Why I Created the System I Wish I Had in Law School

For almost two decades, I’ve been a law professor and served as the director of an academic success and bar preparation department at an ABA-accredited law school. During that time, I saw the same problem again and again: law schools teach students the law, but do not teach them how to learn it. 

Instead, students are often taught individual “study skills” throughout the semester—case briefing, note-taking, outlining, exam writing—without being shown how those skills fit together into one cohesive process to learn class topics.

Students are left to connect the dots on their own, often during an overwhelming first semester when the stakes feel highest.

I wanted to change that.

I set out to create an all-inclusive approach to learning in law school that students could use from the outset of the semester—or implement at any point when they needed a better way forward. A system that would eliminate the guesswork.

But I didn’t want to simply teach my personal method and call it the answer. No single person’s habits work for every student.

So I conducted two qualitative phenomenological studies of highly successful law students to understand how they actually learned the law. Through in-depth interviews and a close review of their study materials, I uncovered the strategies they used to understand, organize, and articulate class concepts in discussion and writing.

I then removed redundancies across their processes and combined the remaining skills into one comprehensive system for organizing, learning, and writing class topics for law school exams.

That system became my book, Nine Steps to Law School Success: A Scientifically Proven Study Process for Success in Law School (second edition coming fall 2026).

In 2020, I founded the Law School Success Institute, a national law school preparation company, to support students beyond the law school where I taught.

Using the research behind my book, I transformed the Nine Step Study Process into my flagship course: The Law School Operating System™.

Today, I work directly with law students and partner with law schools nationwide to teach the system through live, virtual, and recorded courses. I also offer personalized coaching to help students apply the system to their own classes, professors, and goals.

And I’ve seen what happens when students finally have a system they understand and know how to use: they become more confident, sharpen their legal analysis, and make meaningful progress toward the academic goals they know they are capable of achieving.

Beyond teaching, I’m a personal injury attorney of 20+ years, co-owner of my Southern California law firm, and a board member of several nonprofits supporting pre-law and law students. These roles keep me connected to both legal education and legal practice—and ensure that what I teach remains grounded in the realities of becoming and practicing as a lawyer.

You can succeed in law school. You are worthy of your seat.

My mission is to give you the system, structure, and support to prove it to yourself.