Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast. Today we are excited to have Rebecca Petrilli from Themis Bar Prep as our guest, talking about legal writing and IRAC-ing. Your Law School Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the law school and early legal career experience, so you'll be the best law student and lawyer you can be. We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website CareerDicta.
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And save with our exclusive offer: Save $900 on any July 2025 Themis Bar Review course using the code LAWSCHOOLTB900 at checkout, now valid through May 19th, 2025. That's LAWSCHOOLTB900, available until May 19th. Today we are excited to welcome Rebecca Petrilli - Midwest Attorney Director at Themis Bar Prep - back to the podcast to discuss IRAC and best practices for legal writing on exams, including the bar exam. So Rebecca, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. Glad to
be here,
Lee. Yeah, good to see you back in my Zoom box, we hang out. But for those who haven't heard our previous conversations, could you just introduce yourself and a little about how you ended up in this role?
Definitely. So, I was actually a Themis rep when I was in law school. So, I started second semester of my 1L year and have been locked into Themis ever since. I used it for the MPRE, I used it for the bar, and now here I am - almost a decade later, seven years later, working with students. And I ended up in this role because I was a first-generation law student and I had no idea what was happening in law school.
And then I became a Themis rep, and it was such a valuable experience for me, getting information about not only what is the bar exam and how you study for it, but all the resources that we have to offer to students while they're in law school were such a helpful part of my law school journey. And now I'm glad to be able to help share that information with more students.
Amazing. Alright, today we wanted to talk about the ever-loaded term IRAC, which is something that we talk about in law school, we talk about it for the bar. Hopefully everyone listening has an idea of what IRAC is. It's just our Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion - this formula that we use for legal writing, legal exams. And it seems like it is simple, because it's only four letters, but it can be difficult to implement for some students.
In fact, I'm just doing a podcast series called "Legal Writing Makeover" that will be released very soon. And we're talking about each part of the IRAC. So it is something that does take an awful lot of practice. Your expertise is really in the bar world and you talk to students about bar prep, and writing is such a big part of the bar.
What aspects of this kind of formulaic writing do you think is a challenge for students, or do they misunderstand it or misinterpret what they're being asked to do?
So I think the key word that you've said a couple of times already is "formula". It is a formula. You are following a very specific methodology to showcase your answer. And where I see a lot of students get lost is in the showing your work part, where it is, "Okay, I have this rule statement, I understand the rule. I know what holding I'm trying to go with here." But what's missing is the analysis that brings in every single relevant fact.
And you can never assume that anything is common sense in legal writing. You have to imagine that you're writing to somebody who has no idea what you're talking about, and be able to walk them through the process step by step. So, I would say that is in my experience the biggest place where I see deficiencies.
Yeah. And I think that sometimes we overcomplicate the legal writing, and I would say that this is true especially for the bar exam. The formula feels formulaic, boring, like you don't really know what you're talking about, because it's so simplistic, yet that's really what the graders are looking for. When your Themis graders are out there working with students, are they able to give them feedback to help them use these formulas to their advantage?
Absolutely. Our graders give really detailed feedback. So, you're going to get inline feedback of, "You missed this rule statement" or, "You stated the rule slightly incorrectly" or, "You didn't have enough analysis here" or, "Your rule statement was right, but your conclusion
was wrong." Whatever applies to your specific essay, you'll have those pieces sprinkled throughout, and then at the end you get some summary guidance: You did great on, let's say structure, but your analysis was deficient; or you got all the rule statements right, but whatever else was wrong. And then you get numbered scores. So it's a lot of varied feedback. feedback Yeah.
And I think the other thing that folks really need to keep in mind - and we've talked about this on previous episodes I've done with a former California bar grader - is how quickly these graders, both in your bar prep, but also in the actual exam situation, even your law school professors are reading this material. They are not reading it like a novel. They are reading it very quickly, and these formulas really help them do that job and be very good at it.
So, what you're really doing is enabling them to make their job easier, which I always think is a good thing to make your grader happy, in whatever context it might be. But the formulas really allow you to do that, and I think that can be important.
I totally agree. It's all about making it so they can spot where you're going to get those points easily. That, from your perspective as the student writing, is: "How clearly can I separate out my sections?" So we know exactly where the rule, the issue, the analysis, right? Like, where is everything? And "Am I being as succinct as possible?" We don't need 5,000 words, right? That's an exaggeration, obviously.
