SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everybody, in this episode of Law School Decoded, I think that I have a pretty unique tip to help you succeed on your law school exams. You should take your outlines that you prepared for your exams down to a print shop and have them professionally spiral bound. Yeah, let's talk about it.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Welcome to Law School Decoded, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to succeed in law school. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

So, in other episodes, I've discussed some important things related to preparing an outline for your law school exam. We've talked about how to draft your outline. We've talked about when you should draft your outline. I just did a podcast about how you should format and organize your outline to maximize your chance of success on your law school exam. I'll do another one on the importance of making the outline yourself and not just inheriting some other outline from some law student who took the class before you. In this episode of Law School Decoded, I think I have a tip for you that is pretty unique. And that tip is this sometime before your exam, probably at least one week before your exam, you should take the outline that you prepared, take it down to a print shop on your campus or near your campus, a Kinkos, a FedEx, Kinkos, whatever, and ask them to print your outline and to bind it with a spiral. So it is spiral bound with a nice, clear cover on it. Why should you do this? Why does this matter? And why should you do it at least a week before the exam? Well, let's talk about the timing. First of all, if you set a deadline for this, you will also have a deadline for completing your outline, which is important. We've talked about how you can work on your outline throughout the semester. So your goal is to have it done so that you can practice your exam answers. So you can deploy your outline. So you can take it for a spin and test drive it. So if you have a goal to have your outline done so you can take it to the printer at least a week before the exam, you will be in a position to have that time to practice. And I'm suggesting that you should tell that printer, hey, I want my outline really well presented. I want you to print this and I want you to spiral bind it. I want you to put a clear cover on it. And so under that clear cover, you're going to see that table of contents that is auto-generated from the headers of each section of your outline. That table is going to identify every single issue that you believe could come up on the exam and the page where that issue is. So as you are sitting there and as you are reading the exam, when you need to go to a particular issue, you can look at that cover page, that table of contents, you can see what page the outline of your answer is on. You flip to it and you start to deploy that section of your outline into your exam answer. Your outline is a choose your own adventure story that you use to draft a really compelling exam answer. Now, if you finish this outline and get it bound a week before, you're gonna read it, you're gonna practice it, and you're gonna make it even better. If you see errors in it, grammar errors or things that could be clearer, you can just make a little note with a pen to make it a little bit better as you hone your answer. It's better to do that before the exam than on the exam when you're writing down your answer. If you finish your outline early, you have the opportunity to do that. Some of the best briefs I ever wrote, some of the most important briefs, when I needed to write them, I would start to write as early as possible. As early as possible. Why? So I could do the same thing. So I could edit them before I submitted them and make them even better. And if I waited to the last minute, my work product just wasn't as good. That's just a fact. I'd make mistakes. I wouldn't organize things as well as I should. The same goes for your outline and why you should finish it early so you can focus on using it to prepare for that exam of yours. Maybe put some tabs in it to really important subjects, some tabs on the side so you can flip to those issues quickly. That's a way that you can uplevel it. Think about whether you want to print it one-sided or two-sided. Go with whatever you think is going to be best. So, why else do you want to print your outline like this? One, it's an important document. Your grades in law school are probably important to you. And when something is important to you, you should treat it really, really well. Imagine you're painting a room in your house. You don't just throw paint on the wall. You're careful, you're precise. The same goes for your outline. You want to be careful, you want to be precise. And since you care about this, you want to put in the time to get it done early and to make it really, really well formatted and well presented because it matters. In the same way, when you submit an appellate brief someday to an appellate court, they will probably have rules about how you have to print it, printing multiple paper copies for the judges that are spiral bound and that have covers and that have certain color cover pages. Appellate courts do that because the document matters. When something matters, you want to format it well. Think if you were going in and giving a presentation to potential investors in a company, the deck that you would give them would be printed and spiral bound, just like this, with a clear cover page. This is just as important. So treat it that way. It's also going to be much easier to flip through a large outline if you spiral bound it, spiral bind it, as opposed to if it's just stapled or paperclipped. Ugh, if it's paper clipped, you're going to take off that giant paper clip or that giant binder clip when you're in the exam room. And those papers are going everywhere. You're disorganized. Flipping from a paperclip or a staple is harder than flipping from binding. And you want everything in the exam, all the conditions to make it as easy and conducive as possible for you to succeed. That is your goal. Spiral binding will do that. This episode should be sponsored by Kinko's. If anybody's from Kinko's is listening, come on. You know hundreds, thousands of law students are going to spiral bind and walk into exams with spiral bound outlines because of this podcast. Reach out to me. Let's get you sponsoring this. So it's going to also encourage you to format your outline impeccably so you can easily turn to the sections. If you have a goal of spiral binding your outline like this, if it's important to you, you're also going to format it well. You don't send a book to the publisher and have it be sloppy, right? So having this goal is going to encourage you to format it well. You're going to do the indentation. You're going to have the clean spacing. You are going to have, you know, one issue per page and then go to a next page, a page break when you have a new issue that you need to discuss. You're going to have those bold headers. You're going to have those placeholders where you're going to insert party names. I've got a whole nother podcast on formatting. But if you're if your goal is to bind the outlines, then you are also going to do all those formatting things well. It's going to encourage you to succeed in that regard as well. Spiral binding your outlines will also keep the document durable for exam day. You're going to be using it for exam day. You're going to be practicing with it. You're going to be carrying it around. That is your game plan. And you're going to have it with you in the library. You're going to have it in a backpack. You want to keep it durable for exam day. It also is going to just bring an air of seriousness and confidence to your work. If you organize things well, if you present them well, you're going to feel more confident walking into the exam room. You're going to show yourself, I took this seriously. I did everything I could. I'm giving the best presentation that I can in every single way. It's the same reason you should shine your shoes before an interview, right? Because it's going to help you ensure that you're presenting your best self. This is a little thing that you can do to ensure that you're accomplishing that. And again, use that bound outline to practice. So this was a little tip, but it is something that I really did in law school as I figured out how to succeed. It wasn't something I did initially when I wasn't getting grades that were as strong. But as I started taking real pride in my exam answers, I started doing this. And it really did help me have confidence in the outlines that I put together, in the work product that I made, in the accuracy and precision of my exam answer. It helped me ensure that I was revising my language to write those rule statements in a really clear way as we learned them in class. It helped me revise my issue statements so my language would be concise yet eloquent and appropriate for the situation. Binding my outlines really did up-level my game. And it was part of all the things that I did to do better in law school. So I hope this was a fun tip. I hope it's a fun idea for you. I hope that you consider doing it. If you do this, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a note and let me know that this worked for you. So thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We will see you next time.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

That's it for today's episode of Law School Decoded. Visit us online at lawschooldecoded.com and make sure to subscribe. Until next time, keep decoding the law one step at a time.