After recently completing my 1L year at Northwestern California University School of Law (NWCU Law), I thought it would be helpful to put down some thoughts about how it went and things I could do better moving forward. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything you need to know, but you may find the information in this post helpful if you are about to start 1L or if you are a few months in and some things are not making sense. This will be most applicable to you if you are attending or thinking about attending NWCU, but there are many general tips that can be helpful for any law student.
First Things First
The most important thing to do is get the checklists for each course early on. These are typically based on outlines from Professor Fleming, who taught at the school for many years and then went on to start his own company selling study materials and bar prep courses. These checklists are your roadmap for the topics taught in each course and they need to be committed to memory along with the many rules of law that accompany each course. You should be able to get these checklists from Professor Mary's Beginning IRAC lectures.
As far as the checklists, I would convert each one to two additional documents customized for your study throughout the year.
The first document is your outline for each class, where you expand on the terms of the checklist and get a comprehensive, but punchy summary of the material.
The second document is what I called my “attack checklist”. This is just the checklist, but personalized. What I mean by this is that there are mnemonic devices to make each section easier to recall come test time. There are some sections that already give mnemonics, but for the ones that don’t you should make up your own. You can also add any additional important terms or concepts that will fit, on the single page.
You also want to figure out what the most important concepts that are likely to be tested are for each course. This is not too difficult to figure out for 1L. Criminal law exams will definitely have a homicide, torts will have negligence, and contracts will likely have formation (although I’ve heard this may vary). These major issues will have to be written on and written on in the format that the professors expect. Where you can add extra icing on the cake in the way of additional points is in spotting any minor issues and sub-issues and writing competently about those as well.
Roadmaps
The best way to prepare for writing for these major issues is by understanding the roadmap for them. A roadmap is the way that a particular issue will be expected to be written about by the school. An example is homicide. For homicide you will have to write an IRAC for applicable issues in the following order:
Homicide (definition and analysis)
Actual Cause
Proximate Cause
Murder? (Here you determine if it was murder by malice aforethought and you must cover the 4 ways that malice aforethought could be evidenced…if malice is present then it is a murder, if not go to step 10)
First degree murder? (premeditated or Felony murder Rule)
If felony murder rule applies, you can apply it in the same IRAC, or write an additional one but it must be covered)
Second Degree Murder?
Defenses (If any defenses can be reasonably asserted..these are under Justifications & Excuses in your checklist)
Mitigations (If defenses can’t be reasonably asserted, you then move on to mitigations like Heat of Passion to mitigate to Voluntary Manslaughter)
Voluntary Manslaughter (murder but reduced because of mitigation)
Involuntary Manslaughter (homicide without malice)
This is just the roadmap for homicide. There are others for negligence, contract formation, etc. I didn’t fully understand the concept of roadmaps when I took my midterms and I did far more poorly on them than I expected. I still was able to make up for it on my finals and move on to 2L without being on academic probation, but it was necessary to correct this flaw in my writing structure to do so.
Writing and Issue Spotting
Legal writing is entirely different from any academic writing you have done in the past. While you may have been an ace on college papers in the past, be prepared to have your world crushed a little bit as you start learning legal writing. It's a lot like learning to walk all over again. Getting as much practice as you can writing exam hypos between the beginning of the year and the final exams is paramount to your success. In the beginning, it will be challenging because you are still learning the structure of the checklist, rules of law, and trying to spot issues. This will be difficult and discouraging at first, but hang in there. Here are some ways to ease your anxiety around this:
Start out just outlining: One way to practice and get some really good reps in without having to do a full practice answer is to just outline your answer. This builds your issue spotting skills early on. Go to the California Bar website with the Baby Bar/FYLSE exam questions and selected answers. These are going to be a very important resource for you as you progress through the year. While the selected answers are not a perfect or “model” answer, they are chosen because they are what the examiners saw as the best passing answers from the test takers in a given Baby Bar administration. First go through and briefly outline your answer without fully writing it. Then compare what you spotted with what the selected answers spotted. This is a good technique to use, especially when you don’t have time to write full practice answers, and I used it heavily down the stretch when I was getting ready for final exams.
Write smaller practice exams: Write a full answer out but only for one portion of an exam. You can try only covering the homicide portion of a criminal law exam question or negligence on a torts question. This way you can cram some good writing practice into a short time window.
