How To Take Notes In Law School

As we creep up on fall and get closer and closer to orientation season, I have decided to write a series of posts on law school to help all the soon to be newbie law students out there. As a rising 3L, I finally feel like I have finally gotten this whole law school thing figured out and if I can help others figure it out quicker than I did, I'm happy to help. 

Yes, an actual outline of mine. For an open book exam. 

You would think that after 13 years of k-12 education and 4 years of college, note taking would be second nature. Unfortunately, law school follows a different set of rules and if you don't figure them out quick, it can be hard to get back on track.


Keep The End Game In Sight -
The whole purpose of your notes is to help you be prepared for your final exam. Sure, they can also help during class if you get cold called, but their ultimate purpose is for the exam. YOU DON'T GET GRADED ON COLD CALLS. If your notes are 90 percent about the cases, you are seeing the trees but can't see the whole forest. You need to find a balance.

Don't Save Your Outline Until The End -
Seriously, what kind of sense does it make to do all the reading all semester, take book notes and/or briefs (at least in the beginning of law school) take class notes and then redo it all into an outline at the end? The week before classes start, I take the syllabus and the table of contents of the casebook and make an empty outline. As I do the reading, I fill in what I think will be important. During class, I type in anything my professor said that was important. Still in outline form. Then at the end of the semester, I go and remove anything that I don't need for the exam. Back when I still did case briefs, (I do a couple lines per case now) I would end up deleting most of the case brief except for the Rule.

Color Code Your Notes -
I color code my reading too so this one was a no brainer for me. I use black for notes from the book. Blue for anything the professor said during class. Red for anything the professor said about the exam. And brown for anything I added to my class notes from an external source, such as a supplement. At times, I have had to add additional colors, for example, when we had a guest professor or the like. Not only does this make it more interesting to study from, it also helps when there is a conflict. Often, professors disagree with a point made, or the standard theory and having them clearly marked together on which is which is invaluable.

Add Visuals -
Lots of people are visual learners and can't really understand a subject until they can see it. Even though it's in outline form, you can still add images to your notes. A surprisingly large number of professors draw graphs or tables on the board. Put that in your notes. If you find an excellent ____ ---> ____ ---> ____ in a supplement, take a picture of it with your phone and add it in. If it helps you understand and retain the information, put it in your outline.

Evaluate Your Class -
The kinds of notes you need to do well on the final, depends on the class and the style of the exam. If you are taking a closed book, multiple choice exam, your outline needs to be extremely brief and barebones. You need to basically memorize it before you walk into your exam and since you won't be writing an essay, you don't need to be able to argue the material. A closed book exam is similar except you will want a bit more detail so you can adequately argue both sides and come to a conclusion. For open book exams you want much more detail but your organization needs to be extreme. There is no point in having the best outline in the world, if you can't find what you need when you need it. Headings, sub-headings and such, help a lot but the easiest way I've found is to print out your outline (So far, all open book exams have been hard copy only), put it in a binder and then tab the living daylights out of it. At the end of the semester, I go through it dozens of times before the exam. This makes sure that when I get a question on a specific topic, my brain immediately goes, Oh yeah, that's about 2/3rds in between blank and blank. All of these different styles will change how you take notes during the semester. If you have a closed book multiple choice exam, don't type up 2 pages of reading notes for every class. Similarly, if you have an open book, essay exam, don't leave from class with two sentences of notes.

Back Up Everything -
Seriously, I wish I could shout this though a bullhorn. Although most people know to back up papers or other assignments, people seem to forget about the lowly class notes/working outline. One of my closest friends lost her outlines halfway through the semester when they were deleted from her computer. My second week of school had me freaking out when my class notes crashed and only deleted a couple days worth of work. A couple days took me almost a week to redo.

Notes are even more important in law school but they can also end up making things easier for you come finals.  As everyone around you is running around frantically trying to finish their outlines, you can stay calm and actually study from your outline.



Related Posts -

How I Prepare for Each And Every Class

How to Start Getting Legal Experience Even in Your First Semester

How to Succeed in a Law School Class When the Professor is Terrible



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Batch Cooking Fail?

I have been craving bean burritos like crazy lately. Generally my cravings aren't a problem but because Fiancé is allergic to beans, I knew I wouldn't be making them for dinner anytime soon.

Then I ran across this recipe for budget freezer burritos. I was sold. Super cheap, burritos and freezer cooking? How could I not be.

So I went to Aldi's and bought all the ingredients for a grand total of $8.24 and came home and made 18 bean and cheese burritos. My cost was only 45 cents per burrito! This should totally be a batch cooking win right?

No. Apparently when you don't eat beans for a long time (say because your fiancé is allergic to them and you don't buy them) your body forgets how to digest them. My neighbor ate one and is perfectly fine. I ate one and I feel like I'm dying. It's been over 24 hours and I still feel blah.

And I have 16 burritos left. I think I am going to see if I can slowly reintroduce beans to my diet so I can eat these. They are REALLY GOOD.  I spent a long time Googling last night and apparently other people have had the same problem and they could fix it. Here's hoping!

