Some better tips for surviving the law degree
This blog post was originally published in October 2019.
Last week, just in time for the new term, Legal Cheek published its top tips for freshers attending law lectures for the first time. Most of them are unobjectionable banalities, such as “get enough sleep”, or good advice on lecture hall etiquette. Others are harmlessly wrong. Sitting at the front has no effect on achieving higher scores, for example: that’s probably just a selection effect, because the most eager and able students tend to arrive early and sit close while less eager and able students arrive late and sit at the back.
There are some I would like to take issue with, though, based on my own experience as a law graduate from a top university. Here are my top tips for surviving the law degree in general. Please assume throughout that I did not follow any of these, and am giving you this advice based on what I should have done and what I have found helpful ever since. Many of these are equally applicable to subjects other than law, too.
1. Arrive early.
Not on time; early. It’s good for you. You have no excuse. And while you’re at it, try to get up at the same time every day — that way you aren’t storing up body clock problems for exam season, and sleep deprivation won’t set in at crucial times.
2. Avoid taking notes during lectures.
I say this with some caution because workshy people will read this and use it as an excuse to slack off. However, Legal Cheek’s advice to take notes as “an excellent way to maintain focus” is flatly wrong. Here’s what the author says in full.
Taking notes is an excellent way to maintain focus during a lecture. Your mind will be actively engaged if you focus on writing down what is being said. These notes don’t need to be 100% complete: just jot down points that are interesting to you and any questions that may come to mind. You can fill in any gaps during your reading later.
This is the exact reverse of how you should treat lectures. Lectures should almost never be the first time you come across material, because they are a horrible way to learn details. You simply can’t retain enough or write fast enough from an oral lecture, and the lecturer does not have time or energy to cover sufficient material anyway. This is especially true of law, which combines a need for ruthless rote learning with deep analysis of cases and principles. Trying to learn this way will likely make you miss critical points that will punish you in an essay, exam or dissertation.
Instead, think of lectures as a way of going over material you have already learned. Print your notes out (more on that below), follow along with the lecturer and notice anything that you’ve got wrong or that needs refinement, instead of clumsily trying to reconcile the two sources on the fly. You’ll miss things and you won’t learn properly, and you’ll go into your seminar/tutorial/supervision underprepared and caught by surprise.
Moreover, this method gives you the confidence and understanding to be able to ask intelligent questions of the lecturer. This has three positive effects: you will be able to abstract your learning so as to properly phrase a question; you will fill in gaps in your knowledge; and your classmates might learn something too. Everybody wins.
3. Vote with your feet.
Sometimes, despite the best will in the world, you will discover that your lecturer simply isn’t any good at it. In my undergraduate degree, I had one lecturer who read out their handout verbatim. It would have been more useful to download the notes from the Moodle and read them with a cup of tea in bed.
If you discover that this is going to be the case for a given set of lectures, then don’t go. It’s a waste of your precious time. But do not use it as an excuse to slack off — treat the hour you’ve gained as a home-learning class, and do a little extra reading for the upcoming seminar. Maybe there’s an article you thought was intriguing but were pressed for time, or a piece of legislation you would benefit from going through with a red pen. Now’s your chance: don’t waste it, and don’t be afraid to show off a bit.
4. Technology is not your friend.
I have been a Google Docs evangelist since Day One. I was an early adopter of Spotify. I have been on Twitter for many years. So this comes from the heart and from bitter experience.
Technology is not your friend. Legal Cheek says “put your phones away” and “only bring your laptop if necessary”. I would go further: if it is at all possible, do not bring any technology to the lecture at all. Leave it in your room.
The reason for this is that you are probably not unusually conscientious. You’re probably in the top half of the population because you’re at university doing law, but you’re not a hyper-focused super-person. And that means the technology companies are smarter than you. They trade in attention and eyeballs, and the smartphone and the tabbed browser window are extraordinarily effective inventions for taking your attention from you and making you think you’re being productive. Especially if you are active on social media as I was throughout my degree, having access to this kind of technology when you’re doing work is like trying to take notes in a nightclub. It isn’t going to work, no matter how smart you tell yourself you are.
