Thomas Jefferson School of Law has a unique and highly effective academic success program, the SUMMIT Series™. The series starts at the beginning of law school and continues until our students have completed preparation for the bar exam.
The SUMMIT Series™ brings scientific principles in psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science to the study of law and equips students with the best possible skills to succeed in law school.
The SUMMIT Series™ director, Dr. Nancy Johnson and adjunct professor Dr. Dennis Saccuzzo are both California licensed attorneys as well as licensed psychologists. Together they created the SUMMIT Series™ as a unique program that literally develops the brain.
Students learn how to retain the body of knowledge that is the law, and how to apply that knowledge on exams as well as in the real-world practice of law.
The basic premise of the program is teaching law students how to take complex sets of facts, extract the pattern, and then organize them into an integrated whole.
"The core secret is creating access from short-term active memory directly into an individual’s long-term base of knowledge. That allows all of the information needed to pass the bar to be accessible in active memory You can literally expand your memory.”
-Dennis Saccuzzo
“We’ve taken the backbone of the law and have organized it to fit the way the brain works,” says Dr. Johnson. Her partner Saccuzzo says that means categorizing the information in the same way the brain is organized; “We have extracted the structure of the law for them.”
“The basis of it is the encoding-retrieval relationship,” says Saccuzzo. “The way the information is put in is the best indicator of how it will be retrieved.”
SUMMIT Series™
Part one of the series is a graded series of skills, each of which builds on the others and leads to the bar review program. This is how experts are made; the goal is to create expert level law students.
Johnson and Saccuzzo’s system is based on deliberative practice – making adjustments while learning the material. Making those adjustments moves students beyond their comfort zone to take them to the next level. The ability and willingness to move beyond that comfort zone is one of the critical features that distinguish experts from novices.
The program helps students develop a learning framework or schema, helping them develop landmarks or anchor points to be able to learn and retrieve the information.
The SUMMIT Series™ helps students access their long-term memory, which is an unlimited library of information. Accessing long-term working memory depends on effective use of short-term working memory. Not enough information can be held in short-term active memory, but short-term active memory can be a direct link to that unlimited library if used properly. Often we know we have the piece of information we need, but we can’t seem to get at it – that’s the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. The memory is there, but it’s not immediately accessible because the direct link is not there.
The goal is to develop students’ skills to allow them direct access to the body of the law they are storing in long term memory.
See: The Secrets of Human Memory
Bar Secrets® Series
Legal Synthesis:
This is a 3 credit graded course and is the prerequisite for the Full Bar Program. Legal Synthesis covers the same material as a normal commercial bar review course and goes over the core body of knowledge required on the bar exam. It is an intensive class that meets for 8 hours a week over 15 weeks, but most work is done in class with relatively little homework.
Students write one essay in each subject and are taught an effective writing system. The course teaches a unique approach to multiple choice questions (35% of the California bar exam total points) and introduces performance exams (closed universe), which comprise 26% of the California bar exam.
The memory system is taught, but the main goal in Legal Synthesis is to begin the process of automating the tasks required for successful completion of any bar exam.
Legal Synthesis culminates with a comprehensive final which is a mock bar exam.
Full Bar Program:
This program begins where commercial bar review courses end. It entails extensive application of major legal principles and rapid individual feedback on performance and how to improve it.
You can memorize the law, but can you apply it? Since the bar tests your ability to apply the law, Bar Secrets not only develops your brain, but helps you master the material by properly applying the law. It fixes the tools of the trade in your mind and gives you skills which will stay with you forever – making you a better practitioner when you enter the profession as an attorney.
