One of my colleagues, a lawyer with impressive credentials and accomplishments, claims that one simple practice helped him move from mediocrity to excellence in law school. "I started reviewing my notes every day after class."
What??? It can't be that simple. Wouldn't it be better to read a hornbook — or two or three — to thoroughly understand the nuances of the subject? And to follow up with a few law review articles, integrating their insights into the notes that you spend all Saturday retyping? If something intervenes this Saturday to interrupt this deep dive into doctrine, you're sure to catch up next Saturday, or certainly by the next weekend. Except that, for most of us, life intervenes continually. We rarely, if ever, have the time to to accomplish our over-ambitious goals. So that makes it important to follow the KISS principle my engineer father taught me ("Keep it simple, stupid"). As Steven Foster noted earlier this month in his post, Compounding Effect in Law School, small, easy-to-implement practices can yield impressive results over time. So I'm a big fan of reviewing class notes using the technique of "transforming notes" that Dennis Tonsing sets out in 1000 Days to the Bar.
Here's my approach, which adds some tweaks to the method Tonsing describes.
First, commit to reviewing your notes for each class every day before you leave the law building. Making the commitment to staying in the law building to do the review reinforces how important class review is — in essence, it makes the review a short continuation of class. In addition, it's a great practice to review all today's classes before starting to prepare for the next day's classes.
Second, commit to spending 5-10 minutes for every class you attended each day. That is, you will never spend less than 5 minutes per class, and you will never spend more than 10 minutes per class. Why no more than 10 minutes per class? Because if you stretch out the process of reviewing notes, it will become a chore: the perfectionism monster will rear its ugly head, you'll try to make things perfect, then you won't be able to review the notes before you have to pick up the kids or the dry cleaning, and you'll fall off the wagon. Consistency is more important here than perfectionism. In addition, this keeps the total time devoted to daily review manageable on even the heaviest of class days.
I like using 3X5 or 4X6 notecards for transforming notes. With one card for each class, you immediately get a visual confirmation of how much you're learning, instead of your class review being buried in a thick, over-burdened notebook. Notecards force you to handwrite, which is time-effective and engages the visual, oral, and kinesthetic senses. They are wonderfully tactile and great for kinesthetic learners. Going through a stack of them is an easy way of incorporating spaced repetition into one's study. Perhaps most importantly, the limited space helps reinforce the limited time and limited scope of the review. There's room for fun, too: many of my students have used different colored cards for each class, or use stickers to reward themselves for a job well done.
Now, set your timer (using your favorite technology) and start.
Spend about 2 minutes reviewing your raw notes from class. If you've left gaps, fill them in; if you've written something wrong, correct it.
Now spend 2-3 minutes summarizing your class on the front of your notecard. On the top, write your header: the class date and a sketch outline of where you are in the subject. This helps make sure that you're always putting things into perspective instead of just learning random rules in a vacuum. So, for example, I might write "3/2 — Crim/Defenses/Excuses/Duress" or "11/17 — K/Remedies/Legal/Reliance." This visual header also helps later as you build outlines.
Use the rest of the front of the notecard to summarize the most important things you learned in class, including terms of arts, important policies, rules, and exceptions. Think of this as your elevator speech or preparing to answer the question of friends or family, "What did you learn in school today?"
Five minutes to go, and you still have lots to accomplish. Flip over the card — you'll use the whole back. Draw a line down the middle, leaving a little space on the top. In your remaining time, you'll be asking yourself 3 questions:
How does this connect to something I already know?
What don't I understand?
What ambiguous fact scenario could the professor use to test my understanding of this material?
First, it's time to strengthen your neurological connections to this new knowledge by making a connection and writing it down — this takes only a few seconds. Make a conscious effort to think about how what you learned today connects to something you already know — from a previous class in this subject, from another subject, or from something you've experienced or read about. For example, you might think "Duress reminds me of all those old gangster movies where the crook has his gun in somebody's back;" at the top of the page, you might jot down "James Cagney" or "old gangster movie." Your connection doesn't have to be deep or profound at this point: you're just building extra pathways in your brain to what you learned today.
Next, move on to "What don't I understand?" Give yourself several minutes here: it's common to think at first that everything is perfectly clear, then on deeper reflection to realize you have points of confusion. Jot down these questions now, while class is fresh; chances are you'll forget them later. For now, writing the questions is all you need. You can return to them later to get answers — from the casebook, from a peer who made a good observation in class, from a secondary source, or from the professor. But you can't get the questions answered later if you don't remember them.
Still two minutes to go! Now tackle what for most students is the hardest part of your class review. "What ambiguous fact scenario could the professor use to test my understanding of this material?" It's tempting to give yourself a pass by sliding into rules: "Oh, she'll want to know if we understand the difference between duress and necessity." But you can best test your understanding of the material and flex your analysis muscles by trying to come up with an actual fact scenario. For example, you might think "Duress requires unlawful and imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to person or third party that a reasonable person wouldn't be expected to resist. So gunpoint = duress, squirtgun ≠ duress, what about a cast iron skillet? Or what if the bad guy is threatening to post information on Facebook that could put the victim's friend in danger of being shot by a gang?" Your hypo doesn't have to be perfect — it just requires you to engage the class material to try to figure out nuances and hard cases.
That's it! Think of all you've accomplished in ten minutes: you've put the day's class into context, summarized the most important points, connected it to your existing knowledge or experience, identified your points of confusion, and started problem-solving. That's a lot! The first few days of reviewing like this are deucedly hard, but if you stick with it, you will find this daily review sharpens your mind and helps you understand and use the law you've covered in class.
(Nancy Luebbert)
