Success in law school requires three primary skills: the ability to think critically — that is, to analyze complex situations, weigh facts and principles, and draw logical conclusions; the ability to read and understand challenging texts, such as legal briefs, court opinions, and statutes; and the ability to communicate clearly, both orally and in writing. Undergraduate education should provide a good foundation in each of these areas, but these skills grow tremendously in the course of a legal education. Law school classes, particularly in the first year, are designed to “turbocharge” development of these skills, with the result being that students begin to “think like a lawyer.”
“Thinking like a lawyer” means using a variety of logical tools to analyze a situation and come to a conclusion on how the law might apply. Law students learn to follow the “IRAC” framework, an acronym that stands for Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion. Thinking like a lawyer means identifying all the potential legal issues presented by the circumstances, recognizing the relevant rules of law, figuring out how the rules might apply to the situation, and clearly articulating the result you want based on analysis of the facts and law.
If the facts were always straightforward and the laws that applied were always clear, the lawyer’s job would be easy. But, of course, neither of these is true, and law school teaches future lawyers how to identify the facts that matter and how to make the best legal arguments even when no rule clearly applies. Good lawyers also recognize when there are plausible arguments on the other side and try to address them by distinguishing facts and/or legal principles. Law students learn to use several analytical approaches to do this.
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is an essential tool in lawyerly thinking. Deductive reasoning always starts with accepted premises, considers particular circumstances, and leads to conclusions from the application of the general premises to the circumstances. For example, a general premise is that shards of glass in a meal served to a diner shows negligence on the part of the restaurant. In the particular case you are considering, a diner is injured by shards of glass in a salad served to her. By deduction, you can conclude that the restaurant was negligent in allowing glass to get into the meal.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is another logical tool used in legal analysis. Inductive reasoning looks for patterns in specific situations and draws a general rule from the patterns that emerge across multiple instances. Imagine that there was not a general rule that finding glass in a meal indicates negligence, but you learn of several cases where customers were injured by glass in their meals and the restaurants involved were held liable for negligence. From these cases, you can infer the general rule that shards of glass in a meal indicates that the restaurant is negligent.
Reasoning by Analogy
Reasoning by analogy is also a critical part of the lawyer’s toolkit. For example, suppose your client gets food poisoning at a restaurant. You can’t find cases dealing specifically with liability in this situation, but you do have the cases where restaurants are found negligent for leaving glass in a meal. You can argue by analogy to those cases involving glass that the general principle in both circumstances is the same: Restaurants owe a duty of care to serve their customers safe meals.
Logic and reasoning are essential to “thinking like a lawyer,” but so too are close and careful reading of complex texts, as well as strong communication skills in speaking and in writing.
Careful Reading
Reading and understanding complex texts is critical to success in law school, as it is to the practice of law. Studying for the Reading Comprehension section of the LSAT provides a good preview of the challenging reading that awaits you in law school. Through practice, you will become comfortable at identifying main points and major arguments in a difficult passage and learn to draw inferences from what is said or not said. While the LSAT doesn’t typically ask you to read legal cases or briefs, the analysis required to answer its questions mirrors the kind of critical reasoning that applies in reading law school materials.
One the best things you can do to prepare for law school is reading and analyzing argumentative writing. Critically evaluate the arguments being advanced. Is the writer’s point of view well supported by evidence cited? What are the counterarguments? What would make one perspective or the other more compelling?
Effective Communication
Finally, good written and oral communication skills are essential to a lawyer’s success. Memos and briefs need to be clear and logically organized. Likewise, oral arguments and presentations have to be clear, logical, and concise. Good lawyers get to the point as quickly as they can. A famous professor once said: “Write a 10-page memo, unless you have time to make it five pages.” It is almost always worth taking the time to go through multiple drafts of your memos and briefs.
A good lawyer’s communication skills include strong listening skills and the ability to elicit the information you need from a client or witness. When interviewing a potential client, for example, it is important to get the full picture of the problem for which they are seeking your help. Being able to frame clear questions and ask good follow-up questions is critical to getting the information you need.
You will find more information on these essential skills in Law School Unmasked and in Law School Jumpstart and Legal Analysis Boot Camp, which are included with a LawHub Advantage subscription.