But the simpler the language you can use to convey your point, the more likely it is that what you're trying to say is going to be clear.
Yeah. I've seen some really high scoring, very short essays in law school and on the bar. So, length is not always your friend. And I think that can be something that is very hard for students to recognize, because you can copy and paste, now that we all take the exam on laptops. And copy and paste is not always your friend, because the graders don't want to read copy and pasted stuff. That doesn't do anything for them, right?
Being like, "Oh, thanks for restating something you stated up there. I've already read it once. I don't really want to read it again." So, this idea that it has to be a certain length to collect all the points is just not really as important as I think a lot of people make it out to be. Yeah, absolutely.
I think another thing to consider too is that when you're getting your scores, when you're getting those points, you're starting at zero and you're building up. You're gaining points for everything that you get right. You're not starting at a perfect seven, if that's your grading scale, and getting knocked down from there. It's the other way around.
So, everything that you add in that is of value to that response is going to get you points, but you're not going to get a better score by including a bunch of stuff that is not relevant. Like, you're not going to miss out on points. I don't know how to say that in a way that is... We're talking about being succinct.
You're trying to be super succinct.
You're not going to gain points because you're looking to add the entire kitchen sink into it. You're going to only get points for what is relevant to that response. So, part of it too is students need to memorize the law. And I think we can chat a little bit about that, but that's a huge part of it. Being able to issue spot and write succinctly is based in large part on your ability to have quick recall of the black-letter law for the subject that you're writing an essay for.
True, that is the "I" and the "R". But I think where a lot of people fall apart is then they just assume the "A" is included. So, one of the things that I definitely see both in my law school and bar work is this idea of the dreaded word "conclusory", which of course, everybody has seen. If you went through law school and the bar, somebody's told you something you said was conclusory. I think it's just impossible, unless you have a very different legal career than I do.
But this idea of needing to use the analysis to explain yourself and linking those rules to facts, I think you get lost when you're trying to be succinct, because it can be very boring. If you've got a four-element test, it is very boring to say, "The first element of this test is met because of these facts", tying these facts back. It is so easy to either just list facts, which is not legal analysis, or just
say, "Of course this is met, because all of the elements are met, period." And that's really what is too conclusory. So, we've got to find a way to use those important words like "because" and just click things off your list as you go through, because it can feel like if you just do the "I" and the "R", that you're most of the way there. But when exams are graded, both in the law school and in the bar space, the analysis is really the key.
I've even had graders tell me, "If you get the wrong issue but have a decent rule, even if you get the rule wrong, you can get quite a lot of points by doing correct analysis." So, it really is its own thing to stand on its own.
Absolutely. And when I mentioned that the memorization is such an important part of it, it's that if you can get to that issue and rule faster, then have more time in your 30 minutes or whatever you have for the essay, if it's a bar exam essay, to spend time on fleshing out that analysis and giving a really clear answer. So, I wasn't saying that that solves all the problems.
It just gives you the space to have more freedom, rather than spending the first 10 minutes of your essay trying to figure out what they're even asking you.
That's true. And if you put everything and the kitchen sink in a rule statement, that's not a very good use of your time either. You just need enough rule to do the analysis. It's a little bit of a chicken or the egg problem, right? You need enough rule to get all the analysis, but you don't want to have extra rule, so you just have to really think through that.
And as students are studying and doing these practice exams, I think that you can use easy little tricks to keep yourself honest about the IRAC. Sometimes we even recommend that students have four different color highlighters, or you can do it on your computer screen, and you just highlight, "Did I do every part?" And then, a good rule of thumb is that the "A" should be bigger than everything else. And so, the "A" is not bigger than everything else, then that's not a good sign.
Now, that's not to say that sometimes an analysis can't just be one sentence. I was working on something that was just about contracts, about what law applies - is it the UCC or common law? The answer to that is almost always one sentence. It is, "This is a movable good and therefore it applies under the UCC." That is the outlier. But generally speaking, your analysis should be longer, if not as long as your rule statement. Does that sound about right to you?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think in terms of breaking it out to go back to your color-coding thing, I encourage students to say, "The issue is", "The rule is". don't have to be writing these things in a way that disguises, right? Doesn't need to be language that disguises the fact that you're listing the rule there.
