Law School Success

Whether you are new to law school or have made it through a few semesters, there are always ways to improve your process and performance. This lesson uses your answers to help you determine the best CALI Law School Success lessons to help you meet your goals and tailors the advice depending on where you are in your law school career.

A basic introduction (or refresher!) about sources of law, court structure, and precedent.

This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to think like a lawyer, or analyze. Students will go through basic analysis exercises, so they can master this technique prior to writing exams.

This lesson also includes video commentary from the author that expands on the material in the lesson.

This lesson provides time management strategies for law students.

This lesson is designed to help part-time, evening, weekend, or flex J.D. law students maximize their limited study time as they navigate multiple obligations, balancing law school with full-time work, care, or other responsibilities. The lesson encourages self-reflection on when and how the student learns best, and walks them through the basics of time-blocking and time management, encouraging frequent reflection and adjustments to schedules as necessary. The lesson can be completed or revisited at any time during law school, and might best be completed by students before/upon entering the first semester of law school.

You may have heard that lawyers are precise. It’s true. In law school, you will spend a lot of time discussing the meaning of a singular word or placement of a comma.

It is also true that sometimes there is more than one way to say something, or multiple phrases may mean essentially the same thing. It can be tricky to hear both that every punctuation mark and word matters, and that you must be nimble enough to recognize when two sources are talking about the same concept in different terms. This lesson is designed to show you some examples both of precision, and of when two things essentially mean the same thing.

This lesson focuses upon the concept of metacognition and teaches you how to enhance your understanding about how you learn to better improve your study, organizational, test-taking and self-assessment skills with the goal of improving your performance in law school.

The lesson should help you better understand your individual learning process and show you how to use this information to develop study and test-taking skills needed for success in law school.

One of the best ways to learn and remember something is to connect it to something that you already know. Once you have made that connection, it becomes easier to use the new information, because you are connecting it to something that you already understand. Making these connections is called transfer. You can transfer vertically (i.e. from one topic in criminal law to another, or from Contracts 1 to Contracts 2), or you can transfer horizontally from course to course (i.e. from contracts to criminal law).

Law school will consume your life during the three or four years that you are enrolled. But that doesn’t mean that life stops. Bills still have to be paid; people still get sick; the rest of the world keeps rolling on.

There will likely be a time during your legal education when you need help with something. The good news is that there are plenty of people available to help. You are not alone. Whatever you are going through, someone else has gone through too. It’s important to reach out for help, so you can work through your problems, without hurting your academic performance.

This lesson will address what to do if you face a variety of academic and life issues. It will also get you to begin thinking about post-graduation planning.

If you are just starting law school, or thinking about doing so soon, it can often feel like you need to learn a foreign language. Not to mention all the abbreviations, odd acronyms, and more! This lesson is designed to help you get started on mastering the brand new language that is the field of law.

Course selection plays a critical role in your success at law school. If you choose poorly, it can hurt your law school experience, your GPA, and your future career options. In this lesson, we provide you with a four-step process to help you make smart course selection choices each semester.

In this lesson, we will discuss best practices to follow when deciding whether to approach a professor with a question. Also, we will cover some valuable tips that will help you get the most out of your meeting. The goal of this lesson is to help you make your interactions with faculty positive and valuable experiences.

As you start law school, you might notice that reading cases is rather difficult. This lesson will explain why reading cases feels so hard, and give you tips on how to make things slightly easier.

This lesson will run through critical considerations to think about before stepping into the law school classroom, or the "theater of learning" for the first time! Through a series of interactive diagnostic questions and teaching pages, the lesson explores many themes of first semester, including choosing your seat, class participation and how to handle the Socratic method, pre- and post-class prep, time management, using professors' office hours, and how the basics of the court system and functions of each level of court generate the "case method" of law school teaching and learning.

This lesson focuses on case briefing. The lesson will guide students through cases identifying the most important part of cases to prepare for classes.

This lesson will discuss ways to identify the legally significant facts within cases using pre-reading strategies.

In law school, students are expected to read multiple cases to identify rules that will be applied on exams. Using non-law sources, students will learn how to extract individual rules from multiple articles to create one synthesized rule that can be used to solve new problems.

Recognizing and understanding policy in cases is a challenging task - and an invaluable tool. Knowing the policy behind case law and statutes and understanding the underlying policies helps us apply the law on exams and when representing clients. Engaging and practicing these skills throughout your law school career is essential.

This lesson will walk you through things to consider before setting "foot" (physically or virtually!) in a law school doctrinal classroom. You'll learn about how to listen for and capture the most important information, how to maximize your note-taking efficiency by using symbols and shorthand, and the various software options available for taking notes. It is recommended by the author that this lesson be completed before Note-Taking 101: Case-Based Content, which tests your note-taking skills in practice.

This lesson, intended for incoming and current 1L law students, guides participants through the process of note-taking in law school classes with a focus on case-based information. Using a series of cross-doctrinal audio lecture examples and integrating periodic checks for understanding, students have the opportunity to develop their note-taking skills and practice categorizing the pieces of case-based information. This lesson is equally suitable for full-time, part-time, evening, or remote law students.

