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This originally appeared in March of 2010:

One of the frustrations of law school that many students have is that the model of school (and to some extent the model of law practice) was built at a time in which the information available to make a decision was much less. The strategy that was taught was to research all of the information on a subject and only after researching everything exhaustively, to come to a conclusion. To some extent, this is still the way that law school works.We kind of pretend like that is still possible, and we tend to try to cover as much information as possible in school “just in case” students encounter these situations in the future.

But the underlying research and decision strategy for just in case processing is not quite as workable anymore. We have too much information, and students instead have learned (or we need to teach) how to manage the information out there so that they have enough high quality information easily available to process quickly to guide a decision at the time the decision needs to be made. Students tend to follow a “just enough” and “just in time” information management strategy.

To some extent we need to have a good balance between “just in case” learning and “just in time” learning. And I just read a really interesting explanation of the difference between the two and why just in case learning is especially important. So, keep in mind that what you’re learning in class is mostly just in case learning, and that is what we are testing for at the end of the semester–can you see the possibilities and dangers of different factual scenarios, and can you explain those to someone not in your head.

That will make you better at the just in time learning that fine tunes a decision when you encounter it in the world.

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