- One question we get asked a lot
is whether you should use commercial outlines
or commercial supplements in law school.
Today we're going to tackle the good and the bad
of commercial outlines.
(lighthearted jingle)
In general we love commercial supplements
and commercial outlines
and highly recommend them in law school,
but not all supplements are created equal.
Let's go over the good and the bad.
We'll start with the good.
First, commercial supplements help explain
complex and complicated subjects.
They are designed specifically to provide clarity
where your professor is unclear.
They can provide great summaries
of important parts of cases,
especially when an outline is key
to your particular casebook,
where an outline goes over each individual case
that you're likely to find in the casebook itself.
A commercial outline can give you crucial insight
as to why certain cases are important
and what the important takeaways are
from that particular case.
This is in fact the foundation of our flipped case method,
which we talk about in another video linked down below.
But commercial outlines are not perfect.
Some of the downsides include
the fact that a commercial outline might cover a subject
or a legal topic differently than your professor,
but you should know that if your professor
has a different understanding of the subject
you should go with the understanding
that your professor has.
Your professor trumps the commercial outline.
Their version will be on the test,
not the supplement version.
Another downside is that a commercial outline
might confuse you.
It's possible that getting a different version
or explanation might take something that you understand
and actually confuse you,
so you have to be wary when you're getting a whole bunch
of different explanations about the same thing.
You have to be able to synthesize all of that information.
But on the whole, commercial outlines are totally worth it.
Think of it like a pyramid.
You have to have a solid foundation of the basics
so you can get to the higher level stuff.
Think of it like a game of chess.
You have to understand the foundations first
before you can move on to the higher level strategies.
If in chess the foundation is how
every individual piece moves,
you have to understand that a knight moves in an L shape
and a pawn moves one square at a time,
with certain exceptions of course.
You literally cannot understand the second
and third level strategy without understanding those basics,
and a commercial outline provides that.
They also help you understand what you are reading.
So many law students dive into huge cases
without knowing why that case is important,
and as a result they get bogged down
in verbose appellate opinions.
This is why the average reading rate in law school
is only 10 pages per hour.
It's also why it takes so long
to complete your reading assignments.
That's why we advocate for the flipped case method
where you read the supplements first
before you get to your cases.
Read your commercial outlines
and your upper classmen's outlines or Westlaw case notes
before starting the reading of the case itself.
This will make you read the case faster
and with far more understanding
and it's one of the reasons that commercial outlines
are so important.
You are not cheating
if you're using a commercial supplement.
I hear this a lot.
There is this notion that unless you do
everything on your own the hardest way possible,
you're somehow cheating in law school.
Using a commercial outline is cheating in the same way
that having a piano teacher is cheating.
That is to say it's not cheating at all.
You are also not a failure if you use them
to understand your cases.
These cases are assigned in law school
and they're intentionally old,
they're intentionally antiquated,
and they are hard to understand
so use commercial outlines in a way
that will help you understand them
and in a way that will help you retain that information
so that you can use it on the final exam.
What will also help you on your final exam
is our free guide to law school down below in the free link,
and also you can check out our master class
on crushing law school that will help you to destroy
your next law school final exam step by step,
and it will show you how to think like a lawyer.
If you like this video, hopefully you found it helpful,
please click the subscribe button to our channel.
We come out with new tips on how to crush law school
all the time.
As always, thank you for stopping by
and we'll see you next time on Legal Eagle.
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