Law School Academics - 1. Resource Collation

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Law Readings = Low Yield

Law readings are notoriously long and dense. On average, a 30-page reading might take you 3 hours — carefully re-reading legal jargon and writing detailed notes.

But here’s the real question: Is spending hours on these readings really worth it?

Self-Evaluation Exercise

Ask yourself:

• How much will doing 100% of your readings impact your marks?
• What about 80%? Or even 40%?

You might realise there's a "sweet spot"—where doing fewer readings gives you nearly the same results as doing all of them. This is the Law of Diminishing Returns.

So if you’re time-poor, it is important to set your expectations clear early on in the term. That way you are not caught in the middle of guilt for not studying or feeling miserable for yourself by having no free time.

You need to find the ‘point of diminishing returns’. You can assess this by considering the type of subject you are taking: eg. problem question heavy or essay heavy; and your lecturer class participation style (discussed in a future article).

You may be thinking: what about all the information you miss from the readings?

The Solution

Enter resource collation.

Websites such as Studocu provide great resources to save you time from doing the readings. This is especially important for time-poor students.

Resource collation is inconvenient, but before each course, you should spend around 1 hour collating all available resources - notes, midterm exams, final exams, feedback sheets, past student responses etc.

This will allow you to understand the rough ‘vibe’ of the topic without even doing the readings. Of course, the reliability and accuracy of these resources varies significantly. The solution to such is to only do the readings for sections you don’t understand from the notes, or seems highly important.

In summary

1. Lighten your workload by finding good resources to assist and speed up your learning process.
2. Detach yourself from preconceived notions that doing law readings diligently is the only way to get good marks.
3. Always favour high-yield activities on your marks, and remove low-yield activities.

In the next 6 articles, I’ll dive into strategies that busy law students can use to maximize their grades while minimizing study time.