Law School Office of Academic Success

The Law School Office of Academic Success is committed to providing you with the resources needed to succeed in law school, pass the bar examination, and excel in your professional career. The Academic Success team collaborates with the doctrinal faculty, the Legal Writing Center, and the Wellness Office to promote student learning and development.

The Academic Success Program is designed to help you get acclimated to learning in law school and to empower you to become independent, self-regulating learners. To this end, the Academic Success team provides a comprehensive network of resources, including classes, student-led tutorials, workshops, and one-on-one guidance designed to increase the effectiveness of your learning in doctrinal classes.

The Office of Academic Success coordinates the law school’s tutorial program. High-performing students are selected and trained to conduct tutorials for all of your first-year courses and selected upper-level courses. Tutorial sessions are held biweekly. The tutors help you with your understanding of the substantive material and help you apply your knowledge with interactive sessions that include review of the law, games, and practice exam questions.

Academic Success team members are available to meet with you for individual appointments throughout the school year. You may be referred by a faculty member who believes you could benefit from individualized assistance or you can sign up on your own.

During these sessions, the Academic Success team member addresses your concerns, which typically include, but are not limited to, the following: evaluation of your study regimen, learning style assessments, time management, synthesizing class materials, and exam preparation.

The Office of Academic Success offers a required legal skills class for first-year, day and evening program students, and the Academic Success team works with the Bar Preparation and Support Office to offer upper-level courses designed for bar preparation. These courses are listed below:

Critical Thinking I:

(Taught by Academic Success staff): 

Critical Thinking I is a required, one-credit course for all first-year students designed to ease the transition to law school. The course focuses on important skills such as critical reading, case briefing, critical listening and analysis, effective studying, multiple-choice and essay-question practice, time management, and self-assessment strategies.

By the end of the course, first-year law students should be able to demonstrate the following: the ability to critically read and brief cases, the ability to synthesize course material in preparation for exam study, the ability to analyze complex fact patterns to write essay answers and critique multiple-choice questions, the ability to effectively manage their time by creating and following a schedule, and an increase in their ability to self-assess and make appropriate corrections in their study strategies.

Second- or Third-Year Advanced Legal Analysis:

(Multiple sections taught by the director of Bar Preparation and Support; Academic Excellence Fellow and doctrinal faculty)

Advanced Legal Analysis (ALA) is an elective course that is strongly recommended to our students. ALA focuses on objective multiple-choice test-taking skills and strategies, with an in-depth overview of subjects tested on the Multistate Bar Exam. The course focuses on core Multistate Bar Exam subjects taught in the first year.

During the course, students use problems and exercises in a bar exam format to become familiar with the techniques for answering multiple-choice questions. Students also learn critical analysis skills for each subject from substantive lecturers. By the end of the course, law school students should be able to systematically approach multiple-choice questions in a way that improves performance and strengthens comprehensive reading and analytical skills.

Third-Year Comprehensive Legal Analysis

(Team-taught by the director of Bar Preparation and Support, the director of Academic Success, Academic Excellence Fellow and doctrinal faculty)

Comprehensive Legal Analysis (CLA) is offered to our third-year day and fourth-year evening law students. CLA is a pass/fail course required for graduation. First offered in the spring of 2019, this course focuses on substantive areas of law frequently tested on the Multistate Essay Exam. In addition, this course focuses more heavily on essay writing for the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) versus substantive law review, namely by incorporating writing labs to assist with essay writing approach and organization, practice essays to assist with rule construction and analysis, and essay re-write opportunities to encourage constant assessment of writing deficiencies.