How do I learn this?

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Bar Review, a space where we talk honestly about life and the legal profession. I'm Carrie, and I'm Anika. Welcome to the conversation. Just a quick note before we get started, we are not your lawyers, and this is not legal advice. - And to the extent either of us are employed by the time this airs, this is where we share our personal opinions and not the opinions of anyone else, especially those kind enough to employ us. - And one more time for the people in the back? - We are not your lawyers. This is not legal advice. - Thank you for listening. (upbeat music) - So I read at some point that the way that you learn a new language or the way that you can learn something totally new is that you have to be exposed to it seven times. - Oh see, I was taught it was three. - Huh? - Well, I heard seven. So what I would do, this was my process. Here are my seven times of exposure. I would do reading before class and the first round of reading, I would just highlight, take notes in the margin, second, also before class. I would then take notes on my reading. So basically turn my highlighting and my margin notes. I'm exhausted when I was step two, or I was step two. And then I would turn that into my reading notes that I would then have in front of me when I went into my law school class. I then took notes. All of this was handwritten. I did none of this on the computer because I also read that. - I also hand wrote. - Yeah, that's how you look at things. So my class notes were taken in a different color pen on the same piece of paper over my reading notes. My reading notes are what, oh, prepare me for my psychotic method. Then after class at the end of the week, 'cause let's assume each class had two classes that week, I took those two classes and added them to a running outline that lived on my computer. That was typing. Then during reading period, I then took that outline and turned it into a bunch of flashcards that I would memorize or just learn. Then those flashcards over time found their way onto a whiteboard that in my apartment, I had put onto a wall. I did not have a TV. I had a giant whiteboard with lots of dry erase markers. And then once I felt I had grasp of the situation, I then made a one-pager outline, which at that point I typically could do from basic memory. And those were my seven ways of that I learned the language of whatever law class. - Yeah, so I understand why you had a better GPA than me in law school. - So, okay, I do have thoughts. And I think it's interesting that you framed it as learning a language 'cause it's also how I framed it. But I wanna take a little bit of a step back. So first thing is that law schools, I think pretty universally, are based on a single exam grading metric. So you take your classes throughout the semester, you have one exam at the end of the semester that are intense. My intent to range from three to eight hours, some of them are take home, some of them are completely locked down, some of them are open books, some of them you get one outline, whatever the professor decides. But your entire grade rests on your performance on one exam. Some classes I was in had midterms. When we got into the higher level of classes, there were weekly assignments or writing things or something like that. But especially in my, are you one-o year? My entire grade was basically this one exam at the end of the year. And if we had a midterm, it wasn't a real 50/50 split. So that means that you spend the semester preparing for this one exam. And in the midst of preparing for this one exam, you are taking law school classes, which if they're taught in the traditional method, which is most one-o classes, they're taught in the Socratic method. And the Socratic method is the professor walks into the room, has whatever they wanna talk about and will randomly call on people to answer whatever question it is that they have. - There's usually a seating chart. - Yeah, there's a seating chart. Some of my classes, it was assigned. We walked in the first day and we're told where to sit. Some of them it was wherever you sat day one is then where you sat for the rest of forever. And the professors had their assistants make seating charts with like our photos on it so they could learn who we were. Sometimes some of my professors did on call lists. So there would be 10 people or five people designated to be on call for the Socratic method that day. So if you weren't on call, you didn't have to worry about being the one called out. But I think, I never had that. I always worried about being called it. And I think this is actually a function of the fact that we went to law school eight years apart because a lot of those changes were made to better the mental health of law students until lower the stress level. The on call list actually did make a big difference because then you could make that judgment call. I'm not on call in civil procedures. So I don't need to read quite as closely. Even though you should be reading as closely because you have that exam coming. But so that is the backdrop on which you're learning to study. And the other big thing that you mentioned that people might not know is outlining. And so that is a huge topic in law schools and a huge topic on how people approach outlining. I'll talk about mine. It was unconventional, but actually somewhat similar to yours. But there's this idea that as you get to exams, you usually have a reading period. It's usually a couple days to a week. Mine almost always fell in the fall semester over Thanksgiving. So you spent your holiday prepping for exams. And that's where you take everything that you've learned the entire semester and try to condense it into a singular outline of only a handful of pages and internalize all of that information. And we should talk about curve. Yeah, the curve. That's what makes all of this so stressful. So law school forces your grades onto a curve. And what that means is that only a certain percentage of people are allowed to get each grade. So a small percentage can get an A plus, an A, an A minus a B plus, all the way down the letter scale. I don't think we gave D's. I think it went C to F. So first of all, how about how many people are in your section? What's a section? A section is the group of people you're assigned to date classes with, you're one or a year. Mine had 100. We would take some classes as double sections. And those would get close to 90 to 100. So our sections must have had closer to 40 or 50. And the 100 people, let's call it just because it's an easy number, let's say that math is done before the semester starts. 