Law School Final Exam Tips & Strategies
To help you manage your time, avoid BIG mistakes, & write your best final exam!
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Law school final exams are universally considered the TOUGHEST part of law school. It’s the two times of the year when the pressure and tension and stress really kick into high gear.
But… as much as the build up to the final exam may be unavoidably stressful, knowing what to do to write a high-scoring final exam answer is the BEST antidote I’ve ever found to relieving that fear-based anticipation for exam day.
As game-changing as it is to know what TO do when heading into your final exams, it’s equally as powerful to know what NOT to do.
It allows you to avoid all of those pitfalls/common mistakes that law students make so that you can perform at your highest POSSIBLE level.
So that’s exactly what we’re diving into:
Tips to manage your time before and during final exams
BIG mistakes to avoid during final exams
Strategies to write the best final exam
Final Exam Strategy No. 1: The Analysis.
I know a lot of you have probably heard of IRAC as a framework for structuring your exam answer. IRAC stands for:
Issue
Rule
Analysis
Conclusion
A four-part framework—where all the parts are NOT weighted equally.
Now, IRAC is a fantastic starting point. It gives you a great high-level structure to think about when organizing your answer.
BUT. IRAC doesn’t tell you anything about the most important part…the ANALYSIS.
The Issue, Rule, and Conclusion are need-to-have’s. But they are “get-in-and-get-out” parts of your final exam answer because we want to spend as much time as possible on the star of the show, which is the ANALYSIS section.
The Analysis section is where you’re applying the facts to the rules of law that you have learned during the semester. (to get all those juicy, juicy points!)
And just like in high school math—you can only get points in this section if you SHOW.YOUR.WORK.
Meaning, you take the reader (in this case the professor) by the hand, and walk him/her step by step through the arguments and counter-arguments it takes to reach your conclusion.
So the BIG mistake that most law students make is skipping this section altogether and torpedoing their chance at major final exam point-grab!
⭐ Final Exam Reminder:
Make sure you don’t fall into “IC” mode. This is when you share only the Issue and Conclusion. It’s critical to always remember to use “because” statements to bring in the facts from the fact pattern.
Rookie mistake: “conclusory reasoning.”
Instead of writing a true analysis, what a lot of new law students do is what professors call “conclusory reasoning.”
In a conclusory argument, you state that the RULE is met because of RULE LANGUAGE—only—and do NOT use any facts to support your argument.
(That is death to analysis.)
Remember, “analysis” means making “arguments.” And “arguments” are made with RULES + FACTS. Not using facts in your analysis will obliterate your point total.
The reason this happens in law school final exams is two-fold:
Students get excited when they spot an issue in an exam, and their brain immediately goes into “right answer” mode (which is death on a law school final). They want to write that “right answer” down and move on. (Hold on juuust a moment—we’ll get to this “right answer” business shortly.)
The thought process is, “The professor already knows all the reasons why there was a ‘battery’ in this fact pattern. I don’t need to spell it out for them.” (When, in fact, the “spelling it out in baby steps” is EXACTLY how you get points on a final exam!)
I get it! The application step is scary and can seem overwhelming—but—diving into those facts headfirst is how you get those MAJOR point totals and avoid falling into “conclusory reasoning” mode.
Rookie mistake: restate the facts.
Similar to the above, another mistake that new law students make is simply restating the facts of the fact pattern. You get zero points for this.
Instead, we always want to use facts in the context an argument that you're making.
Remember: "rule + fact = argument."
The easiest way to make sure you're not simply restating facts but actually using them to form an argument is my favorite: “P will argue that [rule language] is met because of [facts].”
Final Exam Strategy No. 2: Ask your professor what they want to see in your answers.
This is a MUST.
In law school, the person who holds all the cards to your grade in a particular class is the professor. And every professor has their own preferences when it comes to structuring an exam answer.
It’s true that most professors do really like the IRAC framework—but not all of them do. Some professors have specific nuances to the IRAC framework that they REALLY want to see (or not see).
There are tweaks, personalizations, and preferences that will work best for each professor.
For example, some professor preferences may include that they…
Don’t want you to write out issue statements or rule statements—they just want you to begin with the analysis.
Prefer CREAC framework (conclusion, rule, explanation, analysis, conclusion), so we want to make sure to give them our conclusion at the beginning and the end.
Write VERY long fact patterns designed to focus on issue-spotting, and won’t give as many points for going into the more indepth arguments and counterarguments.
Love to see LOTS of formatting (headings, subheadings, numbered lists, etc.).
Are sticklers for beautifully written exam essays, and take off lots of points for sentence structure and grammar.
Love to see you use case analysis or policy arguments—while others don’t care about those things at all.
The point is, as a law school student preparing for final exams—YOU.WANT.TO.KNOW.THIS.BEFORE.THE.EXAM.
You want to play to your audience in this competition, which is your professor. Their preferences are VERY important to our final exam strategy.
How do you find out about and put that information about preferences to use?
Straight-up ask them in office hours.
Yep, that’s right.
Ask them how they prefer the answer to be written, what “A” answers do that other answers don’t, and how they feel about the traditional IRAC (and argument/counterargument structure).
Ask 2Ls/3Ls who had that professor.
Some professors won’t give insight into what they’re looking for—because they like to play it VERY close to the vest. But you can usually (at the very least) get some information from TAs or 2L/3Ls who have taken this class with this same professor. ASK THEM. They are a treasure trove of knowledge.
Model answers—if provided.
