Studying for Law School Exams

Law school exams test your mettle as much as your legal knowledge. They can cover an entire semester’s worth of material and you may have four or five of them within a couple-week period. They also matter a lot, often being the entire grade for a class. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, they are graded on a curve. You are competing directly against your fellow classmates for just a handful of A’s.

Doing well on exams, especially first year exams, can also have an outsized impact on your future legal career. Getting a coveted 1L summer position relies heavily on your first semester’s grades. A lot of firms, especially Big Law firms (the most lucrative legal positions) will interview for 2L summer associate positions at the end of the 1L summer, when your resume will largely depend on your 1L grades and 1L summer experience. These summer associate positions often turn into job offers for after graduation. And if you want to transfer to another law school after your first year to better position yourself for a legal position, this too will rely on 1L grades. So, it is not hyperbole to say your eventual legal career can be heavily impacted by 1L grades. (I will discuss summer associate interviews, legal careers generally, and transferring in later articles.)

Of course you can have a very successful career regardless of grades. But if you are spending three years of your life and likely thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, to get your law degree, it behooves you to make the most of your investment. Doing well on tests is a fundamental way to get returns on that investment.

Now for the chaser: anyone can do well if they are prepared. But preparation takes organization and commitment. I developed my own method of preparation for finals that proved very successful for me, helping me finish in the 10% at a top-15 law school. Though there are infinite ways to study, I hope showing you my methods will help you find a successful process that works for you. As long as you have a plan for understanding, absorbing, and applying the material, you can crush law school exams.

My process for studying was: (1) finalize outlines, (2) write out rules, (3) memorize outlines (for closed book tests), and (4) take practice tests.

1. Finalize Outlines

Waiting until finals to understand the material is not advisable. It is much easier to do this throughout the semester and reserve your study time to practicing how to apply the knowledge. But don’t panic if there is still material you do not understand. Set aside time at the beginning of finals prep, 2–3 weeks before your first final, to review your notes, talk with fellow classmates, and most helpfully, meet with your professor about any difficult topics. Taking advantage of your professor’s office hours is the best way to understand the material in the manner they want you to for the test, and it might also provide an opportunity for the professor to tip their hand on what is and is not on the exam.

Finalizing your outlines is critical. Your outline is the foundation for every remaining step and an erroneous or unnecessarily verbose outline will waste time and worse, lead to errors on the test.

For open book tests, you should also make your outline structured so it is easy to find any rule or issue during the time-crunch of the test. This can include creating a table of contents with pages for all sections and subsections, an index of all major words, and a table of legal authorities (statutes and cases), which can all be easily created in most word processors. With these tools you can quickly find the relevant rules to write out and apply during the test.

2. Write Out Rules

My next step was to write out all the rules in my outlines in plain English. When you’re outlining, you should be using shorthand and condensed sentences to conserve space and reduce the rules to their essence. But when you take the test, you will be tasked with writing these out in full sentences in proper legal analysis. This should not be done for the first time on a test.

Writing out the rules will also help the rules sink in. Something happens in your brain when you have to go from an outline to writing it out into an actual sentence. It becomes less abstract, more concrete in its meaning. You will also quickly see if you actually understand what the words in your outline mean, not just in theory, but in practice. Don’t be surprised if you have to go back to step one while writing out a rule you thought you understood but realize you need to seek further clarification.

I also recommend writing out your outline section by section in a way that requires you to fully process its meaning. I did this by reading one entire section of my outline and then covering or hiding the outline and writing out what I just read into a new document. This semi-memorization really helped drive the concepts deeper into my brain and made them more accessible for issue spotting (described below).

You will not need to write out every single detail of every rule for each exam question; only write out what is relevant to the facts and the prompt. But knowing all the nuances will help guarantee you are positioned to get the most points possible on every exam question.

3. Memorize Outline

Memorization is only needed for closed book tests. Though it won’t hurt for open book tests, this step takes time, time better spent practicing if you do not need to memorize. In closed book tests, you will not be permitted to bring in any materials and will have to memorize every single rule in your outline.

My memorization technique was to do a write out without looking at my outline. When doing your first write out, the prior step, you read the outline first then write it out on a blank page. With a memorization write out, you try to write out each section from what you remember after the initial write out and then look at your outline to see if you missed anything important. You will invariably miss things the first pass so write out what you missed to focus your brain on those difficult rules, and then try to do the entire section again from memory. Only move on to the next section after you can do the entire section from memory.

Memorization is a slow process, it took at least a full day or so for me to memorize each outline. But this was the best way I found to make hundreds of rules stick in a short time and for me to be able to write them out quickly on the test, which is an absolute necessity for closed book tests.

Another key to memorizing for me was creating and memorizing what I called a skeleton outline. Think of this like a table of contents, a bare-bones outline of just the section names and the names of all the rules within each section. This helped me issue spot during the test (discussed in the next article) and helped trigger the rule language in my mind during the stress of the test. So after my memorization outline, I would memorize a skeleton outline and write this out from memory constantly before the test, at least 5–6 times, so that I could get it written out during the test in a minute or so.

4. Practice Tests

The last step is to practice, practice, practice. Understanding and memorizing rules will only get you so far. You must be able to spot which rules apply and then apply the rules correctly to do well on tests. The best way to do this is with practice tests taken under real test conditions. (Again, see the next article for how to take tests.)

You must first find relevant tests. Often there will be a repository of tests from past classes at your school, both from your professor and other professors in the same subject matter. You might even be able to find online practice tests from other schools. Tests from your professor will be the closest to what you can expect on your actual final, so I would save these for last. Take the practice exams from your professor after you get a feel for applying the rules from your outline or memory on real questions using other professors’ exams, this way you are most prepared for your professor’s testing style immediately before taking their test.

Reserve two days before the final to only take practice tests. Since you should be doing them while timed, they could take a couple hours for each test. After each test, review the answer to see if you missed any issues or wrote out any rules incorrectly. If there is no answer sheet, skim through your outline to see if any rule could have applied.

This is also a good opportunity to work with other classmates you trust to compare responses and see if they found issues you missed. Though you are competing against everyone, studying only alone can be mentally draining and studying with others generally only made me better (and more sane).

Creating a Study Schedule

As you can tell, there is a lot to do to prepare for each test. Making sure you accomplish each of these steps for each exam within a few weeks requires extreme organization and frankly, a lot of effort. This is, I think, the real value of law school. Studying for tests was the best preparation for real-world legal practice, much more so than the actual material. Regardless of what you do with your law degree, being organized and committed to completing a complex task is a very valuable skill.

There are a myriad of ways to organize your study schedule. I mapped out all the above tasks I needed to accomplish for each class and assigned them to the days before each test. I also reserved the days leading up to each exam for doing practice tests for that class so that the subject matter was fresh in my mind for the test the next day.

Below is the study schedule for my exams for the spring of my 1L year.

Closing

Law school tests are very important and very difficult. If you break apart the tasks into smaller parts you can not only do well, but do great, putting your legal career on a firm foundation.

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