Those who have been studying or practising the law for a considerable period call it 'working smart' and not 'hard', I call it 'the shot gun approach'! It is understood in various ways, but the general and principal inference that can be drawn therefrom is one of optimising the amount of work that one does in a limited time. To disclaim, there is also the slightly diverging understanding of answering a question by stating every ounce of knowledge that one has about the subject-matter of the question. This shows a lack of understanding, sloppiness and 'guess-work'. This understanding shall not be the focus of this post in that nothing positive can be written about, by analogy, recklessly shooting down a large group of similar-looking people in the hope that one will manage to hit the right one.
It is true that there is indeed a much better alternative to fastidiously spending day and night covered in bulky law reports and it is also true that one must understand oneself in regard to one's own capabilities, comforts and interests. The shot gun approach is a latent and underlying approach that pervades most, if not all, law schools and indeed the profession. The question to be asked is: Why spend five hours reading a case if you can do it in just two? Perhaps it is not as simplistic as I make it out to be, but the fact is that in whatever material that one reads there must be a scraping-off of the irrelevant periphery and a proper grasping of what Professor Garth Abraham calls 'the penumbra'. Put differently, fundamental principles, relevant to a certain set of facts, are what ought to be sought after and anything ancillary thereto can be placed in the proverbial 'back-burner'.
Many of my predecessors have mastered this and none of them express any misgivings about it. However, when one critically analyses their responses and the approach itself one can easily see a possible shortcoming of the approach which may not necessarily be, on the face of it, detrimental to their studying of and development within the law. If we can agree that there are many legal skills (ie: analytical ability, reading faster,etc) which one may acquire through reading and/or analysing a written text, then it obviously becomes rather difficult to understand or accept that one is able to acquire as many skills using the shot-gun approach. The acquisition of skills does not occur only when reading 'relevant' or 'essential' parts of a piece of writing, but also when reading irrelevant parts. For instance, reading everything but the essential principles of a judgment allows one to learn many things such as: legal reasoning, the proper articulation or expression of thoughts and ideas on paper and reading quicker with more precision.
It seems, to my mind at least, that the point is that one should not spend any more time than is absolutely necessary reading or working on something which will in no way contribute to his or her juristic learning and development, by way of skills. However, one should also be careful not to unduly truncate the reading or work which will allow him or her to acquire the necessary legal skills, as explained above.
Frank Talk
Tshepo Mothulwe