10% of the class gets this grade, 10%. So what that means in practice is if every single student, quote unquote, ace the exam, your lowest score was a 90%. Then the person, depending on how the curve is meted out, that got a 90 gets either a C, a D or an F. Yes, because it's a competitive grading system to identify who is at the top of the class and who is at the bottom of the class. And that is reflected in your grade, therefore reflected in your GPA. So you could get what in any other context would be an A on an exam, but get a C minus in your law school class. So that creates this really competitive atmosphere to law school and really ups the pressure in studying and studying the right way and studying so that you ace this exam and also beat out everyone else. Because it's not really about doing well in the exam. It's about doing better than everyone else on your curve. That's a really bad way to think about it personally and that's not how I thought about it. It doesn't adopt the rising tide results. Mentally. No, we're pitted against each other. So that is the environment in which we study. I approached it also from the perspective of learning a language. That was a French major as we talked about. And I approached learning law school, how I approached learning all of my French. And so I would do the reading ahead of time. In the first little bit, I did try to do what I think we called case briefs. We would be assigned a reading and those readings in especially follow your one-year tend to just be a series of cases. And so I would read it and I would highlight the case. And I had truly eight different colors of highlighters that had a key and the different colors meant different things. Like a plaintiff argument, defendant argument, analysis, rule, holding, Dicta, and Iraq, which is issue rule, issue rule analysis conclusion, which is how cases are structured in people writing and theories. In theory. And you are supposed to learn how to write that way. So part of one-year is learning to read cases that way. So I would do this really detailed highlighting structure. And I would sometimes take notes in the margin. At first, I started then translating that into briefs on the case, trying to reduce this down. I would also do it handwritten. And I would not use any resources. Like, Quimbee-- I think Quimbee even will give you video breakdowns. Like professors will talk to you about the case. But I refused-- I didn't use any of those because I won wanted to learn how to read the cases. And I knew that if I didn't understand how the sausage is made, I was never gonna be able to do it on the back end. I eventually gave up on taking those case brief notes because I found that they were just wrong. I wasn't getting the case well enough for those to be useful to me. So I would do my highlighting, so that would give me a gist of what the case was. And if I was asked a question, I could quickly find where the analysis was in the case and try to find the answer. But I would wait to take any written notes until I got to class. And then I would hand write, no. As the professor leads us through the case, I would write down what people answered, what answers went well. And then on the back end, this would be my third step. I only did three steps, not your seven. My third step was every Friday, I would sit down and go through my handwritten notes and type them into a type written outline. So really similar to what you did because the idea of outlining everything would be end of the semester, which is what some people do. Some people don't even start their outlining process until Thanksgiving break. I could not fathom. - That is so overwhelming to me right now. - I'm getting anxious thinking about it. - It's too much stuff. So I was like, I'm gonna start the outline and it was a good check because I would have to go back to my notes and understand what I'm reading. I could go back to the reading itself and break it down further. So it gave me another set of time to let's sit with the material, write this outline. And then when I got to the reading period, it was more about cleaning up the outline and making it something more functional. The skill with which I read a case in September was vastly different. I know I read the case in November. So a lot of times I was going back and redoing because you were learning the language. - 'Cause you were learning the language. I was redoing those initial few weeks because now I actually understood what I was supposed to be getting out of this. And then I would take my exam with that outline and that's how I did that process. - When we take your exam with the outline, were you allowed to have your outline during your exam? - Some classes I was allowed to have an outline. Some classes I was not. Some we were allowed a one page. There was one professor that allowed a postcard. All of these were tricks though. In my opinion, all of this is bad. Some people make them fully open book. You can bring the textbook, you can bring all materials. That is such a trap. Because the time limits of a law school exam mean that you are not going to write a really strong exam. If you can't pull it off