You're making it easier, again, to go back to our earlier conversation, for your grader to find it if you just say, "The issue at hand is X, Y, and Z." So, yes to the analysis portion being longer almost always, but breaking out your issue, rule, analysis, and then even breaking your analysis down sometimes into subparts to make sure that those sections are really clear, is going to help you.
And even if you don't want to write it necessarily, "The issue is" on the bar exam, earlier on in your practice, to get yourself used to that formula - definitely, I recommend doing it like that and making it as clear as possible that that is formula within which you're working.
Yeah. So, sometimes we hear about CREAC, which is Conclusion, Rule, Explanation, Analysis, Conclusion, which is a slightly different modified version of IRAC. Some folks like this CREAC formula when doing their performance tests, because you lead with a conclusion or you're doing something that's pervasive. So, sometimes your header needs to be more of a conclusion or something a bit argumentative - in a good way, not in a bad way.
But I think that the CREAC should not feel, in my opinion, all that different from the IRAC, because the whole idea is, you're just giving them a very easy structure. You still need to assume that your "A" is going to be the biggest thing, that this analysis is really what's going to be the majority of the point getters. But perhaps you have a rule that requires more explanation, and I think that's really where that "RE" comes in the idea that you're not just stating a rule statement.
You're possibly discussing how it applies, or maybe there's a case law that you're referencing. That would be more in a law school situation; you're not really referencing case law on the bar exam. But let's think about it in kind of a performance test context. You do have more discussion of the rules, because it's a paper - it's a memo, it's a letter, it's a closing argument, it's whatever it is, right? It's a bit of a different thing than a typical exam.
But what I think is important to keep in mind is, even if you have more explanation of the rule, it just doesn't trump the fact that you have this analysis section that's so important. So, an example of this would be, let's say that the performance test that you're doing is on evidence, and you're talking about hearsay. But you're really talking about dying declaration, and maybe they've given you cases that give you nuances about dying declaration.
And the dying declaration rule is the dying declaration rule, it's in the Federal Rules of Evidence. It's not up for interpretation. But what is up for interpretation is how the courts apply that rule. And maybe you have case law to explain something that you're going to discuss. To me, that's where that CREAC really comes in, like, I have to explain this rule more, so I can make my arguments. I just feel like it's important to know that it doesn't take away from the analysis.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And to the idea of performance tests, generally, often the memo or whatever you get at the beginning that explains the assignment to you, is going to give you a very clear structure for what that looks like. And it may ask you to write in IRAC format. It's not going to come out and say, "Write this in IRAC format", but the way it is asking you to break down the answers is almost always going to give you a structure to follow.
And that's a place that I always encourage students to pay close attention to, because if you already have the formula that they want you to follow in the assignment itself, that makes it a lot more of a "plug and play" situation. And again, you can then spend more time on that analysis portion of the assignment, making sure that you are giving enough information and facts and tying everything together.
Yeah. I also think the other thing that's important is to remember what they're grading on. And this is for law school exams, for the bar exam. So often I think we can become scribes, especially in a performance test context or in an open-book context. And so you're like, "Oh well, let me give you my dissertation on all this law that I just read." The one thing that I think is important to always keep in mind is what is our role as a lawyer, right?
Let's take a step back and say, the training to be a lawyer is different than the training to be a paralegal, and it's different than to the training to be a legal assistant. So, what is supposed to make us so awesome, that we have to go to more school, we have to pass the bar, we get paid more, we bill at higher rates? What are we paying for, right? What are you paying for? And the idea is that we are supposed to be trained to issue spot and do that analysis.
That is really the point, is that we have different training in theory - hopefully in truth - but in theory, to allow us to do that. That is what our clients need, right? They need to take us facts and say, "I have a problem. What are the legal ramifications of my problem?" And then you have to be able to say, "Okay, it looks like your issue is you didn't get paid for the work that you did.
And then the rule for that in California is X, Y, Z. And then, depending on how that rule is applied by the courts, these are your options, and now, maybe you should win, but there are all of these other considerations." That is what we are supposed to be trained to do. And so, I think it's always a good idea when folks get frustrated with the bar - which has plenty of stuff to be frustrated about, so I'm definitely arguing that we can't be frustrated with the bar.
