Study schedules

How to use these plans

The three plans differ in days, not in content. Each one schedules every chapter, every chapter-end set, every practice bank round, the practice exams it has room for, the whole core deck, the one-sheet, the review sheet and the exam strategy. Each of those is placed once. What the extra days buy is spacing and another practice exam, not extra material.

Seven days costs about 51 hours, fourteen days about 54, one month about 57. That works out at roughly 7 h 20 m a day for seven days, 3 h 53 m a day for fourteen, and 1 h 55 m a day for a month. Those are the honest numbers, priced at the rates below, and they are the reason to pick by the days you actually have rather than the days you would like to have. A seven-day plan is a full-time week and nothing else.

Then run the rows in order.

Five columns, and the last one is the honest cost.

• Day is the row's place in the plan, not a date. Start on any day of the week.
• Read is the day's chapter or chapters, priced at 180 words a minute.
• Questions is the chapter-end sets, the practice bank rounds and the practice exams. A chapter-end row always covers the chapters in that day's Read cell. A question costs three minutes — chapter-end and bank alike — because that is what one takes when you read its explanation, and the plans assume you read every explanation. A practice exam is 60 questions in 120 minutes, and its explanations are an hour more on the day after — except exam 1 in the seven-day plan, which reads its explanations the same evening.
• Recall is the flashcards at 25 seconds a card, plus the review sheet at ten minutes a half — it is a lookup you keep beside the day's work, not a read, and ten minutes is what a lookup costs — the one-sheet at twenty minutes, and the exam strategy at twenty-five minutes the first time and fifteen the second. Nothing in this column is free. The marked-wrong pass is priced at 110 cards, a third of the deck, which is about what a first pass leaves behind; if you marked more, that row costs you more.
• Time is what the row adds up to.

Five things the rows do that are worth knowing before you start.

• Chapters run in the book's order with one move: chapters 13, 14 and 15 are pulled forward to sit beside conflicts. That puts conflicts of interest at 12–18% of the exam, and the client-lawyer relationship and litigation and advocacy at 10–16% each, in the first half of every plan, alongside client confidentiality at 6–12%. You then have days left to meet all four again.
• A chapter's chapter-end set runs the day you read it, and its flashcards run the day after. The core deck is weighted to the rules the exam tests most often, so the count per chapter is uneven by design: some chapters carry a handful of cards and one carries none, and a day with nothing to draw shows no card row.
• A practice bank round runs once you have read the chapters it tests. The round table's Read first column names the last chapter a round needs; run it that day or any day after. Where a plan splits a round, it splits at the Second half marker the bank prints inside the round.
• Every practice exam covers all 24 chapters. In the one-month plan the first one arrives before you have read them all, and that is deliberate: it prices your pace, not your knowledge. Expect a low number, read every explanation, and do not repeat the exam.
• The last practice exam in every plan sits two days before the test, and its explanations fill the day after. An exam a plan leaves unused is retest material. It is not something to squeeze into the final two days.

The reading order

Twenty-four chapters, in this order in all three plans. The three marked chapters are the move.

1. Ch 1 · Admission, discipline, and reporting
2. Ch 2 · Unauthorized and multijurisdictional practice
3. Ch 3 · Supervision, nonlawyer assistance, and leaving a firm
4. Ch 4 · Forming the relationship and allocating authority
5. Ch 5 · Fees and termination
6. Ch 6 · Attorney-client privilege and work product
7. Ch 7 · Confidentiality: the duty and its exceptions
8. Ch 8 · Conflicts: current and former clients
9. Ch 9 · Imputation, government lawyers, and organizational clients
10. Ch 10 · Specific conflicts under Rule 1.8
11. Ch 13 · Meritorious claims and candor to the tribunal (moved)
12. Ch 14 · Fairness to the opposing party and the tribunal (moved)
13. Ch 15 · Trial publicity, the lawyer as witness, and the prosecutor (moved)
14. Ch 11 · Competence, diligence, and discipline
15. Ch 12 · Malpractice and civil liability
16. Ch 16 · Truthfulness and the anti-contact rule
17. Ch 17 · Unrepresented persons and third-party rights
18. Ch 18 · The lawyer as counselor, negotiator, and neutral
19. Ch 19 · Prosecutors, public roles, and the organization as client
20. Ch 20 · Safekeeping client property
21. Ch 21 · Advertising and solicitation
22. Ch 22 · Pro bono, public service, and the legal system
23. Ch 23 · Judicial conduct: integrity, impartiality, and duties on the bench
24. Ch 24 · Disqualification, extrajudicial activities, and campaigns

