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 going back and forth in a fight against time. You must be calm, collected and methodical during your exam – here are some tips to help your outline contribute. This article assumes that, like most law students, you have compiled several outlines from various sources for each course.

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

Law students tend to be very hectic when 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 ultra-impressive and completely bad sketch, you need to do it methodically. Take a section (say, Auxiliary Jurisdiction in Civil Procedure), read the treatment of each outline in that section, and create your own.

2. Write your own outline

Putting pen to paper also helps the law student to meld the information in his or her 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, in your supplements) and put it into your own words, you are forcing yourself to think critically about what you’ve read and to make executive decisions about what goes into your outline. and what is cut. Remember: you transcribe as you think. The last thing you want on test day is to have to try to understand 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 are known to have spastic memory. Don’t just compile the information for three schematics and assume you have everything you need. 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. This is an example of my tort outline: condense all the relevant information into the concept > sub-concept > Black Letter Law > Example [if necessary] > Exceptions [if necessary] Format.