After my first year of law school, I put together a list of books and other resources I believed incoming law students and 1Ls would find helpful. This post updates and expands the list to include books helpful to law students, prelaw students, attorneys, and paralegals at any stage of their career. I’ve also added my own book about legal writing to the list.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon and Audible!
Ryan McCarl’s book Elegant Legal Writing is now available from the University of California Press. I’ve pasted the jacket copy and blurbs below.
I’ll continue to post excerpts and other useful content on the Elegant Legal Writing blog and on LinkedIn. By sharing posts you find helpful, you can help me spread the word about a book that can do a lot of good in the legal profession. It will help many attorneys, law students, and others write more confidently and persuasively.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. Ryan also maintains a free blog and email newsletter with legal writing tips, and regularly posts about legal writing and strategy on LinkedIn.
Thank you for your time and readership.
——
Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter/X | Blog) is an attorney and law professor in Los Angeles.
It has been many years since I kept a personal blog, but I’ve decided to start again with a blog and email newsletter called “Second Stage.” You can read the first post and subscribe for free here.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. I’m not yet certain which direction Second Stage will go, but I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along.
What is the best way to study for the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE)? I made a short YouTube video demonstrating my favorite strategies.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. These strategies include:
Doing thousands of MBE practice questions with Adaptibar or books containing past questions. Creating your own outline for each subject from scratch Populating your homemade outline with rules gleaned from answer explanations for practice questions you didn’t understand Creating your own audio resources using Speechify or another text-to-speech app Listening to lectures from YouTube, the Sum and Substance series, or other sources while you run, drive, or do the dishes Working with a bar tutor or study partner Check out the video here:
How should a person preparing for the bar exam—or for black-letter law school courses such as those taught to 1Ls—master a subject’s legal rules as efficiently as possible? After spending hundreds of hours tutoring law students and bar examinees, I’ve come up with the method below.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. Build momentum by starting with one or two MBE subjects that interest you, then gradually add additional subjects.
After my 1L year of law school, I put together the following list of books and other resources I found helpful. I’ve also added my own book about legal writing to the list.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on [Amazon](http://bit.ly/elw-book) and [Audible](https://bit.ly/elw-audible)! Buy a copy here and follow Ryan's legal-writing blog at [elegantlegalwriting.com](https://elegantlegalwriting.com). (* = essential/most valuable)
General: Richard M. Fischl and Jeremy Paul, Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams* Dennis J.
I recently posted about the trend of “productivity gurus and marketers” making inflated claims about how much people can learn or otherwise accomplish in a short time.
📚 Ryan McCarl's book Elegant Legal Writing is now available on Amazon! Buy a copy at bit.ly/elw-book and follow his blog at elegantlegalwriting.com. This trend is particularly common in the domain of language learning. Language-learning apps routinely make absurd promises of fluency in their marketing materials.
We live in the age of the “productivity guru.” A productivity guru is someone who advertises his or her own productivity and suggests that others can achieve similar results. I enjoy the books and other content produced by some people who can be characterized as productivity gurus—Cal Newport, David Allen, Tim Ferriss, and Marie Kondo, for example. But they have thousands of imitators, and for many of these, the core of their brand is exaggeration: exaggeration of what they have accomplished and of what you, the consumer, can accomplish by following their lead.