But when we get frustrated by the task that the bar is putting in front of us or that our law school exams are putting in front of us, I do think that it's important to remember that in the end, this is our jobs. I mean, maybe not your and my jobs, because we're not giving legal advice all the time, although I am still licensed and I have to do my CLE by the end of the month, but... I
am too. And I just
got
a letter from the Supreme Court being like, "You're licensed, but you don't have an IOLTA account, so you need to do some extra CLE."
I know. But that's what happens when people call you for legal advice. And so, as much as these formulas can feel like, "Oh, Lee, I can't believe you're saying I need to use IRAC in the real world" - well, when you have a law license, whether or not you are actively out there practicing law, people call you for legal advice. I don't know if your friends call you for legal advice. My family. Somebody will call, right? And the reality is, your advice comes back to them in IRAC form.
It really does, because you're like, "Okay, here is the problem." And maybe the rules sometimes, you're like, "I've got to do some research on that." But the idea is that you're really breaking it down for them in the same way, and then what they really want to know is your conclusion of, what options do they have? And I think that can kind of soften the blow a little bit about focusing on doing this for these exams, because it's really just part of life.
It's how Supreme Court opinions are written. If you read Supreme Court opinions, take your highlighters, my friends, and they IRAC that stuff. At least the good ones. Maybe not Marbury v. Madison, but the new ones. I don't
know. Yeah, now they do.
I was like, "I don't know." It's been a long time since I read Marbury v. Madison, but I don't know that they were IRAC-ing that one.
Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to read it again.
I'd have to read it. It's been a long time, so I don't remember that one off the top of my head. So, I think that something that comes up for students in all exam situations is, what do you do when you just don't know the rule, right? You were talking about the importance of needing to learn these rules for the bar exam, closed -book exams in law school require you to know these rules cold. You spend all these hours memorizing them, hopefully in element formats.
You've got mnemonics, you've got this and that. Yet, sometimes you're in the room and they might test something that wasn't on your outlines - happened to me. Or they might do something completely wacky, or you just get anxiety and you just forget. It definitely happens. What do you think that students should do when they think about rule statements, with this acknowledgement that, "I may show up on the test and then there's still going to be something I don't know"? Yeah. I'll start this
with a personal anecdote when I took bar exam. So, I took Corporate Finance, I took BA. I did a lot of business-related classes in law school. So I was like, "Oh, I'm fine for Corporations on the bar exam." I did not take the UBE. I took Ohio before it went UBE. So, we had a lot of state-specific, all kinds of things on there. And my Corporations essay was a seven-part essay on voting trusts.
I don't even know what that is.
Right.
Now, I'm not licensed in Ohio, but I don't know what that is.
I don't even think that was Ohio-specific. Don't quote me on that, because this was a while ago. But I remember getting that essay on bar exam day and being like, "You're joking. This has to be a sick joke." And I went back after the fact and I was like, "Did I learn this?" It was like the tiniest little part of bar prep. So, the reality is, you're not going to be able to memorize every single rule.
And even sometimes subjects that you think you're really solid in, you are not going to get hit with an essay that is easy or functional for your knowledge base. Now, that said, I did try my best on that essay, and I think I got like a three on it. It was definitely one my lower exam scores, but I got points because I used the knowledge that I did have about corporate law in general and just tried to solve my way through the problem.
I don't remember which parts I made up, to be quite honest with you. But I definitely made up a good part of it. But, as I said, it was a seven-part essay. So I broke it down into those seven, I gave it the structure, I tried to do IRAC to the best capacity that I could, and I got some points. And so, if you do that, you make up what you need to make up, you write what you know, and you just try your best.
The good thing about bar exam essays is that because you are not answering a multiple-choice question, where it's either right or wrong, you have some flexibility for partial credit for things that are just slightly off, to not be a zero. And so, you give it your best. But yes, make up what you don't know and work with what you do, and you'll probably be surprised. You know more than you think you know.
Yeah. So, I have a similar story from my bar, because they tested the preemption of executive orders, which sounds like something we would all talk about right now because it's it's like very in the news. But this was back in the aughts, the late aughts, which this was not being discussed widely at that time. And there was a BARBRI lecturer at that time. I don't even think Themis was doing prep at that point, or at least not widely, when I was taking the bar.