a memory in some capacity. If you know which case says which holding and you just are gonna go to that printed out casing your book to pull the exact language, that's one thing. But if you're relying on having the time to actually find an answer, there's no universe where you have time to touch the textbook during a three hour essay exam. - No. - I actually don't recall, especially in my one L year, things got a little different, especially with just the kinds of classes I took in second and third year law school. But I don't recall ever being allowed to have anything in the room with me. But it does sound like even having something in the room with you is tantamount to a trick. You really should have studied as though you're gonna have nothing in the room with you. This is a really key point. Studying to the professor, I got that advice. And it's hard to internalize that one L year because you don't even know what law school exams are to begin with, let alone how should I adapt my studying to fit with this professor once. But I had one professor in my constitutional law professor where she was like, I don't care about sentences. Do not write me something pretty. I want you to bullet point and just put as much key information as possible on the page. So it was much more a volume than a pretty type of exercise. So she wanted to make sure that you knew everything and knew it well enough to spit it out quickly rather than formatting it well. I had another professor where the thing that mattered to him was how many of the cases we referenced during the semester you could cite in your responses. He wanted you to be able to recognize which cases supported which principles and pull them all into your citations or find a way to make that case relate. He was way more interested in how many cases you could make fit that answer. So bullet points versus citing every single answer versus my towards professor that wanted a master class polished essay, very different exams to both prep for and take and so understanding what your professor wants is really important. And I found my professors were very willing to tell you what they wanted. It would difficulty live more in actually understanding what that was when you just don't have a frame of reference. And when you say tell you do you mean in the actual classroom or do you mean attending office hours was wise? Attending study sessions were wise. So as a blanket do as I say not as I do. Attending office hours and study sessions are wise. I didn't go to a single one in all of law school. I went to every single one. Yeah, again, our GPS were different for a reason. But our professors did say it out loud. Some of them be final class. They would put it up on the whiteboard about what they expected. Some of them there was an optional exam prep session. I did go to those that felt wise and they would tell you exactly what they wanted. Some professors would give mock exams. I'm not sure I found those all that helpful. Just like study groups, I didn't study in a study group. I also did not study in a study group. But I did have certain people very similar to learning a language. If you and I had gone to law school at the same time, the way it would have looked is we get lunch or we get coffee and we talk about it. That would have been really helpful. I think it would have made a difference for me to have one other person, a small group of people where we all had the same philosophy about what we were doing here and just sat together to talk about it. I should break that down a little bit more. So as an initial point, study groups in law schools have a bad rep because there are four stories of people because of this competitive greeting curve will sabotage people that are in study groups. Just don't be a fucking asshole. People will always remember how you made them feel. If you act like a fucking asshole, you will be remembered as a fucking asshole and it is bad for business. That is very true. I think that there is some short-sightedness in law school. It is real that you go to law school to build connections and people that I went to law school with now message me on LinkedIn to say, "Hey, I saw your firm as hiring. "Can we chat about the job?" And like the way they interacted with me in law school does matter because that is my impression of them. And so if I feel comfortable recommending them for the job is dependent on how he treated me in law school. And there are people that I would say absolutely not. And it's because you were a fucking asshole. It's because you ripped pages out of library books. It's just a real thing. It's a real thing. There's no assholes, dude. But I would say actually where I went to law school is known for having a culture that's against that. And I don't know anyone I went to law school with, never heard stories of anyone I went to law school. Never had a rumor even of someone sabotaging another person intentionally. I'm not gonna say it never happened, but it was a culture that was set up to be nicer. But even so, your in control of your culture and your in control of your behavior. So again, don't be a fucking asshole. But even with all of this and even with the culture that my law school tried to foster, I didn't really grasp study groups. I think for that reason, I approached law school differently than a lot of my peers. I wasn't here to study all the time. I really tried to not be super anxious to not get caught up in the curve. I'm gonna show up how I show up. I'm gonna live my life. I'm gonna do what I feel comfortable with. And whatever that means on the curve, I will deal with those consequences in my career. But I only've met people that had different views to me that we were not gonna study well together. And then there were people that also really didn't care or just didn't care in a different way that we weren't gonna study well together. It's never found that groove. One of the things that I was thinking when you said earlier, well, that's why your GPA was so different. Ultimately, you and I have landed in very similar careers. There can be that hive mind of stress. I loved law school. I loved studying it. I wasn't trying to get the top grade. I was trying to learn as much of it as possible. I took time in between college and law school. Being back in school was energizing for me. I missed school when I went back to school. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a law school when I went to law school. And then I found myself in it. I approached it the same way I approached the New York Times Crossword on a daily basis in the morning. I just loved doing it. And it did reflect in my GPA quite frankly. I am now going through some assessments to identify that I have very likely had ADHD, my whole existence and just masked it and functioned through it. So why study groups didn't work for me with my personality or with my particular brand of mental illness is that I just get really distracted in groups. Yeah. So I'd end up shooting the shit instead of staying focused. I needed complete quiet, complete isolation. But I also needed to talk about it when you [BLANK_AUDIO] French, you got to sit down and speak French with somebody every so often. Yeah, and I think that is the part that I missed, is I didn't have a space where I could say it out loud. I think the saying it out loud makes a difference. And that's also the part of the job that I love as a lawyer is when you get to be in the conference room with the whiteboard and you're just talking out the problem. That's my favorite part of the job. I love a whiteboard. A beautiful whiteboard. Uh, talk dirty to me. Did you know you can turn a zoom TV into a whiteboard? What is a zoom TV? Oh my god, my dear. So any TV that has zoom on it, conference rooms you go into that are set up for group conferencing so people can zoom into your meeting. You can bring up the zoom function and turn the entire TV into a whiteboard. A whiteboard for me is not a digital thing. So same, but my current firm does not have any physical or in the wall whiteboards. The only option is to turn it into a TV. You did obviously lead a rebellion. Obviously. When you talk about how you studied, is there any class in particular that you did do it differently? The way that you're three part structure that you maybe applied to everything else just didn't quite work for this one class. For me, that class is contracts. Yeah, I had a couple, the more practical classes like trial practice where you're doing tangible things that doc trinol class setting is different than that. So that's not really a work. I approached it different for evidence. Evidence, I was a flashcard girl. Our professor, great professor, loved the class actually had fun in that class and he just really cared about you knowing what the rules were, which makes sense. And so he's a lot of memorization. It's it was a lot of memorization. So I have memories of pacing in my room before the exam with flashcards trying to memorize things. And then I had a class that I got the book award, which is different among law school. So we called it the book award. It was you got the highest grade in the class. Yeah, we called it the Cali award. And I think that's more common is the Cali awards. So it means you got the top of the grade on the curve. And that was that international business transactions class. He ran his class as simulations. So we would read a problem, which is set up like a business school problem. He taught in the business school as well. So anybody who's done an MBA or has an MBA student in their life, there's this concept of casing where they give them this description of something that a company did. And in the case walks through what they did, what went wrong, what the outcomes were. And we'd read that. And then we'd show up to class. And he would assign us roles and say, okay, you, but just points in the circredic way, like you are running the local government, you're the CEO, you're the consultant. And now explain to us what your position is, why it should be that way. And then we'd have to negotiate it out. So it was that talking it out process. And I loved that you just are put into this place where you just adopting this position and then putting all of your mental brain power into advancing that position and playing that checks. And that's the chest of being a lawyer that is so much fun. So contracts was where I won the Cali award. My outline, unlike everything I just said, my outline for contracts was an entire handwritten notebook that never got typed into an outline. Cause to me, it just my brain didn't see it as outlinable. It was a series of cases about a series of different deals. Not just in that makes a lot of sense, because contract law evolved that way, doctrinally. And the crew of people that I typically would have met up with to have those conversations, I do actively remember leading up to that exam feeling like I am so lost on contracts. Contracts is hard. There's just no way. And those people are reaching out and being like, Hey, when I sit around and chat, I'm just not prepared. So that was the other thing when we were talking about something like a study group for me. I needed to be where I felt I needed to be to participate in those conversation. Yeah, like it wasn't necessarily a learning spit. I had to know how to conjugate my verbs before I went back to the conversation. Yeah. And then the other class that I just couldn't really ever figure out how to study for was professional responsibility. I did fine in it. Same. I did fine. I did make an outline. So I guess I actually even as I'm saying that out loud, I probably did approach it the way I approached the typical law school class, but it didn't work. Yeah. Well, that class, it is doctrinal, but it's not that's less to me. Just feels like if you're ever presented