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What up guys, some of you have asked to walk through what outlining looks like and best tips and practices for that in law school, so let's talk about it. Before we begin, what is an outline? Let's talk about that. Just a short version of your notes that you can use to study before your law school exams. Law school exams, as you know, are usually 100% of your grade. That's a lot of your grade, man. Some would say that's your entire grade. Some would say. And, uh, obviously grades are important in law school because that leads to better job opportunities and prestigious clerkships, pivoting into business, or just bragging rights and being happier about yourself and your performance. And listen, you're paying a lot of money for law school. I think you owe it to yourself to perform well. So let's talk about some best practices for outlining and we'll walk through a couple of examples too. We're going to start with this contract outline example that I pulled from the library of outlines at my 1L school, NYU, and this is for contracts just at a high level. Let's note a couple of things. First of all, the format of this outline, as you can see, it's a lot of text. Just line after line after line of text. When they get into the actual outlining of cases, they do a pretty standard format here for outlines, which is the case name, relevant facts of the case, the holding or the reasoning of why the case is relevant or special. This is the most important part. And potentially any rules that have developed or been created in the legal realm doctrinally from that case. Right? Again, that's the most important part of the outline is, uh, is, is the reasoning of the case. And then any special rules that were created there from that's what you should expect to do. When you outline, I'll note, you know, here is case name reasoning slash any special rules. That's the most important day in this outline have actual doctrinal pieces or components that they thought were important listed here. You see like the restatement of contracts. What does it mean to have expectation damages while it's lost profits plus incidental losses minus cost for the blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that's, that's okay to include. And you should include those things when you think that they're really important rules that are going to be on the exam or pertinent to the exam. This is what I think 90% of most people's and the law students outlines look like. It's just this text format of, of condensed notes. But I want to walk you through mine because it looks a little bit different and I'll tell you why. So first of all, this is a different subject. It's not contracts. It's torts. You'll see that it starts off pretty similarly. I list out, you know, the basics of, uh, of intentional torts, negligence, strict liability, just doctrinal rules along with the elements that fall under them. Because these are like kind of the big topics that I wanted to memorize and really understand. I very quickly, when I get into the cases, switch to this tabular format. And this is what I recommend for outlining rather than doing a text, text, text, just line based outline is using this tabular format where on the left side you have the case name in the middle, you have the reasoning, the holding, and a little bit about the facts. Just very little, right? I want to make it clear to you guys, like facts do not matter for the exam. I think if you're spending a lot of your time memorizing facts of cases, you're wasting your time. All you need to know is the basic relationship between the parties of the case and then take that and spin it out into the broader reasoning and holding and memorize that piece. The reasoning and the holding, the rules coming out of the case, that's the more important thing that you need to understand for the exams, not the facts. So you'll see in here that I have very little about factual information about each case. So that's the middle column, right? That's the meat. It's the reasoning, it's the holding, it's potential rules that you're learning. And then on the right side is notes. And these kind of vary. Like some cases I don't have any. Some cases I have a couple of them. But it's just kind of any like special qualifications you want to add for yourself to clarify your understanding of the case or maybe your professor brought up like some unique point about doctrine that you want to include. I think that using this tabular format is much easier for your brain to absorb all of the information because this is a lot of stuff you're going to be cramming in your brain. When I look at this, I see a much cleaner product and something to easily absorb relative to this. You know, this just looks like a block of text staring me in the face. And in some ways, this is like what your notes look like. I think like an outline should be distinct from your notes. It shouldn't just be a shortened version. So I recommend doing the tabular style here. That's basically it on the general outline. For timing, I would recommend starting your outline right at the middle of your semester. That'll give you enough time to hopefully finish your outline two to three weeks before your exams, which leaves the rest of that time to just review your outlines over and over. In a perfect world, you memorize them, but I know that that's somewhat of an unreasonable ask for most people. But listen, I scored at the top of my class at NYU and Harvard, and that's what I did. There's no excuse for the hard work that can breed success. Moving on from outlines, I wanted to also touch on attack outlines for you guys because these are like a key to being very successful on exams, right? Because the actual broad outline, that's good for understanding the doctrine and like learning an overview of the course. But on the actual exam, what you want is a tool that will give you the doctrinal rules or elements that you can refer to super quickly and start writing out your answer to immediately. In an attack outline, and this one is for contracts, and this one's actually pretty long, four pages it looks like, usually mine were one to two pages. You basically have a doctrine or a piece of law. There are typically elements that you want to discuss underneath it, right? Those are the things that I listed here. I didn't list specific cases or like the full rule statements or any of that. What I listed is, here's the issue that I'm going to discuss in the exam, here are the various elements that I need to go through, right? So example, for a contract, what makes a contract potentially voidable? All of these things should be discussed on an exam, right? In theory, ethic, condition, precedent, duress, meeting of the minds, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? Now, because I have this list, as soon as I know that I'm going to do an analysis of whether the contract is voidable on the exam, I can just knock through each of these one by one. Check, check, check, check, check. And it makes it that much faster, right? On the exam, rather than if I were to look through my big outline and then go through like page after page, okay, I'll hit this issue, okay, I'll hit this issue. This is a very easy tool that you can make while you're writing your general outline that I think can be super helpful on the exam. And ultimately, look, the exam is a game. You can have the best understanding of contract law, but if you don't hit all of these elements or a bunch of these different points, then you're going to score relatively less well than your peers and you might end up with like a B+, when in reality, you have an A-plus understanding of the subject. So I think it's important to remember the gamesmanship element of these exams. And that's what an attack outline is addressing, right? It's helping you hit all these points as quickly as you can. All right, everybody, I hope that was helpful. Make sure to hit that sub button for future giveaways of my outlines and other resources to help you crush your academic career and performance and be well.