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I'm taking bar prep and trying to follow the proposed study schedule. Said schedule recommends to "read" long outlines before you actually listen to the lectures and form your own study aid material. I can read the long outlines, but I know I won't retain anything to memory. Being very paranoid about not learning a topic that will actually be tested, I'm reading the long outlines very carefully and notice there are a lot of missing information between the lectures and the long outlines. So I'm kind of nervous and scratching my brain as to how much I should be paying attention to that extraneous material. It is very time consuming to outline from the long outlines, but still am nervous. What are you doing? Would love to get input from past bar takers who passed and to see how much attention they've paid to the long outlines.

Keep in mind that you need to tailor your bar prep program to your needs. Themis asked me to do this, but I felt like it made more sense for me to view the lectures first and then read the long outlines. Then when I took practice exams, if I was consistently getting the same issue wrong, I would back to that specific part of the long outline again. Remember you're trying to pass, not ace the thing. So you want to retain as much as possible, but you will never remember all of it.

Took Themis for July NY UBE. Completed 100%+ (asked for more questions afterward) of the course.

Ideally, you should at least be familiar with information in the long outline (I did this by reading through them after the lectures and incorporating things I thought were important into my self-created short outlines. The nuances from the long outlines will come out in the practice MBE questions, which you will learn better through that process. You don't have to know the nuances as much for the MEE portion - you'll see most of the questions test very general concepts.

I was an outline person in law school, so I learn best by recreating outline after outline. I did this when I first learned the topics and just added onto them as time went on. I felt like this was a great time saver rather than reading and re-reading long outlines or reading someone else's short outlines that did not help me internalize the concepts. I learn best by writing and thinking about organization.

Some people find the lectures completely useless and a waste of time. I liked some of them (some were better than others) in terms of being able to coherently organize information from them into a logical sequence.

Your bar prep should tell you which topics are heavily tested and should know better than others (e.g. mortgages in RP; offer and acceptance in Contracts, etc.). So you should focus on the nuances for those topics more than others. You'll start to see a pattern in the MBE questions after you do enough of them.

You only need to pass - so you don't have to know every little nook and cranny cold. So focus your time on what is best for you and how you learn.

Hope this helps!

Never touched the long outlines and I passed. I'm sure i'm not the only one.

Are you taking barbri? When I took it I stopped reading the long outlines very quickly because they were taking me too long and I don't retain much of anything reading an outline in a vacuum. I relied on the lectures and the CMR, only using the long outlines for reference. The year I took it the agency/partnership lecture was really bad and so in retrospect I should have done more with that long outline but otherwise I was totally fine.

(Disclaimer: this was a few years ago now in a UBE state. May not apply depending on the state you're taking.)

I also never touched the long outlines and passed. They just stressed me out more than I thought they were helping

I forgot to mention that I was taking Themis. I do hear however that Barbri does have a Conviser (with shorter more concise outlines) and a long outline book. Themis only has a long outline form.

Never touched the long outlines and passes (took Barbri). I agree with what's been said above...you have to tailor the program to your own needs. Yes, the program might tell you to read the long outlines, but if you get more out of the shorter ones, or from your own personally made outlines, go with that.

Whether you read the outlines or not, I would argue most people generally only retain the necessary BLL from PRACTICE. Therefore, I would suggest a skim of the outline before the lecture. However, you want to make sure your emphasis is on practice. Some have encouraged open-outline essay writing to start but ymmv.

desperate4lawschool wrote:I forgot to mention that I was taking Themis. I do hear however that Barbri does have a Conviser (with shorter more concise outlines) and a long outline book. Themis only has a long outline form.

This isn't true. Themis will at some point soon give you short outlines for your state-specific stuff (unless you're UBE in which case I'm not sure if they'll email those to you or if they're in print somewhere) and there are already short outlines for the MBE topics in one of your books.

FWIW I never read the long outlines for themis unless I had a specific question about a topic and needed more details. in the beginning when they recommend that you skim before watching the videos - I never ever did that. So it just depends on your learning style... for me, skimming the outlines before the videos would have been a waste of time because I wouldn't have retained anything at all.

It's been a few years, but I think my Barbri Paced Program had me reading the short outlines only and recommended the long outlines in areas where you hadn't taken the courses and/or needed extra help or review. (This obviously depends somewhat on 1) which program you're taking, and 2) what materials it has.)

Everyone learns differently. If you don't learn/retain anything from cold reading an outline before a lecture, don't. I think I barely cracked my long outlines (maybe reading a relevant section or two based on MBE or essay questions where I had a 0% understanding of the subject matter). Pretty much no one strictly follows their bar program's study recommendations; feel free to adapt to your subject-matter needs, your learning style, and how much time you have left.

I did Themis. I never read the long outlines, just watched the lectures in high speed and filled out those outlines. Got high 150s on the MBE. It's much more important to understand what the test tests and where they try to mess with you than it is to understand "the law" or whatever. Just like in law school, understanding the test itself and doing tons of practice is way more important than learning all that garbage.

I would refer to the long outlines only if there is something that you don't understand/keep missing questions about.