1. Use actual physical note cards for stationery studying.
Yay! Just finished my Russian final!! #хорошо
Start simple. Your technophile friends may brand you a troglodyte, but there's something to be said for writing actual words on actual card stock. The material sticks in your mind better. Digital flash cards are great, but nothing compares to working your way from ab initio to vis major in a stack of real index cards.
"Think like a lawyer" is for 3Ls. First, you need to memorize an unimaginable volume of vocab words, Latin phrases, and (sigh) torts definitions. With Quizlet flash cards, you can keep jam-packing your brain from your phone or tablet even in those few hours you spend outside the law library. And it's free!
3. A tablet will help you with lightweight heavy reading.
You can always rock the wheely suitcase look if you want to carry 40 pounds of casebooks from class to class and be mistaken for a professor, but in 2016, most textbooks either have online versions or downloadable PDFs you can pop onto your tablet. Do your back (and your image) a favor.
If legal writing had just one main document, The Bluebook would be it. Even if you considered yourself a "good writer" in college, you probably didn't know how to cite a slip opinion from the district court for the Southern District of Ohio. In law school, citations matter, and that's why we have The Bluebook.
The Bluebook is to legal writing as WestlawNext is to legal research. Becoming a competent researcher on this online tool is maybe the most important task in law school, which is why almost all schools provide you with a law student subscription. A good lawyer doesn't always know the answer, but they always know how to find the answer.
6. Get professional binding or a three-ring binder for those precious, precious outlines.
Outlines pass down through law school classes until they're revered as holy artifacts bequeathed unto us from a bygone race of legal legends who, against all odds, understood the intricacies of proximate cause. Don't spill coffee on the precious heirlooms; get them bound, or at least throw them in a three-ring.
These are questions from actual previous bar exams. There's nothing like the real thing. Perhaps the best preparation for the bar exam is to expose yourself to literally thousands of these Barbri MBE questions until you are numb to their vague phrasing, their insistence on obscure legal nonissues, and their cruelly indistinguishable answer choices.
In addition to memorizing everything in the world, you'll also need to apply for everything in the world, which means signing everything in the world and keeping a copy of everything in the world. An app like Scannable that turns your phone into a portable scanner will be your best friend.
amazon.comRemember all those flash cards we talked about earlier? Whether you go digital or real cards or both (go both), this is how you're gonna make them. Black's Law Dictionary is an indispensable guide to legal terminology across all disciplines. Go ahead and buy the hard copy; it'll make you look like a real lawyer.
11. Find out if your state bar has an app!
Lots of law school professors teach you federal law, which is great for learning general legal theory, but when you get down to cases, you're gonna need to know the law of your state. Your state bar association has resources for that. Plus, they're the organization that registers you for the bar exam, so you might as well get comfortable with them.
When you're in law school, it's easy to get lost in a sea of abstract concepts and theories, so it's helpful to follow a few blawgs to remind yourself that real people are out there practicing law every day. It's also helpful to remind yourself that sometimes even good lawyers screw it up in really hilarious ways, and that's OK. Sure, the law is important, but at the end of the day, it's just about doing your best.
Original article and pictures take www.buzzfeed.com site
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