But he had this thing where he would say, "If you don't know it, nobody knows it." That was his line. And it was not in the outlines that most of us were studying off of this law. And so, we all got this question and half of it was on the Fourth Amendment, which is my favorite amendment, and so I had plenty to say about the Fourth Amendment. But the rest of it was on this other thing that I had no idea. And so, I'm just throwing in words.
I'm like, "Well, this is a reasonableness standard, there's full preemption." Any law that I know, I'm pulling something together. And I don't know what I got on the score, because California does not release your scores if you pass. So I can assume I just got an amazing score. Perfect. Perfect. 100%. 100%. They did invite me to be a grader, so I had to do pretty well. But I'm going to guess that was not my shining example.
But what was interesting and funny, is at the end, it was the end of our morning session and I'm in this conference hall with thousands... I mean, so many people take the bar in California. You'd be in this room with thousands and thousands of people. Someone in the back screams, "If you don't know it, nobody knows it!" And the whole place cracks up laughing, because we'd all watched the same video
for bar
prep.
That's amazing.
It was amazing. And so, what's funny is that now, of course, that law is absolutely in the outlines because I have seen it over the years. But almost everyone has this story that there's something that happens, right? And so, the only thing that I think can really lead you astray is when you give up and you feel like you're focusing on this IRAC and you're saying, "I have to hit all these things." Now, what will sink you is to write no rule.
I have seen that before: "Well, I didn't know the rule, so I didn't write anything." That's a terrible choice, because if you write something, even if it's kind of garbage, what if I was almost right? I might get some of the points. What if somebody's reading so carefully that they don't even notice the part that's wrong? I've seen it. I've seen passing essays that have bad law on them. And you need to say it with confidence.
You never want to say something like, "Well, I don't actually know the rule for preemption of executive orders, but I'm going to just give it my best shot." No, I was like, "Well, the Constitution is silent on this topic, but..." I had plenty to say. But you've got to do it with confidence, you've got to dress it up and make it look like it knows what it's talking about.
But then you just want to give yourself enough rule that you can do the rest of the legal analysis, and you're going to get something for that. And if you leave anything out or if you ignore an issue completely, all you're doing is really inviting whoever's grading your paper to just not give you any points. And that's always sad.
So, you've got to work it and just take a deep breath and just do your best, because you just never know in this point collection game where you can find some additional points. And maybe your made-up rule is so compelling that you get quite a few points. Or, like I said, I'm sure I high scored that. It's amazing I wasn't the model answer for that question. But in your case, you were mentioning you got a three.
But a three is still pretty good, because the next one is a five, it doesn't really matter. You just need it not to be a two or a one.
I passed with plenty of room to spare. And granted, that was pre-UBE, when Ohio had 12 essays, so there was a little more wiggle room in the essays. That said, you can fail an entire essay and still pass the bar exam if your other scores are good enough. So, getting a question that you are like, "I'm at a loss", you should try, absolutely. But you should also not assume automatically that question is going to tank your ability to get a passing score.
I think that's important for people to remember. A lot of students when they're studying are like, "I'm afraid to turn in my graded essays, because I know I'm not ready to take them." And it's like, how do you get better at it? You practice. And two, you can't have that mentality on bar exam day. You've got to be ready to just say, "Alright, I'm going to give it my best shot, no matter what happens." And, like you said, you'll be surprised at what you can pick up, points wise.
Because they're not grading for perfection. No bar exam grader is looking at essays and saying, "This needs to have every single thing available for it to get a passing score." That's not how it works. If you look at model sample answers from bar exams, they often don't even have every single... Unless it's drafted specifically to be one that gives you every single point. But actual sample answers from students, they're not perfect. And they passed and they're being used as model answers.
So, that should give you a little bit of hope.
Yeah. I think that it's really an important mindset to have in all exams that you take, is that one bump, be it a rule or an issue you don't know the answer to, you cannot give it any more power than it gets, right? It gets one issue, and then you've got to move on. I think in the law school exam space, there were plenty of times on an exam that you would reach something and be like, "I don't know, but I
think this is how I'm going to handle it." You just do your best, because again, you're collecting points. And what you don't want to do is just say, "Well, there goes the exam. I guess I'm done" and give up, because you're leaving things on the table. I remember taking my Evidence exam in law school.
