A Veteran’s Military-Inspired Approach to Law School

In the Army, a commander wants a common operating picture in front of them of everything happening on the battlefield: Where are the helicopters? Where's the artillery? Where are your forces and the enemy's forces, and so on. It's the same concept. I would take my notes from the reading and put my notes in class directly on top of them, so I'd have a common operating picture. While I was in class taking notes, and things were going rapid fire, I'd have my book in front of me, so I could see my highlighting from the reading and my case brief. It gave me a common operating picture during class.

My system was: read before class, develop the case brief, go to class, take notes, and at the end of the week, synthesize those notes into an outline and then develop flash cards from the outline, so I could memorize it all for those closed-book finals.

What that turned into was a battle rhythm - of preparing for class, developing my outline every week, and studying for finals - starting from the very first week of law school. That allowed me to develop a pre-populated calendar of recurring events, and when I needed to be studying, in class, and outlining. For example, if I had a Monday 9 a.m. class, I was reading for that class on Saturday or Sunday night.

I also estimated the time requirements so that as things happened throughout the semester, I could shift time blocks around the calendar. If I wanted two weeks to work solely on my final memo for the fall semester, I was able to plan backward and read ahead for that two-week period. It's what the Army calls a long-range training calendar, where you plan what tasks your subordinate units need to accomplish over time to, for example, get deployed to Afghanistan or get ready for the National Training Center. A long-range calendar lets you see visually scheduling conflicts.

My calendar ensured that I was getting everything done in accordance with my battle rhythm, while at the same time accounting for changes. Whenever things popped up - mentorship, meetings, social and networking events, interviews - I was able to react and stay synchronized. It all boils down to abstracting the lessons I learned in command in the Army and then executing with discipline.

It's also about repetition. I had it on my long-range training calendar that I would get lots of practice exams before finals. I did 10 to 15 practice exams for every single class where I had a final - probably 30 to 45 total practice exams in the fall 1L semester. I walked into finals very practiced. I didn't know how I was going to do, but I wasn't scared, because I knew that I had done this before under similar timed conditions.