While these tactics are great for quick practice sessions, there is no avoiding eventually practicing the big exam session. You will need to start practicing writing full exams under timed conditions. Take the introductory writing classes as soon as you are able to. Once you are through that and have written samples of your work, you can apply to take the live classes so you can get some feedback. Once you are done with the live classes, you can contact the school to participate in the Advanced classes. While I never participated in any live sessions of the Advanced Writing class, I found that the sessions archived on eJuris were incredibly helpful and I viewed them multiple times to really drill in the concepts.
Learn IRAC structure and get good at formatting the answer the way you are taught in the writing classes. Finally, start thinking about how each side of a case (Plaintiff or State vs. Defendant) will argue their side as this will be a necessary skill not only for exams, but also as an attorney.
Reading
I understand the importance of the casebook method of instruction, but after the first 2-3 months of just reading cases I realized I would have a tough time getting through the whole year if I just read the casebooks straight through. I switched over to Quimbee and CaseBriefs.com at that point and used a method I got from LegalEagle where I just did a condensed brief in OneNote for each case (Case, Rule of Law, Short summary of case and holding). This helped me cover and understand every case in the casebook without losing my mind. For the cases that you are required to brief for the Case Briefs assignment, you will need to view the entire case in depth for each one, but otherwise I would spend no more than 1-2 months just reading full cases in the casebooks before starting to create these "turbo" briefs using Quimbee's and CaseBriefs.
For the commercial outlines like Gilbert’s, you will read the whole book. To make effective use of my time here, I purchased a subscription to Speechify and listened to Gwyneth Paltrow read outlines to me. Using this method, you could go on a walk or clean your house while you get your reading done.
Another effective method of reading to understand the concepts you are learning is to acquire Hornbooks for the class you are studying. I did not read entire Hornbooks, but they were helpful in clarifying concepts I had trouble with early on.
VAE
You are required to get a certain amount of Verified Academic Engagement (VAE) hours for each class. This can be accomplished primarily by attending live lectures, watching pre-recorded lectures, or listening to Clancey’s Outlaw on eJuris. I believe you can also get credit for posting in the forums, but I didn’t really make use of that option so I can’t speak on it. Although you can change the speed of a pre-recorded video lecture, you only get credit for the actual real time you spend viewing the lecture. So if you watched 1 minute of a lecture at 2x speed, you only got 30 seconds of actual VAE credit. Because of this, I would not recommend watching any lectures at increased speed until you meet your VAE requirements for the year. Once that is done, the 2x speed will come in handy to quickly review concepts that you may have been unclear on.
Assignments
For the required VAE hours that you don’t get through lectures and videos, you get through the completion of assignments (Quizzes, Definitions, Case Briefs, Mini-thesis) and exams. Get the assignments done as early in the year as you can. They are only pass/fail with no number grade attached and don’t affect your GPA, but you must have received a pass on every assignment to be eligible for final exams. Getting them done early ensures you will have more time for memorization and writing practice for the remainder of the year.
Professors
While everybody may have their own opinion on this, here is mine. You should go through all of Professor Mary’s lecture series in each class first. She is very organized, works through the checklists with examples and cases, and ties in the topics being covered with how they should be written on the exams. After you have completed all her lectures, then you can move on to lectures from other professors. For Contracts, after you finish Professor Mary’s videos, I would move on to Professor Kate. Each professor does have something unique in the style that they bring to the material and in helping you to formulate your system of study. I was able to take away at least one helpful idea from every professor whose lectures I viewed.
Notetaking
I used Microsoft OneNote for my notetaking for lectures, and also for all my case briefs from the casebooks. Initially, for my lecture notes I was taking copious notes and typing furiously, which was exhausting and made it easier to miss the fine points the professor was giving. Eventually, I realized it was more efficient to use the Snipping Tool program to simply screenshot the slides and drag them into OneNote as I went through the lectures and made additional notes as necessary.
Law, Logic, and the Facts
You will hear this phrase often in 1L. Professor George harps on it in his classes, in his book, and in the forums. You need to use Law, Logic, and the Facts to craft an answer. It took me a few months before I really got what it meant. I initially thought the “Law” portion meant I was supposed to cite the supporting cases in a holding. In my initial case brief attempts, I was literally including the random case citations the judges referenced in a holding to cover the “Law”, which is laughable to me now. “Logic” to me was often just restating the facts but in a different way. “Facts” was just a regurgitation of things that happened in the case or hypo.
