Better 1L Grades: Rethinking Supplements

Commercial supplements are the Wikipedia of law school. The trouble with law school supplements is that they explain the subject you are learning in law school but not in the exact way your professor is explaining the subject to the class. This makes most students apprehensive of using supplements early in the semester because they are not sure what content relates to their course and what content deviates from their course.

When you get to law school most faculty and law school administrators will advise against using commercial supplements. For the most part their advice is to stick to the casebook and perhaps later in the semester to refer to a supplement for review. While many rationales are given, the prevailing idea is that using supplements is cheating or taking a short cut that will hurt you on exams, when taking the bar or later as a practicing attorney. That is complete rubbish! Let me give you three reasons why.

First, the best supplements are often authored by the top professors in law. In fact, the best law school professors earn a large portion of their income from their commercial publications. So, why would professors author and profit from commercial supplements but urge students against using them? One answer is that the law school needs students to come to classes in order to maintain their accreditation. Law Schools below the top tier will often enforce a strict attendance policy. Endorsing supplements would undermine the goal of enticing students to attend class. By scaring away students from using outlines the professors become the only source of clarity and explanation aside from the complicated casebook. If more students understood the power of a supplement and how to use it they would quickly see class as time wasted. Many of my students use class time to study and review because they already understand much of what is discussed.

Another answer is intellectual snobbery or ego. Supplements just don’t carry very much intellectual currency. You look smarter when you appear to be learning the law from a big leather bound case book as opposed to a supplement. After all, reading a supplement is an admission that you can’t cut it in law school because the original sources are too complicated.

For my clients, appearances take a back seat to efficiency. There is no use in learning in six hours what you could have learned in two hours. This is especially the case since there is too little time in law school to complete the volume of tasks assigned.

The third reason it’s ridiculous for professors to discourage supplements is that they highly encourage them for bar exam preparation. In fact, Bar Bri and other bar prep programs pay your law school several thousands of dollars to set up booths on campus that target law school students to sign up early for bar prep. Bar Bri and their competitors use supplements to teach law school grads how to pass the bar exam. They even employ law school professors to teach the material from supplements. In a strange contradiction, the very parties discouraging law school students from using supplements are accepting money from prep programs who use supplements to train students to pass the bar exam. Furthermore, if supplements are helpful for passing the most important exam in the life of a future attorney, why should they be off the table when preparing for a law school final?

The last reason that supplement bashing by professors and administrators is outrageous is that the need for supplements is created by the very parties discouraging them. Law school professors are often unclear and convoluted. Under those circumstances, who wouldn’t seek out a clearer alternative? Law schools create an environment wherein there is more work than there is time to complete it. Supplements help narrow the time gap.

The problem with supplements is that most students don’t know how to use them in way that directly fits their specific course. A supplement for any given 1L course will cover the entire body of law in the given subject. Your professor, however, is not going to cover everything that is covered in the supplement. Often times your professor will not even use the same terminology that the supplement uses to describe legal concepts. Other times the supplement covers the material in a different order than your professor will. For these reasons and others many students are afraid of supplements when they first start law school.

This makes sense because to a newly minted 1L, supplements on their course are just more books on material they don’t yet understand. As a result, students start on supplements too late in the semester and use them as a crutch instead of a tool to dominate the curve. For my clients, this is where I come in. I am able to interpret a student’s syllabus and tell them which chapters of a supplement relate to the specific aspects of their course. My clients do not waste time reading content that will not be discussed or tested. Some supplements are so helpful that I have had students at law schools in different states use the same supplements to ace their courses!

I urge my students to remember that whether they are at the top of the class has everything to do with how they perform on the final exam. With that in mind, one would be foolish not to use a tool that accelerates the ability to begin practicing exams earlier than their peers. The fact is that using supplements will help you understand the law more quickly and get ahead of the class. The implications of this reality make complete reliance on professors obsolete and puts the power in the hands of 1Ls, which is where it belongs.

Article Summary

1) The right supplement used early enough is an invaluable competitive advantage. 2) The best commercial supplements are authored by the top law school professors. 3) Supplements are useful for law school prep since they are a core material for bar exam prep programs endorsed by law schools and taught by professors. 4) The right supplements make the law clearer to understand and reduce reliance on your professors. 5) Supplements are an important remedy to the time demands on your 1L year.