Opinion writing; A walk in the woods

Opinion writing. Most of my students seem to hate it. It seems to be the "most feared" of the BPTC skills subjects. 

Opinion writing is a tricky skill. The reason for it is that it is, in reality, more than one skill. It is a combination of:

• Legal research (identifying the relevant statutes, SIs and case law)
• Understanding the law (reading, decoding and assimilating the principles from your research)
• Case analysis (applying the law)
• Procedural awareness (applying the relevant pre-action or litigation procedure)
• Case tactics (using the law and the procedure to help your client achieve his/her objectives)
• Writing skills (writing the opinion in an intelligible, logical, clear way which helps the client solve his/her problem)

When we set an opinion, we give you a set of papers where we already know the law, we ensured that the facts and evidence pointed to a particular answer and we knew in advance what we wanted our candidates to write.

Why have we done this? To ensure we can trust and be confident that when you are in practice, you have a logical and methodical way of approaching any case you deal with. So that you know, without guidance, how to reach the answer. Give a man a fish, it is said, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for life. We’re teaching you how to fish, dudes!

Perhaps I can illustrate better with the analogy of being let loose in the woods.

The forest is a scary place. All the trees look the same, they block your view, it becomes disorientating and you can get lost very quickly. Walking for ages only to return to your start point is a real danger.

Imagine the task of writing an opinion as being released at the “start” point of the diagram, and being required to get to the end of the diagram, marked home. The path is strewn with trees, your obstacles to success and a pass mark.

Hansel and Gretel nearly got lost in the woods. Except they had a plan. They left themselves a trail to follow. A trail of breadcrumbs. They followed their trail to find their way home and lived happily every after.

We have left you with breadcrumbs. The crumbs are the legal principles, combined with the facts and the evidence. These are your CLUES. Once you have picked up a legal principle, we want you to apply it to the facts. Then we want you to think about who has the burden of proof, to assess the current evidence and decide if your client can succeed or whether more work is needed. If there is a conflict of evidence, we want you to assess how the court will interpret the evidence and what finding of fact will be made.

The breadcrumb trail represents the most efficient path through the woods. In other words, the best way to deal with the client's legal problem. 

When it comes to dealing with an opinion, we have students who fall into certain tribes.

They are:

• The “Bypass” student
• The “MIA” student
• The “Confused” student
• The “Smart” student

Which of these are you?

The “Bypass” student

The Bypass student can’t be bothered with writing a fully reasoned opinion. This student never fears getting sued for giving the wrong advice. Or that s/he can’t demonstrate why they reached a certain view if things go wrong later in the case. Why bother jumping through the hoops of giving reasons for their view?

Bypass student makes it through the woods. But we don’t know if they did so on their own steam, whether someone helped them get there, or whether they just checked into a hotel overnight and got to home via a black cab without ever entering the woods.

Bypass student is impulsive. Bypass student rushes to an answer without considering all the circumstances.

Bypass student is a professional negligence case waiting to happen.

The MIA student

The MIA student cannot commit to an opinion. The client “may” or “might” succeed. Or “unless I have further evidence I cannot advise”.

MIA student gets lost in the wood and never makes it home, because this student cannot form a view. This student cannot reach a conclusion on the issues. MIA student either couches the prospects of success in vague terms because s/he doesn’t want to actually tell the client if it is worth proceeding with a case, or seeks to hide behind a “lack of evidence” to avoid coming to a view at all.

MIA will find themselves cold and hungry by nightfall. Let us just hope there are no wolves in the woods, right?

The Confused student

Somehow, by hook or by crook, the Confused student makes it out of the woods. The path taken lacks any kind of logic. The expenditure of energy has been entirely inefficient. 

The Confused student may have wandered around in circles or double-backed on him/herself…

Yes, this student made it home. But did Confused student make it home using luck or judgment? We can't tell. And it may even be that Confused student can't explain how s/he made it home. 

How can you be let loose on the public if you get the right answer by luck? We have to know your skills of analysis and judgment are properly tuned.

Confused student, sorry, but you’re just not ready yet.

The Smart student

The Smart student begins with a clear understanding of the law. Everything begins with understanding the legal principles and knowing how to identify the issues in a set of papers.

The Smart student spends time reading the papers, analysing the case, planning an opinion and then writing. The Smart student understands the “legal framework” concept described in Chapter 19 of the Case Preparation and Opinion Writing Manual (“the Manual”) and applies that system as set out in Chapter 21 of the Manual.

