Crafting Effective Drills for Improved Legal Reading Skills
Simply re-reading a contract multiple times is not practice; you need to craft drills to work on discrete issues. The best legal reading drills focus on one discrete legal reading technique per drill. For example, you might try identifying conditions and consequences or determining whether a provision is mandatory or permissive. Choose a single clause or paragraph from any contract you find online, and decide which discrete issue you want to drill on that day. If you struggle with conditions (e.g., “if,” “provided that,” “subject to,” etc.), find five examples of conditional language, copy them out on a piece of paper, and then work each of them.
Circle the condition and draw an arrow to the consequence. Underline the consequence. Now, re-write the clause twice. In the first re-write, invert the condition to make it a negative condition. In the second re-write, make any terms with vague modifiers specific (e.g., “within five business days” for “promptly”). These re-writes force you to pay attention to how the words change the meaning, and they train you to test clauses for tacit conditions. The entire drill takes less than 12 minutes, so even busy days are no excuse. If the re-writes look different from the original clause, you have already gained an improvement in your legal reading skills, as you have seen that there is not a single “right” way to write a clause.
One common mistake you might make is to try to practice a whole section or whole concept at a time. This dilutes your practice, as you will likely drift to superficial work rather than improving your legal reading skills. To avoid this, restrict the drill to a single grammar or structure, a single type of provision, or a single commonly used defined term. For example, if you struggle to track cross-references (“as defined in Section 4.2”), find six examples, and drill on them. Map where the cross-reference leads, and then determine how the clause changes if you replace the referenced definition with a different one. Limiting your drill to a single technique helps you focus, and it will make the difference between the before and after versions more pronounced.
Add a self-checking mechanism to the drill to help you gauge your improvement without relying on feedback from others. After you finish the drill, cover the original text, and try to re-write the clause from memory, using only your notes. Compare the version from memory to the original text, and note any conditions you omitted, any language you softened, and any details you made up. These are the areas that still require practice.
The next day, return to these areas with a drill based on a different contract that uses the same structure. This way, you can reinforce what you learned the previous day instead of starting fresh. Do this every day, working with a fresh contract (and preferably a different type of contract). One day you practice drilling termination provisions. The next day you practice drilling payment provisions. Then maybe you practice drilling indemnity provisions. Varying the type of provisions helps you practice patterns you see across contracts, and helps you practice your legal reading skills under pressure.
After a few weeks, you will notice that your legal reading skills have improved, for you will be able to recognize patterns more quickly, you will need to read fewer times to understand a clause, and you will feel more confident when faced with an unfamiliar contract. And you will not get bored or overwhelmed because each drill is discrete, is just a few minutes long, and directly related to an improvement you can observe in your daily work.