So stop doing it. Leave them at home during lectures. Print your notes and take them with you. Put the laptop on flight mode while you’re writing your notes up, or just write them on paper and file them manually. Print your reading, and manage your money so you can afford the printing costs. Turn your phone off, not just to silent mode, and put it on the other side of the room or (better) on a high shelf. The smartphone is one of the most powerful devices in the history of the human race and it is designed to make you waste your time consuming content on behalf of the technology companies. That isn’t what you’re paying thousands of pounds a year for, so don’t let it become your default activity.
5. Learning and revision are completely different tasks and should not resemble each other.
When you learn you are introducing new information to your mind. Revision, by contrast, trains recall, not learning. If you are encountering new information for the first time during revision you have already made a serious error. Likewise, revision activities like mind-maps and flash-cards are worse than useless when you are trying to learn new information because they are not efficient enough.
Learning follows a sequence: read, write, attend a lecture, ask questions, and finally attend a seminar to make it all lock into place. It’s like laying the foundations, building the walls, and putting the roof on.
Revision should then take place in the safe environment you build in your learning, a safe environment that enables you to practise recall. Good ways of doing this include writing out a page of principles and matching them up with the case that is authority for them, or drawing out connections visually, or doing past papers without your notes and going over the mark scheme with a fine-tooth comb. Your aim should be to figure out a) what you didn’t remember, b) why you didn’t remember it, and c) what you can do to ensure you remember it during your next revision session — and ultimately in the exam.
6. Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way.
Law is a challenging subject. It is not surprising that people try to find shortcuts, and this is particularly true when 60% of graduates or thereabouts will get the same grade, a 2.i. There are all sorts of easy options and shortcuts available to the tired and busy law student, and the most pernicious is the casebook.
Do not read casebooks. It’s sensible to read textbooks, because you need to be able to grasp the contours of the field and they are a tried-and-tested pedagogical device, but do not read casebooks. They cherry-pick pieces of judgments and make you think you understand the case, but the fact is you don’t — you’ve not seen the context, you’ve not seen the tone of the argument, you’ve not seen the weight of emphasis laid on each authority. The worst piece of advice I ever received at university was as an impressionable fresher, when a third-year told me he’d never read a case in full and had always done OK. Do not listen to people who are ‘doing OK’.
Worst of all, and most dangerous for future practice, if you insist on reading casebooks you will be at a serious disadvantage in the first few years of legal employment because you won’t know how to read a case or an Act of Parliament. Reading a case is a specialised skill, involving pattern recognition and instinct gained from experience. It is an unpleasant, boring grind to start with, especially if you are exposed to Factortame (No. 2) in first year, but I promise you if you read cases in full and statutes in context, it will make a huge difference to your long-term retention and understanding.
If I could underline one line from this post it would be as follows: you can read so much more than you think you can. If you make it easier for yourself by getting rid of distractions, your brain should acclimatise fairly quickly and it should become natural. And if a short-cut seems easy or fun — sorry, it’s probably useless. Learning rote for cases is an unnatural, unpleasant activity until you get very used to it (probably not until the end of second year, in my experience). If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is; if your learning looks like something you did in primary school, it probably won’t cut the mustard at university.
When doing a law degree above all you should continually ask yourself why you are doing it. In almost all cases it is because you want to be a lawyer.
So ask yourself: is what I am doing conducive to that goal? Lying in all day and failing to read your cases probably is not; scraping through on a low 2.i and running up debts doing the LPC or BPTC, only for your lack of learning to become extremely obvious at interview, definitely is not. So don’t mess about when you’re supposed to be learning. If you want to mess about, take a different subject or transfer, because law is of limited value unless you are actually going to be a lawyer, and legal recruitment is ruthlessly selective.
This all may sound harsh, but it is better to thrive now through hard work, efficiency and self-criticism than coast through and suffer later. Change and good performance are very, very hard, but failure will hurt you more, and if you fail later you’ll be deep in debt. Make the right choices now and make that nightmare outcome much less likely.
P.S.: I would recommend taking on quite a lot of extra-curricular activities. One of the most effective ways of forcing yourself to become more efficient is by artificially reducing the amount of time you have at your disposal — I did a lot of work on the student newspaper in my final year and my grades went up, not down, despite the sharp reduction in free time. Also, you will have a much better time at university if you do so.
P.P.S.: the best post I’ve ever read on exam strategy specifically was written by an old Cambridge Computer Science student. He’s taken the post down now but it’s preserved at the Internet Archive. I really recommend this when it comes to exam time, especially in second and third year.
