Familiarize yourself with the workings of class rank and grade distribution. Every law school has an official average GPA it needs to maintain for potential students. To keep this GPA, when grading, the school sticks to a grading curve (also known as a bell curve) where, regardless of the number of competent classmates you have, everyone is competing for a preordained number of A's, B's, C's, etc.
Prepare with the final exam in mind. Many students enter law school and manage to go through the majority of their first year without ever laying their eyes on a law school exam. The final exam will make up 100 percent of your grade, and half the part of being successful is familiarizing yourself with the test format by taking practice exams and reviewing examples of exam questions.
Think outside the box with your approach to studying. Many first-year law students have the tendency to stick to the study plan laid out for them. Stray from the pack by putting aside time to read unassigned material. First-year law students tend to study contract law, criminal law, torts and legal writing. There are numerous hornbooks available on these topics as well as videos and forums that can be found online that approach these texts from more in-depth and thorough perspectives.
Utilize the case summary book. Each class has a case summary book keyed to their class to supplement the hornbook for the specific field of law being studied, but it is not mandatory to purchase. Regardless of whether you are assigned a reading from the case summary book or not, make sure you have it handy and take the unconventional approach to your law studies by reading it thoroughly before and after your assigned reading. This will save you valuable comprehension processing time when reading your cases, and allow for a much deeper state of understanding.