- Let's talk about the most common mistake
that people make on
law school final exams.
This thing actually got
you A's in undergrad,
but it will get you an F in Law School.
Coming out of undergrad, everyone has
this mindset and you'll have to work
very hard to avoid it, so stick around.
(upbeat music)
If you came straight out
of a college class on law
and went straight into
a law school final exam,
you would feel like you
were crushing the exam
but really you'd be getting zero points.
That's because undergrad
teaches us that the way
to get all of the points on an exam
is to regurgitate all of
the information you can
to show the professor that
you remembered everything
that they talked about in class.
This is the old information dump.
It works great in undergrad,
but it doesn't work at all in law school.
Law school exams use the issue spotter
hypothetical method of final exams.
Regardless of the class that you take,
your professor most likely
will give you a set of facts
whether it's one paragraph
or on several pages
where bad things happen
to a group of people.
Things go wrong, people get murdered,
people try and take possession
of another piece of property.
This is the hypothetical facts
that you're going to have to deal with.
And when you get an issue spotter exam,
it's your job to figure out
who can sue whom for what.
These are the issues
that you have to spot,
that's why they call it an issue spotter.
So how are you going to do that?
Well you use the law.
But the thing is that knowing
the law is only the first
step, it's the table stakes.
If it's a contracts class
and you simply regurgitate
the entire history of
contract law onto the page,
you're gonna get zero points.
Your contracts professor
is not looking for you
to tell him or her the
history of contract law.
Your professor already knows that.
Your professor doesn't
care if you know the law.
Your professor wants you to use the law.
Now imagine if you took a calculus exam
and instead of answering
the math question,
you just simply talked about the history
of how Newton-Leibniz invented calculus.
How many points do you
think you would get?
Probably not many.
On a calculus exam, you are
supposed to use the concepts
of calculus and determine
the answer to the formula.
And just like in grade school,
showing your work matters.
In fact, showing your work matters more
than the actual answer itself,
and it's the same way in law school.
The information dump,
the most common mistake
that people make on law school exams
worked perfectly in college
but it doesn't work at all in law school.
Law school is all about applying the law,
applying the concept
of the causes of action
and the premises to the facts themselves.
It's all about the application.
And here's the rub,
unlike elementary school
and in most of college, where there is
an actual right answer, in law
school it is all gray area.
The math example that I
used isn't 100% accurate
because in calculus there is a
right answer to the question,
so showing your work is important
but getting the right
answer is also important.
But in law school, there
is no right answer.
You have to show that
you could use the law
and the facts together, synthesize them,
and act as an advocate for one party,
and of course you also have to show
that you are smart enough to know
all the counterarguments
that the other side
is going to use and go back and forth
between arguments and counterarguments.
The worst thing that you could possibly do
is to just write down all
the information that you
can think of, everything that
was talked about in class,
that will get you zero
points on a final exam,
unlike college where it
probably got you an A plus.
So don't go into law school
with the same mindset
that all of your classmates have,
that what got them to law
school is the same thing
that's going to get
them A's in law school,
it's just simply not true.
If you try to use an information dump,
your professor will hate you
and give you a terrible grade on the exam.
You have to apply the
law, show that you can
think like a lawyer,
and here at Legal Eagle,
that's our entire mission is to show you
how to actually think like a lawyer
because you certainly didn't learn
to think like a lawyer in college
and sadly, even law professors
aren't very good at teaching you
how to think like a lawyer.
So go in with the right mindset,
cast aside what you learned in undergrad,
and go in and crush your
next law school exam.
So if you liked this video, please click
the like and subscribe button down below.
You can download our free guide
to law school in the
links in the comments,
and as always, we'll see you next time
here at Legal Eagle where we teach you
how to crush law school.
See you next time.
Today--
grad will get
let's talk about the thing uh
it's all gray area, no (coughs)
school probably isn't showing
you how to be how to think
right mindset and go in and