Now, talking to the sources above is great. But even more reliable than what professors SAY their preferences are, is how they’ve actually graded in the past…which makes model answers and “A” student answers gold, if they’ll give them to you). Looking to past exams or practice exams that include model answers allows you to reverse-engineer the answer to create a breakdown of the order of the analysis, the types of arguments, and the languaging of the answer.
Final Exam Strategy No. 3: Optimize Your Time in the Exam Room.
Managing your time well—during AND before final exams—is HUGE!
Law school final exams are intentionally written to be too long.
For any given law school exam, you could continue to find issues and write out analysis for days and days…Yet, you’re only given 3-4 hours to complete the task.
Having a time management strategy as a law student is a non-negotiable.
It sounds super unfair, but—
Law school exams are intentionally written to be too long…in order to create the “curve” that is intrinsic in law school grading.
The professor needs to create a way for some students to find and talk about more legal issues than others.
Otherwise—everyone would be able to complete the exam in the time allotted without a problem, and creating that curve distribution of grades would be next to impossible.
(I’m not saying I agree with the grading system, I’m just saying that’s a side effect of it.)
Now that we know we’re walking into a time-impossible situation, we need a strategy to aggressively manage that exam time.
Common mistakes that waste precious time and that you MUST avoid so as to protect as much time as possible for actual analysis:
Spending a disproportionate amount of time on the first question.
This happens a lot with new law students who are still getting used to the time crunch of a final exam situation. They go “all in” on the first essay question, and don’t leave enough time for the remaining questions, therefore burning a ton of point possibilities!In addition…they’re NOT paying strict attention to the professor’s suggested time for each question. Your professor is allocating points based on those time totals per question, so make sure you adhere to them as strictly as possible.
Not outlining your answer before you start.
You always want to take a few minutes to roughly (ROUGHLY) outline the issues you’re going to talk about before you dive into writing. This way you have a solid idea where you’re going with your answer, AND you can “set up the issues and knock ‘em down.”So if you know you have 45 minutes per question, you’ve identified 5 issues, and you spend 10 minutes reading and outlining your answer—that gives you 7 minutes to talk through each issue you’ve identified. And that time goes fast!
Spending too much time on the rule statement.
This is another place a lot of new law students get tripped up because you’ve spent ALL semester learning all of these legal rules, and so the thought is you want to show your professor ALL this law that you’ve learned! Students will do a “brain dump” of law on the page and just eat up all that precious time that would be much better spent applying the law to the facts in the fact pattern (AKA, the analysis).Remember—for the rule statements, we want to get-in-and-get-out as QUICKLY as possible so we can spend as much time as possible on the Analysis.
Final Exam Strategy No. 4: Format Your Answer.
We touched on this a little bit already, but the truth is that your professors HATE grading final exams.
They take FOREVER and there are SO many of them. (You would hate grading them too!)
We want to make it as EASY as possible for your professor to find and allocate points to you in your final exam answers.
A HUGE mistake law students make on final exams is writing a giant wall of text.
NO paragraph breaks. NO headings. NO subheadings. NO numbered lists.
→ NO way for a normal human to quickly see how you broke down your answer.
And your professor is NOT going to be inclined to go digging through your twelve-page wall of text to give you points. Help them help you.
So, with that in mind…
Give your professor a clear, visual roadmap so that giving you points couldn’t be easier!
Use headings for every issue that you spot (e.g. "personal jurisdiction"; “subject matter jurisdiction”; “venue”)
Always use numbers to break up your rule statements into parts (literally 1, 2, 3, etc.)
When in doubt, throw in a paragraph break!
Following these simple formatting tips will help you keep yourself organized (and make sure to hit every part of every rule) AND help your professor follow your analysis and more easily find the points to award you.
Final Exam Strategy No. 5: There is no “right answer.”
This is the creme de la creme of law school final exam writing. It also happens to be the part most new law students absolutely MISS.
We have been SO trained our entire academic lives to learn the “right answer” and then give that answer back to professors on exams.
Law school is the first time where we’re actually rewarded for recognizing that THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER—and explaining why.
To this day I remember repeating to myself in final exams, “there is no right answer, arguments and counterarguments…there is no right answer, arguments and counterarguments.”
Professors write law school exams to be INTENTIONALLY ambiguous. That’s the entire point! You’re going through all this training to learn how to “think like a lawyer.”
The gold in a final law exam answer lies in the arguments and counterarguments to each issue. NOT the “right answer” for how the issue should be resolved.
→ The goal of law school final exams is NOT to get the answer right, it's to get points.
If you let your brain jump straight to the “right answer,” you’re simultaneously shutting down any thoughts about the juicy counterarguments you could make. And that means you’re leaving SO many points on the board!
Just one point can be the difference between a B and a B+, an A- and an A, or an A and the highest grade in the class.
The objective for final exams is to get ALL the points you can!
⭐ Final Exam Reminder:
Never go into an answer with your mind made up about which party is going to win.
Instead of going into your analysis with your mind made up as to which "party" you think will win, stay in "P will argue/D will argue" mode.
Keep an open mind and actively look for ALL possible arguments and counterarguments you can make. (It’s not important here who "wins" an issue.)
The BEST Approach for Law School Final Exams
Remember these tips and strategies to employ—AND common mistakes to avoid:
Include the MOST important part: THE ANALYSIS.
Ask your professor what they want to see.
Manage your exam time well.
Format your exam answer.
Remember that there is NO “right answer.”
I hope you found some new insight and fresh reminders as you’re preparing for or heading into final exams!
If you have any questions about final exams be sure to grab your spot for my free 1L Masterclass HERE.