Final exams require recalling information from over 14 weeks of the semester. This lesson provides insight on how to remember the vast information from class to apply on final exams.

This lesson is designed to provide students with data about why their attention levels may dip during class or studying, including recent research regarding the effects of digital distractions on concentration. The lesson invites students to reflect upon the reasons they may lose focus and/or concentration while in class or while studying, and provides a robust set of strategies students can use to anticipate and control for that loss of focus, incorporating several free-writes.

This lesson will take you step-by-step through a method of representing the content from cases in an outline.

Law students are excellent readers, and this skill will lay the foundation for success throughout life. However, reading in law school requires more precision than previous educational activities. This lesson will deepen individuals reading skills specifically within the context of legal reading.

This lesson explains some key differences between legal writing and exam writing. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between legal writing and exam writing. Next, the lesson explains the differences between legal writing and exam writing. After you complete this lesson you will be able to transfer writing and analysis skills learned in your legal writing course to your final exams.

This lesson will teach you the best ways to prepare for exams, and the best ways to organize your response on the day of your exam.

This lesson teaches you why, when and how to create outlines when preparing for your law school exams.

This lesson will cover the basic structure of written legal analysis: IRAC. IRAC stands for Issue, Rule, Application/Analysis, Conclusion. There are slightly different versions of IRAC which may be used for different legal documents. This lesson will focus on IRAC for essay exam writing. Some faculty may prefer CRAC, or CIRAC, where the conclusion is placed first. You may also learn CRREAC for writing legal memos and briefs, which stands for Conclusion, Rule, Rule Explanation, Application, Conclusion.

Creating Study Aids is part of the Academic Support series of CALI Lessons. This lesson introduces you to law school study aids. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and Bloom's learning taxonomy. Then, the lesson introduces law school study aids by pairing them with learning objectives at each level of the taxonomy. Finally, the lesson concludes with an activity designed to help you reflect on your learning. It can be used as an introduction, supplement, or as review.

This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is to be able to spot issues. This lesson looks at what an issue is, and best practices in spotting them in cases, with clients, and on exams. Students will go through basic issue spotting exercises to better prepare for exams.

Law students often hear about the importance of "doing hypos" but don't know why they are important, where to find them, how to do them, and so on. This lesson will cover the what, why, when, where, and how of hypos so law students can conquer the material they are learning and be prepared for exams.

First-year law students often understand the law and know the right conclusion, but struggle to apply the law thoroughly in order to maximize their scores. This lesson is designed to help law students who may have received feedback that their analysis is conclusory.

Have you ever compared your essay to a sample answer, or one with a higher grade, and wondered what was different about yours? Especially if you seemed to use all the correct law? It's likely that you aren't using your facts enough!

This lesson will explain why it's important that you use your facts, as well as help you to do just that!

This lesson helps students understand where cases fit in a final exam answer and develop arguments based on cases. Students' exam arguments should improve using this lesson's techniques.

This lesson also includes video commentary from the author that expands on the material in the lesson.

This lesson teaches a methodical approach for all law school multiple choice questions. The step-by-step approach provides a framework to work through questions so students can more easily eliminate distractor answer choices. The lesson will thoroughly explore each step in this analytical approach.

This lesson teaches you how to select the right answer in a multiple-choice question by better understanding how to identify wrong answers, based on nine specific types of wrong answers.

This lesson provides memorization tools and techniques for exam success. First, the lesson demonstrates the relationship between memorization and exam success. Next, the lesson explains memorization tools and techniques. After you complete this lesson you will be able to apply tools and techniques and effectively memorize important legal concepts to be successful on your exams.

Most law students do not know what professors expect on law school exams. Students wonder what will score more points. In general, law school exam answers that score the highest tend to use a specific deductive argument structure. This lesson explains deductive argument structure and how to employ it on an exam.

This lesson explains the different types of counterarguments and shows you how to best integrate them into your analysis.

This lesson will teach you what grit and growth mindset are, and why they are important for learning and mastering success, specifically as they pertain to law school.

Law school creates a competitive environment with significantly more work than most undergraduate programs. The new expectations and environment increases anxiety and stress for many students. This lesson introduces basic skills to help students practice mindfulness and stay in the present despite the numerous stressors.

Throughout law school, students will be asked to assess their own essays by comparing them to a model or sample student answer provided by their professor. It can often be difficult to distinguish one’s work from the model. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish what a student knows, from what they wrote down. Experienced legal writers understand that subtle differentiation in language changes the meaning of what was written. This lesson will provide students with strategies for self-assessment, so that they can become critical judges of their work, and consequently precise legal writers.

This lesson explores one of the fundamental lawyering skills, which is self assessment. This lesson looks at how to learn from success and failures. Primarily, it focuses on what to do after a quiz, midterm, or final exam, and how to continue learning from those assessments.

This lesson is designed to help you self-assess your semester performance. It is best suited for completion after you finish a full law school semester. It begins with a brief overview of self-regulated learning and metacognition. Then, the lesson provides a step-by-step process for assessing your law school semester.