional privileges in defamation actions
• Economic analysis of tort law in genera.

Why do you need an exam outline?

Because of the nature of law school exams. An exam outline provides a mental checklist that you will use as you answer your essay question to help you spot the issues. An illustration will demonstrate how important this issue-detecting game is.

By mentally scanning the exam outline over and over again as you read through the facts you’ll be able to spot the legal issues that arise and make sure you haven’t forgotten any of them. You’ll see how important it is to have this outline in your head when you take a look at how many potential issues there are.

Even if you can write no more than one or two sentences about each cause of action, your professor will be extremely impressed that you were able to recognize all the issues.

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Step Three: Memorize the Exam Outline

It won’t be nearly as hard as you think. For one thing, because you’ve read your master outline many times you’ll have practically memorized the topics already. Besides, if an actor can learn four hours of Shakespeare, a few exam outlines should be a piece of cake. It’s important that these outlines be committed to memory because by mentally, even subconsciously, scanning them as you read your exam question the legal issues hidden in the question will come popping out.

If memorization daunts you, try mnemonics. When you write your exam outline, try to rearrange the list of topics (to the extent you can without interfering with any necessary order) and find synonyms for words so that the first letters of the topic make a recognizable unit.

In memorizing your exam outline, do your best but don’t worry if some of it slips away from you. The purpose of this memorization process is to help you spot issues, not recite outline topics perfectly.

Step Four: Learn the Answer Format

It is important to know the structure of your exam answer before you go into the test room. Once inside, you won’t have time to waste wondering how to organize your answer.

What is important to remember is this: before you go into the exam, you must have a firm idea of the structure your answer will take.

Open-Book Exams—Beware Of False Confidence

There are two problems with open-book exams—one is psychological and the other is practical.

Psychologically an open-book exam can instil a false sense of confidence that eats away at your pre-exam study discipline. The attitude is this: “I can coast now because I can look up the answer.” But you won’t be able to. Believe me. All the books, notebooks, briefs, and other papers you carry into class with you will be useless 99 percent of the time. They might even be worse than useless because you may waste so much time looking up unknown answers that you won’t have time to respond to those that you do know, resulting in a lower grade than you deserve.

From a practical standpoint, too, open-book exams are worse because you’ll be getting a much harder test, with issues more subtle and more numerous than a closed-book exam addresses.

How, then, does your study technique for one of these exams differ from that for a closed-book test?

You follow exactly the same approach: write the master outline, read it over and over, write the exam outline and learn it, and memorize the answer format.

The only variation is this: paginate your master outline and make an index that includes all the topics and the pages on which the discussion of them can be found. Also, you should type or print a copy of the exam outline and the answer format and put those in the front of your master outline.

. In courses where you have a large volume of statutory material (for instance, securities regulation, taxation, or corporate law), and where you anticipate the professor will question you on material in those statute books, mark all the relevant portions with yellow tabs or paperclips.

When you take an open-book exam, you should have on your table:

1. The master outline
2. An index to the master outline
3. The exam outline
4. The answer format
5. Any statutory material, as described above

Everything else should go onto the floor. But don’t leave anything home. Bring it all: case briefs, notebooks, textbooks, casebooks, class notes. It has been known to happen that a student miraculously sees that the fact pattern on the exam is identical to the case described in a footnote in the casebook. It doesn’t happen very often. But lugging 30 pounds of books with you is a small price to pay for a potential A.

Studying From Old Exams—the Inside Edge

Nearly all law schools have exams available from prior years. They are usually found in the school library and can be checked out for a day or two or photocopied. Some professors will even hand out old copies of their exams.

An old test can be quite valuable (provided it was written by your professor). There are several ways to use old exams:

1. They give you general practice in taking a law school exam. After you’ve studied your material, sit down and see how many issues you can spot. One shouldn’t actually take the whole exam (there are more efficient ways to use your study energy), but the more familiar you are with such exams, the more comfortable you will be going into yours.
    
2. Use them with your study group. Have one student read a question and then use it as a springboard to discuss the issues and rules of laws.
    
3. Read them to get a feel for your professor’s style and to see what sort of topics the test might cover. Do the questions involve academic, philosophical issues? Or are they geared toward meat-and-potatoes knowledge? Are there curve balls? Are there multiple-choice or true-false questions as well as essay questions
    
4. Finally, there always lurks the chance that a law student’s greatest dream will come true: that Professor Jones didn’t get around to thinking up a new fact pattern this year and has used the same exam he wrote two years ago—the very exam you spent three hours studying just last night. (Does this happen often? No.

A word of warning: Old exams can be helpful, but not if you study them to the exclusion of your regular study regimen (read that master outline!). After all, it is this year’s test, not last year’s, that you’ve got to ace.

Sleep—the Secret Weapon

As you now know, the LCM system described in this article is a paced method of learning. It does not require a burst of energy at the end. In fact, you will ruin much of the work you’ve done during the semester and study week if you stay up late on the evening before the exam to cram.