Schema condensation is crucial to success in law school. To attack your endings in a timely and orderly fashion, you simply can’t be furiously back and forth in a fight against time. You need to be calm, collected and methodical during your exam – here are some tips to make your outline contribute. This article assumes that, like most law students, you have collected several outlines from various sources for each course.

1. Attack each section one at a time, across multiple contours

Law students tend to be very hectic preparing for final exams. After all, you are attacking a paper tiger, something totally intimidating and illusory. To that end, when you’re condensing your outlines into an awesome and downright bad ultra-sketch, you need to do it methodically. Take up a section (say, Auxiliary Jurisdiction in Civil Proceedings), read the treatment of each scheme in that section, and create your own.

2. Write your own outline

Putting pen to paper also helps the law student meld the information in their mind. Simply copying and pasting from another schematic will be much faster, no doubt; but what have you really learned by doing it? When you take the information contained in your outlines (and, indeed, your supplements) and put it into your own words, you are forcing yourself to think critically about what you have read and to make executive decisions about what you include in your outline. and what is cut Remember: you transcribe as you think. The last thing you want on exam day is trying to figure out what Joe Law Student ’05 meant when he was explaining the Eric Doctrine flowchart to himself.

3. Fill in any knowledge gaps with your supplementary material

This may sound obvious, but law students in November have been known to have spastic memories. Don’t just compile the information from three schematics and assume you have everything you need. Please review the supplements you have purchased and make sure everything that needs to be addressed has been addressed.

4. Outline in the following format

Every student is different, but this serves as the basic framework for your outline. Here is an example of my tort scheme: condense all relevant information into concept > subconcept > Black Letter Law > Example [if necessary] > Exceptions [if necessary] Format.