Paging All Soon To Be 1L's

Every year as we get closer and closer to the start of law school orientation season, I see the traffic to this blog pick up. Of course, I never know exactly what brings people here but I have a visual of all these baby law students frantically googling for advice and ending up here. With this (possibly imaginary) vision in mind . . .

Here is your chance! Comment on a post or email me. Ask me any questions you have or any topics you think I should cover. What kind of advice are you looking for? I'm open to anything.

It can be today, next week or four years from now.  I know that I lurked on hundreds of blogs before I started my 1L year and every one of them made me feel just a bit more prepared on what to expect and just a little less panicked. Consider this my way to pay it forward.

Fire!

It has been years since I looked around at all the theme and background options for this blog so I spent a few minutes looking them over. I happened to see the fire one and I was sold. In general, law students equate law school with hell and in this day and age, we have the meme's to prove it.

For how long will I leave it this way? No one knows.

Finances Update

Last December I wrote a post about how Fiancé and I had dug ourselves into a financial hole that was rapidly getting too deep. Digging us out of a hole

After half a year, I decided to see how we did. Law school is expensive in so many ways that don't include tuition and books and it only gets worse the farther along I go.

I had six goals and only about half were a complete success.

GOAL ONE: Stop Eating Out - This one was mostly a success. We had a few hiccups when I got stressed around due dates and finals but overall, we ate at home way more often. In general, I do most of the cooking because fiancé isn't very good at meal planning. However, he made it a point to have the ingredients for the couple meals he does well and if I didn't have time to cook, he made the time. I also found a few really frugal meal ideals that drastically stretched our food dollars. I will probably write about that later.

GOAL TWO: Batch Cook Easy Cheap Meals - Definitely a success. I get email alerts for the weekend sales at Winn Dixie and when they had chicken leg quarters on sale for 25 cents a pound, I bought 20 pounds of chicken! It sounds insane but I broke it down into about 12 different freezer bags and each one had a different sauce. I had BBQ, Italian, Teriyaki, Sweet and Sour and many others. Then all I had to do was throw it in the crockpot before class and make rice or noodles when I got home. The sauces were all inexpensive marinades bought on sale so dinner cost between 2 to 4 dollars total (depending on the vegetable) and we usually had two or three days worth of leftovers. We obviously didn't always eat chicken but I made a couple ground beef and pasta freezer meals as well and the whole freezer lasted us months.

GOAL THREE: Work More Hours - Well, this was an utter failure on my part but was a success for Fiancé. My job ended shortly after the new semester and due to my insane course load, I didn't really see how I could get a new one. Fiancé found a new, great paying job and kept his part time one on top of it. That was a fabulous financial decision because a couple months later, his department at the new job shut down and he was back looking for a job. Him keeping his part time job really saved us a lot of stress.

GOAL FOUR: Stop Being A Crutch For The Other - Success! So the last couple years, we had had so many family emergencies, surgeries, and long periods of unemployment that we had stopped budgeting and splitting the bills. Whoever had more money would pay the bill and then when they were broke, they'd look to the other person to save the day. We have stabilized quite a bit and so have not had to fall into that trap for quite a while. We split all bills 50/50 so we are more able to anticipate future bills and budgets. As a consequence, we don't end up flat broke quite so often.

GOAL FIVE: Keep Our Bills Low - Until last month, this was definitely a success. We cut out all sorts of unnecessary bills before the New Year and didn't add any of them back. Then, we got overconfident. Fiancé's job was going well, I was employed for the summer and we had lived in Florida for two years and had never gone to Disney World. Yup, we ended up signing up for the annual pass (which is paid for monthly). Four days later, we found out his department was getting shut down. Oops. So this got downgraded to better but not a success. We should have put that extra money on our credit cards but we got caught up with the Disney excitement. You live and learn.

GOAL SIX: Pay Off Credit Cards - Failure. Complete failure on both our parts. My balance is pretty much the same as it was last December and I think Fiancé's is a little higher. On my part, I tried to pay more than the minimum due but couldn't always manage it. Then I forgot about some annual bills that were linked to my credit card instead of my debit and that pretty much undid all the work I had done on it. Fiancé did really, really well on paying down his credit cards but then his mom came to visit for the first time since we moved out here. He wanted to show her all the things he loves about Florida and he put it all on his credit card. Sigh.

Overall, I'd say we did better that we had been but we still have so much to work on. We obviously need to focus on our credit cards and keeping within our budget for food and such. We also have a friend coming to visit us this summer so I hope we can budget for that instead of going crazy with expensive ideas.

One thing that wasn't exactly a goal but I am glad I started doing was finding small ways to bring in extra money. Not necessarily jobs but small things like getting paid for research studies (not medical or anything) or mail in surveys (pays better than online ones but aren't as easy to find) and saving gift cards for expenses instead of using them to splurge on things we didn't need. I even started getting small gift cards (think 5 dollar walmart ones) by switching from searching on Google to searching on smaller, less known search engines. After awhile, those five dollar gift cards add up.

