Real talk: must you do all the reading to crush 1L?

I know all of the above responses will have different strategies, so I just skimmed through them, knowing I'd add my own.

Top 5% at T14, for what that's worth, with GPA being equal between fall and spring.

I did all of the readings. Type A personality wouldn't let me not do the readings.

With that said, I did the readings quickly. I read the Quimbee before hand (or whatever other online summary I could find). Often, I had a one sentence "rule of law" written down on OneNote before I even read the case.

What that did was allowed me to read the case with the object in mind. So, yes, I would read the facts of the case, but in reading those facts, I was thinking in my mind how those related to the "rule of law" that I'd already written down. I think it helps to read with a purpose, even more so with a known purpose (i.e. "I know I'm reading to see how this case displayed this rule of law").

In terms of how I managed that with outlining, I briefed each case...well, briefly. One sentence of the law. A few sentences for the reasoning. A few bullet points for the facts in case of a cold call (the first 2 weeks in each semester, I took down more facts to understand each professor's style. It never mattered.). Doing that helped me immeasurably with outlining. I never started an actual outline until the first long-ish break each semester: mid-October for fall and late March for spring. Kinda late. I wish I'd started earlier, but I had good results, so who knows.

But by the end of each of those breaks, I had all of my outlines up to date. From there on out, I spent each weekend keeping the outlines up to date until finals, adding in attack outlines and practice tests as we got closer.

May or may not help.

Tl;dr: read quimbee/wiki first, read case quickly, succeed.

/r/LawSchool Thread