Your Weekly Dose of S.O.U.N.D. Advice, 8.25.09

As you practice law school essays, diagram your issues by:

1. deconstructing the question and reading it one sentence at a time;

2. spotting all of the issues within each sentence;

3. spotting the facts or “buzz words” that go to each issue you’ve spotted;

4. and then reconstructing the question based on the issues—diagramming each issue, and including under it the facts that dealt with that issue in the question.

Remember that your professors won’t necessarily present each fact in chronological order; they won’t necessarily present each issue in the order on which they’d like you to discuss them. By deconstructing and then reconstructing the question and paying attention to which facts and “buzz words” go with each issue, you can draw up an organized diagram to help you better organize your thoughts and points.

S.O.U.N.D. Advice for Law School, 8.15.09

S.O.U.N.D. Advice on Time Management:

Develop a time management system for yourself and learn to love it and use it. Whether it’s a diligently kept calendar, reminder messages that pop up on your email account, or a spreadsheet that keeps track of all of your commitments, you need to have a foolproof system for managing your time and your assignments. You may have gotten through college without the need to schedule and plan commitments in advance, but this isn’t the case here. In law school, you must have a continuous plan for everything you need to get done—and you must stick to that plan!

S.O.U.N.D. Advice for Law School, 8.8.09

S.O.U.N.D. Advice for Briefing Cases:

Getting your case briefs done is a great start, but simply knowing what happened in a case is by no means enough for law school success. To succeed in law school and on the bar exam, you must be able to “see the forest from the trees:” you must recognize that each case is assigned in order to illustrate a legal concept, and that each legal concept (rule of law) you cull from a case is an important part of the black letter law you’ll have to know for your essay exams. Keep the “big picture” in mind: for each case, discern what rule of law the case illustrates and then figure out how that rule of law fits into your overall course outline.

Good Luck in the New School Year!

To all entering and upper-level law students: good luck in the upcoming school year! We look forward to meeting our new students at Orientation at the Massachusetts School of Law this week.

Remember to visit www.1LBootCamp.com for valuable law school advice.