I did not love Evidence, despite the fact that I do enjoy it now and have taught it for many years, but I didn't at the time just jive well with my Evidence professor, and I was a super stressed 2L who was doing OCI, and so it was just a recipe for disaster.
And I got that exam and I was like, "This is a mess." And I remember I decided to take a break and I walked to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I was like, "If you don't go back and do absolutely everything that you can do on that exam, you might have to take this class again. And you definitely don't want to take this class again." That sounds worse than going back and just doing the best that I can with what I'm given. And I did okay. It was not my highest score by far.
No CALI awards for that Evidence class, but I got through it. And I think that we all have to have that kind of mentality in the back of our pockets, like, "I'm not going to let this one go. I'm going to fight through it. I'm going to be resilient. I'm going to do the best that I can." And then the chips will fall where they may.
Yeah. I mean, law school's hard. The bar exam is hard. They are not meant to be a walk in the park, and that's for a lot of reasons. It shouldn't feel that easy.
Yeah.
I think that's really important. Students get so nervous and scared. And I was right there too. It's very overwhelming sometimes, but looking back now and having worked with so many students over my time at Themis, I can see how much that fear holds people back from performing as well as they can, because there's a lot of cognitive energy that is taken up by you being afraid and anxious.
I get it, anxiety is a very real thing, but the more that you can do to bring that down and to think about this from a practical, "Okay, what is my goal?" You mentioned that earlier: What is the goal here? Who am I trying to communicate to? What am I trying to do? And think about it like a formula. One of the ways I explain this to students who are struggling with essays when they're studying for the bar exam is, you're solving a math problem. You are given an issue.
Well, you have to figure out what the issue is, but if you figure out what the issue is and you have a rule that applies to it, and then you are doing all of the steps of a geometry proof to get to your conclusion. And if you can take a step back and think about it from that much more logical, rational perspective, it takes some of the fear out of it. So, hopefully that helps somebody listening to this.
Totally. One thing I see often with students, both on law school exams and on the bar, is that they get very excited about this idea that they can just bullet point or make a list of things or scramble to write something out and they'll get a whole bunch of points. And there is a time and a place for that.
But I also really think it's important when you think about IRAC, when you think about analysis, and that's where the majority of your points come from, is that you're really just waving your arms in front of the grader's face and saying, "I am out of time, I do not know what I'm doing, and this is chaos." The chaos is upon us. And so, I really encourage folks to think about managing your time throughout.
Of course, you don't want to end up with an issue left, a big issue that you don't have time for. But you also want to say, "How can I just do this as quickly as possible, without waving my arms in front of the grader and saying I really have completely run out of time?" Because if you just say "Conclusion" at the bottom and don't say anything else, I think that's worse than just not having a conclusion. I don't know, what do you think?
I completely agree. I think that you should treat the bar exam or your law school final exams as if you're giving an assignment to a partner at a law firm. And yet, you're going to be strapped for time sometimes when you're doing your work. That's just the nature of being a lawyer. That's the nature law school. How can you make it as professional as possible within the time constraints that you have?
And so, if you have time for a bullet list, get it out there, get it on the page and start organizing it with the time that you have left. You may not get through all of it, but anything that you can do to clean it up and polish it up is going to work in your favor. I think that's good advice for life in general.
Yeah, it's true. It's true. Well, we are almost out of time, but I do like to ask all our guests, if you could give yourself one piece of advice about your own legal writing or your exam writing, what would that be?
Ooh, that's a loaded question, because
are
a lot of things I wish I would have done differently. One of the best things I did was go to one of my professors with an exam that I did not love the grade I got and say, "Please help me understand where I went wrong here." And that interaction with the professor helped shift my legal writing immensely. So, I would say that is something I wish I would have done earlier in my law school process. And two is using supplements to help me figure out how to write.
So that could be the Themis supplements, and I promise you that's not just a plug for Themis. Once I found those when I was in law school, they were such a benefit to me. But it can also be things like Examples & Explanations books, or other guides that you can look at and say, "Okay, here's what a good IRAC response looks like", and then you can work to model it.