The Smart student follows the breadcrumbs, collecting them one by one and showing how s/he has collected them in the written opinion. The opinion has the right conclusions because it uses the clues to come to those conclusions. It has cogent reasoning because it explains how the breadcrumb trail has been followed.

The Smart student can be trusted when in practice to follow a logical analysis of any case thrown at him/her. The Smart student has thought of the tactics and practicalities of procedure, proof, litigation process and how the client’s objectives might best be achieved.

No wonder it is this student who scores.

Decide which student you have been in the past.

Now; work out what you need to do to ensure you are the Smart student in the exam.

The breadcrumbs are there. They are just waiting for you to follow their trail.

Getting through the BPTC with the Pomodoro Technique: a guest post by Matthew Rees

I am delighted to bring you another guest post from a former student. Even if I do say so myself, this post is a doozy. It is the bee's knees, the dog's nadgers... You will not regret reading this one. Seriously, this is the post which might actually change your life. 

Matthew Rees was an immensely bright and talented BPTC student I taught last academic year. Always prepared, always on the ball, always looking to learn more and improve his skills. Never one to rest on his laurels, Matthew had discipline and organisational skills from the beginning. Not the type of person who I thought had room for improvement when it came to working effectively and efficiently. 

Then, one Civil litigation session, he told me that he had started to use "The Pomodoro Technique" for improving time management, concentration, efficiency and overall achievement. He said that it had transformed his revision; he was revising for more time, revising more often, working more efficiently, covering more ground and achieving greater depth and breadth of learning. 

So I am delighted that Matthew has been kind enough to share his insights with you all. Please, read what he has to say. But don't stop there. Try the technique. Either use the Pomodoro app, or better still, just use a stopwatch or kitchen timer, so that you keep your mobile or tablet device well out of reach. You'll need to train yourself over the period of about a week in how to work in this way, but it will pay off from day one. 

Go ahead, try it. CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
 

Getting through the BPTC with the Pomodoro Technique

I rocked up at City University to study for the BPTC as a 33-year-old (supposedly) mature student. I’m not going to bore you with a CV but trust me when I say I’d already done plenty of academic study in quite a variety of subjects. I was very confident that I knew how to study well and what worked best for me.

I quickly realised that studying for the Bar Exams, in particular those centrally set by the BSB, was going to be a different kind of challenge to any of my previous studies because of just how much there was to memorise in a relatively short time.  Shortly after I’d taken my first exam, Snigdha told my class that one of her students had recently had a lot of success studying with the Pomodoro technique, and when I heard the details, I thought it sounded interesting.

How it works

The technique basically goes like this: you set a timer for 25 minutes (1 Pomodoro). During that 25 minutes, you only study. You don’t answer the phone, or check your email, or chat, or read a text, or go to the loo, you just study. 

When your 25 minutes is up, you have 5 minutes to do whatever you like: have a wee, stare out of the window, make a cuppa, do some push ups, sing a song, whatever you want to do; however, after 5 minutes, you set your timer again and study for 25 minutes more. 

The same rules apply. Repeat the process for 4 Pomodoros and then take a proper break for at least 25 minutes.

Keeping discipline

The best thing about this technique is it keeps you honest.  Before I started defining my study into strict periods I have no idea how much time I spent concentrating and how much time I spent sat in front of a screen or a text book gaining nothing but daydreaming, checking my phone or staring out of a window. It was easy to use up an hour of my time on ‘study’, and never really make any progress. Think about the time you spend ‘studying’ and try to be honest with yourself about how much of that time you spend completely focussed on the task in hand… If you can already stay focussed for the majority of the time then great. However, if like me your mind wanders off quite a bit, then setting yourself some boundaries could really help. 

Upping your game

Another way the technique helped me was by motivating me to push myself harder. I found a Pomodoro App for my phone (there are lots of them) which kept count of how many Pomodoros I was completing each day, and recorded a running total for the month.  As the exams got closer, I would feel guilty if I dropped below my average.  I found study guilt was a great motivator, and I often managed an extra 25 or 50 minutes just because I wanted to match the last few days or beat my high score.

Getting the most out of your time

What’s also great is that when you start counting Pomodoros you begin to realise that 25 minutes here and 25 minutes there can be really productive. Before I was using the technique, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to open my books if I’d had less than 90 minutes free. What that meant was I wasted quite a lot of time during the day before after and between classes. Once I started working in 25-minute blocks, I got through more work during the working day which meant I had more opportunities to have good-quality downtime in the evenings and at weekends.

Building study stamina

I quickly realised the technique was helping me study with greater focus because I found I was getting much more tired much more quickly.  For the first couple of weeks, I would struggle to do more than 12 Pomodoros in full day of study – that’s only 5 hours of study in total with 45 minutes of short breaks and 3 bigger breaks of at least 25 minutes – which didn’t seem much when I’d always thought I could study for 10 to 12 hours a day. Nonetheless, working at a much higher degree of intensity and focus, I started to get a lot more done. As the weeks went by my study stamina improved.  By the time all the teaching was finished and we were into full-time revision, I was able to set myself, and achieve, a minimum of 20 Pomodoros a day. I could never have done that before.

Matt Rees

What to do over Christmas

UPDATED FOR 2020 AND THE BVS ON 19 DECEMBER 2020

 

Dear Students

I realise you are all in real need of a break. How I understand! The tiredness and exhaustion have set in over the relentless first term! I feel the tiredness in every bone in my body, and I am pretty sure I am carrying a luggage set under my eyes these days.

But to simply take rest and not take advantage of the break from classes would be a mistake. By all means take the festive dates off; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Years Eve, New Years Day. Except for those days, you are going to have to commit to getting some work done. 

Crimbo Snowdude

So, all you need to do is revise Ethics and Drafting, right? Wrong.

Obviously, it would be a great idea to revise Ethics and Drafting. The exams are in Mid January 2021. 

 

You will need to look over your drafting work, make notes based on the feedback you have received in class, and if you missed and sessions or practice, fill those gaps. If you are using the CLS Drafting manual, you will need to ensure you have carefully read and re-read these chapters: 

Chapter 7 – Particulars of Claim

Chapter 8 – Defences

Chapter 9 – Advanced Particulars of Claim

Chapter 10 – Advanced Defences

Chapter 13 – Defence and Counterclaim

It will also help to refer to the Remedies manual for remedies for personal injury, remedies for negligence, and remedies for breach of contract. 

 

For Ethics, some students make the mistake of simply reading and re-reading the manual, the Code for Crown Prosecutors and the Farquharson guidelines. Firstly, you need to make sure you understand everything you have covered before you start revising. Revising has a “re” in front of it. This means you should be looking at the topics for the second or third time. Do you best to fill in gaps in your knowledge and understanding before beginning your revision in earnest. 

 

This is the advice from my former students on how to pass Ethics: http://snigsclassroom.blogspot.com/2018/02/ethics-how-to-pass-from-former-bptc.html

Active learning techniques are best, when revising, particularly self testing. I have covered how to get the most out of your revision here: http://snigsclassroom.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/revising-how-to-get-more-bang-for-your.html

I would strongly suggest you do not simply use the break for Ethics and drafting revision. You should try to cover and ground you missed this term. It isn't always possible to do everything to the best of your ability, I understand that, so there's nothing wrong in going back to things you want to do better, like your advocacy work. 

Another thing to do is to get organised if you have not been able to do so. Here is how: http://snigsclassroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-get-organised-on-bptc.html

 

I advise that it would be a good idea to ensure you get all of your civil litigation, criminal litigation and evidence learning up to date. You may have a working understanding of most of the concepts and topics covered. If so, great. If not, that is your first task. You need to fill up any gaps in BOTH your understanding and your notes.

 

Here are my top 10 tips for the knowledge subjects: http://snigsclassroom.blogspot.com/2018/10/10-bptc-knowledge-subject-tips.html

 

The Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree donated by the people of Norway

 

There will be very little opportunity for you to do any other catching up after the start of term. You will have classes, hand ins and assessments running side by side from now to the end of the course. Learning time will be hard to come by. The revision period will be short.

Do not expect to revise the other knowledge subjects either from the textbook or one of the revision titles alone. Books are resources for learning, not tools for revision. You therefore need to have good notes. Notes which cover the syllabus areas in the level of detail specified by the syllabus. I advocated hand written notes, as they have a better link to memory.

Poinsettia

 

The syllabus provides guidance from the central exam board about what you do and do not need to learn. Certainly, for civil litigation, the elements of commentary from the practitioner text (the White Book) have been defined and set out. You cannot “learn” these from the White Book itself; make up your notes summarising the principles. Remember that for civil litigation, you do not need to know the names of cases (other than the six set out in the syllabus). 

If you are not a CLS student, then you may have different assessments coming in January. I would suggest that you consolidate all of your knowledge subjects in the way I have suggested above. You may not have the immediate demands of exam revision, but you have got the opportunity to get the bedrock of your knowledge subject learning solid. 

 

Here is Brian Mondoh's advice on tackling the knowledge subjects: http://snigsclassroom.blogspot.com/2017/12/nuggets-of-wisdom-for-smashing-bptc.html

Do yourself a favour. Get your work sorted this Christmas break. When your mum or best friend is annoyed with you for not spending enough time with them, I am sure when you explain that awful Snigdha woman from the law school has told you you must do this, that you will be forgiven. Blame me. I give you carte blanche. Show them my picture and say “it is all her fault, she is that horrible tutor at the law school”.

Blame me, get on with you work.

And you can then enjoy Christmas and New Year 2021 guilt free and without annoying old me gnawing your ears.

Wouldn't that be great?

Please do send me pictures of your Christmas tree all decked out in 2021 so that I can see you celebrating in style when you have put the BVS behind you.

Lots of love

Snigdha

x

How to get organised on the BPTC

Introduction / Disclaimer:

You might be feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Overwhelmed with your workload, overwhelmed by "stuff". 

Too much work to do: 
Lots of chapters to read for each knowledge small group.... 
The deadlines for formal feedback work are imminent... 
Not enough time to write opinions, drafts and skeleton arguments...

Too much "stuff":
There are case papers, workbooks, student instructions, manuals… the course overview and your timetable. So many pages of information, so many things to cart around. ..

You might be wondering how to get organised and how to keep up with the work on the BPTC. You have my sympathies – this is a complicated course with lots to do and lots to learn.

These are my own personal thoughts and views. They may on occasion be provocative/irreverent or cheeky. They are not binding, and will not themselves guarantee success. But as a person who has often had to fight the forces of disorganisation and poor short term memory, these are good strategies for helping you keep on top of everything.

The 3 part strategy

There are 3 planks to my strategy (and sometimes I am a plank!):

1. Know what you are doing at any given time!

2. Have a “Survival Bag”!

3. File everything!

Know what you are doing at any given time

Half the battle of the BPTC is keeping prepared for classes and ensuring you have enough time to get everything done. This involves FORWARD PLANNING.

I hate to say this, but generally, students don’t do forward planning. Work is done at the last minute, with the deadline looming. Students justify this by saying “I work better under pressure” but I don’t buy it. This year is the year to school yourself into professional habits; professionals don’t procrastinate and then work in a mad rush, they plan ahead. 

You need to think about a week or a fortnight at a time. If you think day-to-day, you are going to suffer. On that day when you have 2 SGS, you’ll end up pulling an all-nighter and feeling knackered the next day. Not good. Whereas if you plan you work over the week, you will use gaps between classes and other times (quiet evenings such as Monday or Tuesday night when most aren’t so keen on going out) to get things done. Too young to watch Downton Abbey? Good, get some work done in the week, take time off on Sunday, and leave us boring middle aged people to watch adult-appropriate period drama!

The Course Overview and Timetable are the 2 most VITAL documents to tell you what you’ve got to do each week. So download, photocopy or a copy which you keep with you AT ALL TIMES. Have a copy at home, and a copy on you. Then you will always know where you need to be, when and what you need to do. 

I copy everything into my diary. I work with pen and paper – no worries about hacking, running out of memory or battery life. I write it with a biro, so those of you who say “oh but you might drop it in a puddle” – ha! Biro won’t run in the wet. And your laptop/PC/smartphone, if dropped in a puddle will definitely suffer more. So, who’s sorry now?! ;)

Have a “Survival Bag”!

Soldiers have a Survival Bag. So should you. This is a bag which is kept packed with your essential kit.

That kit should contain:

1. Course overview grid

2. Timetable

3. Pens – plenty colours and a couple spare in the main colour you write in

4. Pencils

5. At least one highlighter

6. Lined A4 file paper (LOTS!)

7. Ruler

8. Calculator

9. Oyster card

10. City Law School USB stick

11. Headache tablets

12. Small amount of spare cash for snacks/ tea/ coffee

13. Swipe card

14. Library card

15. Smartphone, charger cable, power pack
16. Water bottle (reusable, please, let's look after the environment!) 

You will obviously have to add the preparation and work you need for each session on a day by day basis. But if your Survival Bag has these essentials, you won’t have to worry about keeping track of them.

If you are a laptop person and bring your laptop, bring your mains power cord as you might find that your battery needs topping up when you least expect it.

File everything!

Bits of paper pile up quickly. Individual bits of paper are easily lost. They get left behind, get scrunched up at the bottom of your bag. There are so many ways in which they will elude you when you need them the most. So you need to file everything, and have a system.

The filing system you see pictured above is that of my former student Eloise Turnnidge. 

She has some excellent and astute advice for you all:

"My advice on how to get organised...

1. Buy a folder for every subject, but choose a different colour for each. I found it helped me compartmentalise. It doesn't matter what the colours are, but for reference with my photograph, to demonstrate the amount of documents I had for each subject, mine were:

Pink - advocacy; divided into Civil, XIC and XX. 
Orange - litigation; one folder for civil, criminal and evidence respectively. 
Yellow - skills; somehow I managed to squeeze OPW, drafting and conference into two folders. 
Green - ADR and ethics. 
Blue - divided between my two options. 
Purple - general course information; timetable, course outline and assessments handbook, etc.

You'll need some file dividers, obviously. I split my folders by syllabus topic for knowledge subjects and by brief for skills subjects, which seemed to work well. The weakness was that some briefs were used for multiple subjects.

2. Recreate the same folders and colours for your electronic files. Continuity helps, especially when you have so much to do!

3. File everything the minute you get it! Otherwise you'll simply have mountains of unorganised paper.

Bonus tip! It really should not need to be said, but as an ex Apple employee I'm very familiar with the consequences of failure to do so... BACK UP YOUR DIGITAL FILES. REGULARLY.

Enjoy the course - it'll fly by!"

My own personal suggestion is that you need the following:

1. A ringbinder for each knowledge subject:

- Civil litigation, evidence and remedies

- Criminal litigation and evidence

- Ethics

- ADR

2. A ringbinder for Drafting (which you will only use for LGS notes, suggested answers and work right now, but later will become your Drafting Exam Toolkit)

3. A ringbinder for Opinion writing (again, not something you will use right now, but will become your Opinion Writing Exam Toolkit)

4. Document wallets / elastic files for each of your sets of case papers, notes and work as you go along. Some of the documents may end up in the Exam Toolkits above, but that is something to concern yourself with at a later date.

5. A small (eg half inch) ringbinder for your current advocacy work. By this I mean the exercise you are working on each week. When you aren’t working on it, put the stuff back into the relevant document wallet in item 4 above. You need your advocacy papers in an easy access format, particularly if you are working with a bundle. You need to get to witness statements quickly and easily.

I realise I am suggesting that you buy quite a few files and folders. I am not actually a stationery obsessive (how sad do you people actually think I am?!). Neither do I have any shares in any file manufacturing company. Chance would be a fine thing! I just know that you need to have your revision resources building up as you go along. Revision time will be scarce and you don’t want to be putting your work in order then.

I don’t advise having a single lever arch file for everything. I find lever arch files cumbersome. They are big and bulky. It is not easy to just flick through the contents. You will need dividers. Using dividers will make filing contents difficult. Any system involving difficulty will usually end in failure. My system is SIMPLE.

After EACH LGS and SGS in any knowledge subject, on your way home (or as soon as you get home), make sure you fill in any gaps in your notes. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT!  You have to do this while you still remember. If you are honest, you will realise that your short term memory is unreliable and that something on the day of a class you think you will remember without writing down will probably be forgotten 2-3 days later. After you have filled in the gaps in your notes, file them in the relevant ringbinder.

At the end of each week, have a filing session. File anything and everything that you can. It will minimise the loss of documents. If you write anything on scraps of paper, write it out properly on A4 file paper. Then file it. I have made lots of notes ‘for later’ on scraps of paper, train tickets, receipts and then promptly LOST THEM ALL. Copy and file as soon as you can.

Don’t like files and paper? Think online.

XMind and MyStudyBar are very useful. They can be used for creating mindmaps, revision timetables and the like.

Anki is great for creating flashcards and testing yourself.

Evernote is a superb cloud based notetaking system, is free and can be used with laptop, iPad and smartphone. Alternatively, use OneNote or iNote. Sync and back up your notes frequently. I like Evernote because you can also incorporate pictures taken on your smartphone into your notes.

I would like to thank Eloise for her time and trouble in setting out her advice and for providing a photo of her filing system.