I also make it a point to use coupons on the necessities that I tend to forget that I will need. Every couple weeks I cut out the coupons for makeup, paper towels, soap and the like. When I need to buy something, I look at my coupon pile first and then spend a few minutes trying to find a store coupon that matches. If I can find a store sale at the same time, so much the better. In the last week, I bought Pantene shampoo and conditioner at $1.67 a bottle because I had two coupons and a store deal. I also used my CVS extra care bucks and a coupon to buy paper towels where it actually put more money in my pocket than I spent. CVS had the big pack of Bounty paper towels for ten dollars and I used two five dollar extra care bucks plus a dollar off coupon. Because my savings were more than the cost, I got a couple cans of dog food. I paid a $1.54 but got 10 new extra care bucks to spend on whatever I want. Eggs, toilet paper, frozen pizza, whatever I need. Think about that for a second, I paid a little over a dollar and a half for a 12 pack of paper towels and dog food and got ten dollars to spend on anything (except alcohol) at CVS. If I had just waited until we were out of paper towels and picked some up without a plan, I would have paid ten dollars, wouldn't have had dog food, and wouldn't have ten extra care bucks to spend on next weeks random need. What a waste!

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Barrister's Ball

After my long absence, I looked at my draft folder and saw that I had started a post on the Barrister's Ball. Even though it's been MONTHS since this happened, I decided to finish it up anyway. Here it is. . .


So at the beginning of February, we all got a save the date email for Barrister's Ball. That was happening IN February. Wait, what? Where were the details? The place? The extras? No one knew. And when we asked the people in charge, they could only say "we aren't allowed to say more until we finish signing the contract." Wait, It's in a few weeks, the contract isn't signed yet? Yikes! We all pretty much agreed that this Ball was going to suck and I know many people who decided not to go because of this. Fiancé and I still wanted to go but we really didn't have high expectations. The year before, the Barrister's Ball was so much fun and it was so well organized that the tickets went on sale months before the actual ball. We couldn't see how they could top it, even with the best organization.

We were wrong. We were so, so, so, wrong. It was a Casino Royale theme and it was an absolute blast. We all got to play all the gambling games we wanted and with our "winnings" we got to enter into a raffle depending on how much we made. The drinks were incredible and there were multiple bars all around so there were no lines. Plus the food was actually VERY good this year. Last years was boring and I wasn't very impressed. There were multiple photo opportunities and a live band and dancing. All in all, it was very well done.

However, I did learn for the first time how much the Barrister's Ball actually costs the student body and I am pretty horrified about it. It costs over 50,000 dollars each year! Now maybe I'm crazy but that seems ridiculous for a bunch of students who continuously complain about the high cost of tuition. I mean, sure, some of that is paid by our 50 dollar tickets but not that much of it. The rest comes out of the Student Body budget which comes from our tuition dollars. Yikes!

I will of course go next year because 1) it'll be my last year and 2) my refusal to go wouldn't lower the amount paid in any way. I just think it's a bit excessive.

As to the after-party . . . well the least said the better. It did involve walking barefoot, a strip club and an uber so obviously ... we had a great time. The next day wasn't quite as fun but we survived.

Oops - I did it again

I fell off the face of the earth again. In my defense, this last semester was pretty miserable and when it finally ended, I had two days to fly back to Washington State for my sisters wedding. Totally worth it but totally exhausting.

Not all that much has changed since I last wrote a blog post. I am still a law student but now I can call myself a rising 3L. ONLY ONE MORE YEAR!!! I did pretty much screw up my grades this last semester. Well, in my own special snowflake way. I didn't go below the curve (Thank you Jesus!) but I basically hit the curve for the first time. Sigh. I'd like to say it wasn't my fault or blame it on all my writing courses but honestly, I just didn't have much motivation to study. The class I did the worst in, should have been one of the easier classes but I allowed myself to get behind in the reading and then skipped the maximum allowed days of absences so I wouldn't be cold called on when I hadn't done the reading. I did catch back up of course but I didn't do a whole lot more than that. I cruised and it showed in my grades. My own fault.

I am working at a law firm this summer so I hope to God I get some actual experience under my belt because I feel completely out of my depth. I really like the firm and it's pretty much all Elder Law so I want to soak up as much information as I can. They aren't looking to add more associates so I unfortunately cannot turn this summer job into a permanent one but I'm just so excited to be working in Elder Law that I don't care. Plus I actually get paid this summer. WHEEEE.

Watching all the just graduated 3L's studying for the bar has really made me want to cherish my last year of law school. The bar prep company says that it's 8-10 hours a day, six days a week but everyone I've talked to says that is a lie. They've been studying 7 days a week, no breaks for over a month now and it just doesn't sound fun. Worth it because at the end, you get to practice law. But no fun all the same.

This coming up Fall semester will be interesting. I was accepted into the Elder Law clinic so I will only be taking half the classes but of course, will be working part time instead. I am trying to get as much experience as I can before I graduate and I'm excited about this clinic. I will be working with low income elders and will actually be practicing law!!!!! (Under the supervision of an attorney of course) How awesome is that?

All in all, life is going okay. Some bumps, some bruises but I'm still standing.

Can't complain.