Ninety-Day Trial Recommendation
After you have read a significant part of this book, you may say to yourself, “The rigor, detail, time commitment and strategizing this book suggests is wholly unnecessary—I’ll do just fine by simply studying harder than I did in college—much harder.” Reconsider. Law school is not like college. Law school is your opportunity to begin the practice of law.

If you’re just beginning law school, you have about 1000 days until you sit for the bar examination—but you have only 90 days until you sit for your first semester final examinations. Consider following all the suggestions in this book for 90 days. Ninety days. That’s all. I suggest you take to heart the lessons presented here, and accept my challenge to commit to the practice of law in law school with the same rigor, detail, planning and strategizing you intend to employ in the professional practice of law. Take your finals with confidence and self-assurance. Note your grade point average. Then determine whether it was worth it. (Page xv)

Outline Your Answer
If any step could be called “most essential,” it would be this step. To put the importance of this step into perspective, consider this: many law professors suggest that students spend at least one-third of their exam-answering time outlining the answer, and some professors refuse to hand out the bluebooks until more than a third of the exam time has passed. The style and form of the outline is important only to you since you will be graded only on the finished product: the answer as it appears in your bluebook.

Prewriting Best Practices
Following identification of the rule you intend to use to resolve the identified issue, you need to engage in lawyerly “analysis” of the problem. Lawyerly analysis, in its most fundamental sense, boils down to an interweaving of the facts presented in the hypothetical, with the law you have identified. Often, because reasonable people could view the interplay of the facts and the law somewhat differently, a well-reasoned analysis will be driven by the “policy”—the underlying reason as to why the rule exists, or how the law should best be employed in this instance to serve the interests of society. This is the point where you get into the “jurisprudence” aspect of law school. Jurisprudence has to do with “vision” or “insight” into the law, rather than simple mechanical application of the law. As you know, the legislative branch of a tripartite government makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the judicial branch interprets the laws. Welcome to the judicial branch. You are entering a field of interpretation, which calls upon you to engage in a different type of analysis than most people are accustomed to. This is called legal analysis. It is also called “thinking like a lawyer,” and this is precisely what your professors expect to see demonstrated in your examination answers.

Fluency in the Language of the Law—“Thinking Like a Lawyer”
Fluency in the language of the law and “thinking like a lawyer” are so intricately interwoven that simultaneous development of both should be a goal of every serious law student. Both are readily apparent to professors, bar examiners, literate lawyers, and jurists alike—as is the absence of either. Legal jargon is lost without the emblematic matrix of legal reasoning to support it; legal analysis can’t be appropriately communicated without an abundant legal vocabulary used with precision, grace, and cogency. Perhaps more importantly, significant legal analysis can’t take place without the dynamic mental machinery and intellectual horsepower associated with mastery of the language of the law.

As a practical matter, because professors can’t actually see what students are thinking, they do the next best thing to determine if students are thinking as lawyers think. That is, they scrutinize the product of that thought—student answers to examination questions. Thus, exam answers provide professors with measurable evidence of whether, and to what extent, their students are thinking like lawyers think. Students who earn high grades in courses dependent upon writings as evaluative instruments demonstrate fluency in the language of the law.