Thankfully, my approach to this evolved, and you can learn from my mistakes. “Law, logic, and the facts” sounds snazzy but you should approach it in this way:
You start with the “Facts”. The facts are what happened in a given case that is material or substantial enough to verify that an element of a rule of law was met or not met.
The “Law” portion is simply the rule of law or element of a rule of law you are trying to prove or disprove. Some rules of law have a lot of elements to them, all of which must be proven to conclude that someone is potentially guilty of a crime or liable for a tort/breach. You have to cover each element and determine whether or not they are all met.
You then move on to the “Logic”. Your best friend here in an analysis is the word “because”. You can’t simply say that a fact satisfies an element and end the sentence. The professor will ask WHY does this fact satisfy this element?
A very basic example of this is:
When Albert kicked Brian in the leg (FACTS), it was a harmful touching (LAW), because the kick caused Brian’s leg to be badly bruised (LOGIC).
This post is not meant to be a writing class. You will get those in school, so take advantage of them. But “Law, Logic, and the Facts” is a concept that you should get a grasp of sooner rather than later.
Midterms
Take your midterms VERY seriously. Because they are open-book and done on your own time, I thought that I would do much better than I actually did. But they are graded very harshly, and I got a real wakeup call that had me worried if I would even make it through 1L. When you are given what amounts to unlimited time and access to resources to craft your answer, the professors expect a much higher caliber of answer. If you are like me, this may have been the first real thorough feedback you get on your legal writing. If I had it to do over again, I would have exhausted all the lectures in the Advanced Writing classes archive and I would have made use of the additional paid service the school offers to grade practice exams before taking midterms. Because it is ⅓ of your final grade, you would rather get the feedback on something that doesn’t count so you can course correct before your midterm. My grades for midterms really humbled me, and had me working hard and stressing all the way through finals. Although I made it up in the end, I would not recommend taking midterms lightly to anybody else going down this path.
Finals
By the time you make it to finals, you should know your checklists and rules of law VERY well. You should also have gotten plenty of practice outlining exam answers for issue-spotting practice as well as plenty of practice writing full answers. Finals are ⅔ of your final grade for the course, so you have to do your best here. Get the lockdown browser as soon as you are able to and make sure your computer setup is satisfactory ahead of time. Once that white exam screen pops up and the timer starts ticking down, it’s real. You have either done enough work to be ready for this or you haven’t. I blanked on remembering some of my checklist sections during the finals, which lets me know I should have done more work memorizing earlier on in the year. But I still did enough to write competent answers that got me through 1L without being on academic probation.
Intro to Law
A quick note about ITL. The midterms and the final are multiple choice exams which are open-book and timed. I did quite well on these, although I know that some people have trouble with them. Take these tests very seriously as they can help to pad that fragile GPA. Take your time and double-check your answers before you submit. Take the short practice exams provided by the school beforehand as well, so you can get a feel for the style and substance you will encounter on the real thing.
Helpful Resources
These are things that helped me this year, in no particular order.
Quizlet (for making flash cards you can review on your phone or pc)
Quimbee (videos and case briefs for pretty much all the cases in your casebooks)
Speechify (for listening to cases and commercial outlines)
Physical flashcards (I didn’t make enough of these, but I did use them and they were helpful)
Essay Exam Writing for the California Bar Exam by Mary Basick (a MUST-HAVE, this book gives you checklists, rules of law, sample essay questions and answers, and a great deal of helpful information)
Microsoft OneNote (for taking and organizing lecture notes and case briefs from the casebooks)
CalBar FYLSE Past Exams and Selected Answers (this is your bank of practice essay exams)
The unofficial NWCU Facebook Group (where students past, present, and future trade helpful info about the school)
I hope this post is helpful to you in some small way, but take it with a grain of salt. When I was deciding to attend NWCU and even once I started attending, I read and re-read some very helpful posts by Jon Corbett, Ray Hayden, and David Awad, all of whom are alumni of NWCU. While many of the things they wrote about are still applicable, others are not as the school has changed and updated over time. That will be true for this post eventually as well. But just take what you can that works for you and discard what does not.
Law school is not for the weak. It is much harder than undergrad or grad school. This past year has been the most challenging academic experience I have ever gone through, but it has also been very rewarding. If you are up to the challenge, then I say go for it and I wish you good luck.