Because when you're a 1L, especially when you're a 1L, but even later on, it's hard for you to pull the idea of what something is supposed to look like out of thin air. So, seeking out those resources that can help you figure out how to do this so you're not trying to reinvent the wheel, I think is a great thing to do.
Yeah. And I would piggyback on that by going back to our Marbury vs. Madison discussion. One of the things that I think is hard when you're a 1L is you do spend a lot of time reading really old cases, and I think that that feels like a disconnect to the legal writing you're being asked to do, even in your Legal Writing class or eventually on your exams. So, I found it was really helpful for me when I was working on my legal writing, because shocker - I was not perfect to start.
I mean, I know that's hard to believe.
You're perfect now. but
Oh, thank you. Yes, I wasn't perfect when I started and I had things I had to work on. But one of the things for me was that when I started reading more modern cases to do legal research and writing projects, I started to see the more modern application of the IRAC in legal opinions, and I was like, "Oh, this is easy." It's easy to read, it's not that hard to write.
But I think that it's hard because in the beginning you spend a lot of time reading archaic stuff that nobody writes like that anymore. And so, if you're on the newer end of this journey and you're listening to this podcast, download a Supreme Court opinion maybe one that won't make your blood boil, because I don't think it's good for your mental health.
Maybe one from like seven years
ago. Yeah, I was like, maybe not one from recently. But yeah, to all the Con Law professors out there - whoo, I tell ya!
Yeah, that's
a tough
job at the moment.
Tough job right now. But I do think it is interesting to read more modern cases. And some classes kind of do that. My Criminal Law professor was interested in doing that. I remember we read Lawrence v. Texas, which is like a 2000 or 2001 case. It was interesting to read something that recent, because you are reading so many old cases. So, just look to what's around you, look to more modern legal writing, and also remember that it's like a foreign language.
I have a friend who's an expat in Europe, and she always jokes.... She's Australian. And she's like, "My in-laws have no idea how funny I am, because I'm not very funny in French." She's like, "My French good enough for me to be funny. I am way funnier in English." And she's like, "I don't think they know why my husband's with me, because he thinks I'm so funny and they don't think I'm that funny." I really love that because I think legal writing is the same.
In the beginning, it doesn't sound like you, because you're learning something new. You have to give it time, and then you can develop your own technique and your own kind of style to it. But that's got to be once you are really good at it. So,
Yeah. And it's not that complicated. It's something that's challenging to learn, but once you get over that initial challenge, not only can you make it your own and have a style to it, it just gets a lot easier. By the time you sit for the bar exam, if you've studied effectively, you'll be able to glance at an essay prompt and you'll be able to say, "Okay, immediately, here
is the rule I'm working with, and here are the points." You'll be amazed at how quickly you'll be able to go through something that felt like an impossible challenge to you two months before. So, let that be a beacon of light as you head towards finals or the bar exam.
Totally. I love it. That's a great, great point to end on. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your travel schedule to chat with us today. If folks want to learn more about Themis and their resources for law students and the bar exam, how do they do that?
So, on our website, ThemisBar.com, you can find out about all of our resources. And for students who are currently in law school, we offer free programs. So, our Law School Essentials programs have video lectures, outlines, practice questions, and practice essays for all of the first-year doctrinal topics and the upper level. Not every single upper level bar tested course, but a good number of them.
And those are a way for you to just get some extra guidance towards those, help with the black-letter law, and then do practice and review as you build your outlines throughout the semester. We also have a free MPRE course, and then of course, our bar exam program. So, everything you can find out on our website. We post lots of stuff on our socials too, so check us out.
Alright. Well, thanks so much. Have a good rest of your day.
Thank you, Lee. Always lovely to talk to you.
Today we would like to thank Themis Bar Review for sponsoring this episode. Remember, you can enroll now with our exclusive offer. Save $900 on any July 2025 Themis Bar Review course using the code LAWSCHOOLTB900 at checkout, valid through May 19th, 2025. If you enjoyed this episode of the Law School Toolbox podcast, please take a second to leave a review and rating on your favorite listening app. We'd really appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything.
If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to myself or Alison at lee@lawschooltoolbox.com or alison@lawschooltoolbox.com. Or you can always contact us via our website contact form at LawSchoolToolbox.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon!