Unpopular opinion: 90% of the reading assigned is a waste of your time.

Approaching the end of 1L and reflecting on my experience and strategy for the rest of my time in law school. At the beginning of the school year I'd heard all the warnings about using quimbee/getting briefs online and I spent the first 2-3 months of school reading every case assigned. I'm glad I did because I think being able to read a case and quickly identify the issue, rule, and the courts reasoning is a skill that every lawyer needs to have. My hot take is that once you know how to do that, reading every case assigned is completely unnecessary and will negatively affect your quality of life/mental health.

As I said I started the school year reading everything and learning how to read legalese. My 1L Fall was extremely stressful as I'm sure most law students experience. Around halfway through the Fall I realized that I was no longer reading to learn the skill of legal reading, just to get the info needed for the next days cold calls. Knowing this, I started plugging assigned readings into NotebookLM to generate briefs and utilize their 'podcast' feature. On my way to school in the morning, I would listen to these podcasts to get me up to speed on the material and then I would reference my briefs during the class lecture. I didn't have any cold calls I wasn't able to answer adequately. For legal writing, I did original research and read every case I referenced in my memos/briefs. NotebookLM has gotten really good but I still find it occasionally hallucinates. I don't trust it 100% so in creating my own original work I still do my own research/read cases and if I find it made a mistake in a generated brief, I go back and read the case to understand the discrepancy. I'm at a T30 school and finished the Fall above median GPA. I am extremely blessed to have a 2L big law summer associate position lined up.

I know everyone learns differently and has different goals for their career. I know that I want to be a transactional lawyer; if you have aspirations to clerk or be a litigator I imagine your need to read cases continuously is much higher. This is just what has been working for me. Not having to read a massive stack of cases every night has allowed me to pick up a part time job in the evenings that currently covers my living expenses, lifting a huge financial burden off my shoulders. My 1L Spring semester has been a much more relaxing experience - largely due to having a job lined up but also in large part due to this change in strategy.

My take is that reading legalese and being able to dissect case law is a skill like any other - once you know how to do it, as long as you practice routinely you're not going to suddenly forget how to do it. I read cases for all my writing assignments and cases I am interested in. Not forcing myself to get through every case assigned on a daily basis has been a huge life improvement.

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts I know this is a divisive topic in law school! Hopefully the perspective helps someone out there.