The practice bank rounds

Ten rounds, 602 questions. The bank prints them as rounds 1 to 8; all three plans run them in the order the first column gives. Rounds 9 and 10 are mixed sets for extra practice after the plan; no plan schedules them.

The 7-day plan

A full-time week: 7 h 20 m a day on average, and the lightest day is 6 h 16 m. All the reading and every chapter-end set sit in the first three days; days 4 through 7 are the practice bank, the two exams and review. Exam 1 and its explanations share day 5, because seven days leave no spare day to push them to. Seven days, 3081 minutes, about 51 hours. Take this plan only if the seven days are genuinely clear.

If a day slips, cut in this order: the second read of the exam strategy, then the flashcards, then the back half of the longest practice bank round on that row. Do not cut the explanations, and do not cut an exam. A question you answered without reading its explanation is a question you paid three minutes for and learned nothing from.

The 14-day plan

About 3 h 53 m a day, with three practice exams. Reading and the chapter-end sets finish on day 8, so the first exam lands on a book you have read all the way through. Days 9 through 12 are the rest of the practice bank and two exams; days 13 and 14 are the last exam and the review. Fourteen days, 3261 minutes, about 54 hours.

Two days here run long: the explanation days after exams 1 and 2 carry practice bank rounds as well. If you missed more than ten on an exam, spend that day on its explanations and push the round to the next day; the plan has the slack for it. The rows to protect are the exams themselves — they are the only place you practice the clock.

Days 1 and 2 run about 2 h 52 m; days 6 and 10 run 5 h 00 m each. If the first two feel easy, that is the ramp, not the plan being generous — the reading is front-loaded so the practice bank has somewhere to sit later. Read ahead on either of them if you want the middle of the plan to breathe. Days 12, 13 and 14 are the shortest in the plan, and they are short on purpose.

The 1-month plan

About 1 h 55 m a day, and all four practice exams. A chapter a day for most of it, a practice bank round on about half the days, and an exam roughly once a week. The heaviest day is 2 h 26 m. Thirty days, 3440 minutes, about 57 hours. This is the plan with room in it: if a day goes wrong the round on it moves to the next day, and what the extra weeks buy is the gap between reading a chapter and meeting it again in a practice bank round.

The final two days

The review sheet and the one-sheet own the last two days of every plan. Nine lines on how they run, and the last one is about the clock.

• The review sheet is the 24 night-before checklists in one place. Use it in halves, as a lookup beside the evening's work: chapters 1 through 12 on the first evening, chapters 13 through 24 on the second. It is priced at ten minutes a half, because a lookup is not a read.
• Where you missed questions in a chapter, read that chapter's checklist twice and read nothing else from the chapter.
• The one-sheet closes the second evening: two sides, the 28 rules that carry most of the marks, and the answers to say back. Twenty minutes.
• Say those answers out loud. Reading them isn't the same exercise.
• The exam strategy gets its second read on that last evening — fifteen minutes on a module you already read on day one. It is the shortest line on these two days and the one that changes how you sit the exam.
• The cards you marked wrong are your last run through the deck. The seven-day plan plays them on the final evening; the fourteen-day plan runs them on day 12 and the one-month plan on day 28, both before these two days begin.
• The mnemonic index and the rule index are for anything still soft — a lookup, not a reread.
• The last practice exam sits on the first of these two days and its explanations fill the second: days 6 and 7, days 13 and 14, days 29 and 30. That's the last one in every plan. Don't add another.
• Stop on time. The exam is 60 questions in 120 minutes, and 50 of them are scored.