with any ethical problem, pick the incredible mediocre position. Don't take the best position. Don't take the worst position. Take the mediocre position. And that's probably what the rules require of you, because this is a self regulating profession. So we pick the self serving answer. We have to have enough ethics to be reputable, but not enough ethics that we're holding ourselves to this incredible standard, because why would you impose that on yourself? It just always felt like a gray zone to me. I hear that. I also just think ethics in practice is so personal. Yeah. There are things I do in my practice that I staunchly stand behind and would go to the mat on, but it's your practice. It's your bar license. It's your ethical code of conduct. And it's hard to put that in a law school class. It's hard to put in a law school class. There also just are areas of practice where the rules are in conflict with one another. Yeah. And that's that's really what I mean. That at the end of the day, how you come out and how you would justify your actions and your behavior so that you can feel that you are proud of yourself and proud of the way that you are practicing is truly not something another person can teach you. That's a really good natural for law school as a whole, because there's no right way to be a lawyer. There are wrong ways to be a lawyer. Very, very wrong way to be a lawyer, but there is not one right way to be a lawyer. There is not one right way to be a law student. There is not one right way to study for a law school exam. This is an exercise in figuring out how you want to be a lawyer. Something I heard all the time was law school didn't teach me how to be a lawyer, but it taught you how to think like a lawyer. And I do think law school and how you approach law school does set up how you will approach practice. And so I do think you need to be intentional about how you're approaching law school. And if that aligns with how you want to approach practice, I did learn how to think like a lawyer in law school, but you learn at the practicing part on the back end. And you're going to find your own way with that when you get to practice about how you want to form your practice and be a lawyer. Classes that they don't have in law school are how to manage teams, how to lead teams, how to be a solo practitioner, how to do timekeeping, how to talk about the billable hour, how to set boundaries. Because law school creates this very competitive environment, because they completely agree with everything you just said, about you set a tone for how you're about to hold yourself out in your career by how you started out in law school, that you can lose sight of why you went to law school in the first place. The most interesting people become lawyers. I have met lawyers that started out because they were adopting elderly horses and training them. Everybody has a different reason that brought them here. And we all start out as these incredibly neat, uniquely motivated individual people. And then you go to learn a language and there's a certain amount of, I'm not going to call it conforming, but I just don't have a better vocabulary word. There's some of a culture that comes along with the language. I think culture is a better word. Yeah. You are learning the culture and you're learning the language and you're learning how to speak it. But don't forget you get to speak it in your accent. Yeah. What I would say is you have to be open in law school to where the path is going to take you. I don't know many people who are practicing and doing the work in their careers now that they thought they would be doing when they went to law school. I think that's a pretty small club. And I don't think that there were soft for it. You will find avenues and pathways that you didn't know existed, but it is equally important to keep a reminder about why you went to law school. So you don't lose yourself in the hive mind mentality that we've talked about. And there are pathways and the early part of your career. And what I can honestly say at this stage of my career, having just literally come home from my 10 year law school reunion is that there is a point where you do have to build it for yourself. And don't forget that when you went to law school, that was what you were doing. And the best lawyers speak in their own voice. And they present themselves as themselves in that courtroom, in that client meeting, in whatever they're doing. And they are deeply persuasive, but they are genuine to who they are. The most effective advocates speak in your own voice. And I think you start finding that voice in law school. I think it's very okay to decide when certain things don't fit you. And I think that's maybe most up law school and most of your early career is trying something on and deciding it doesn't work for you. It's a lot easier to figure out what doesn't work than what does. Even if and especially if you are really good at it, you can be excellent. You can crush the curve, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc and so forth and you can be miserable and that could be not the life that you intended for yourself and don't portray yourself. Yeah do it the way that you need to do it and don't worry too much about what other people are doing and if you do portray yourself. It's okay to come back. Yeah you can always change how you're doing this. There's no right way to be a lawyer. Thanks for joining the conversation. You can find Bar Review wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe and share. Want to keep the conversation going? Follow us on social at Bar Review LLC. Onika will see you there and she'll tell me all about it. Got a question you want us to tackle in a future episode? Send it our way. We try to read every you know. And just a reminder, we are not your lawyer. This is not legal advice and these opinions are just our own. Cheers! [BLANK_AUDIO]