The LASER Plan
A plan you can’t keep on a bad week was never a plan.
Open my inbox any January and you’ll find this exact email over and over, signed by a different name each time.
“Steve, I have 4 months. I bought LawHub. I’m motivated. What do I actually DO?”
Look at what that student has. Materials: check. Time: check. Motivation: check. What’s missing is the thing this entire industry is strangely bad at handing out: a sequence. Not 600 pages of technique. An answer to Tuesday at 7pm.
Part 2 gave you the most valuable tools in prep. Tools without a sequence are how my 152 year happened: I owned everything and scheduled nothing, so every study session began with the most expensive question in test prep, what should I do right now? Asked nightly, that question costs you 10 minutes of decision, a coin-flip’s worth of guilt, and eventually the whole enterprise. A plan’s first job isn’t squeezing the most out of every hour. It’s deleting the nightly negotiation.
Here’s the sequence. 5 phases, in order, and the order is the point.
LASER: Learning, Accuracy, Sections, Exams/Endurance, Review.
Before I walk you through it, 2 structural notes that make this plan different from the ones that failed you.
First: the R is not a phase. It’s the floor the other 4 stand on. Learning, Accuracy, Sections, Exams: those are stages you move through, each one adding a layer (first understanding, then correctness, then the clock, then stamina). Review runs underneath all 4, every week, from your first session to your last, because you already know from chapter 4 where points come from. A version of this plan that treats Review as step 5, something you reach in month 3, is the Drilling Trap with better branding. The R runs always. (You may have heard pacing-endurance-accuracy sequences elsewhere, including from a younger me. Same animal; LASER is that idea grown up, with the R holding it together.)
Second: the phases are gated by readiness, not by dates. I’ll give you calendar shapes in a minute because humans need them, but every phase below comes with an exit test, and the exit test outranks the calendar. Leaving a phase early because the calendar said so is how plateaus get scheduled.
L: Learning (1 to 2 weeks)
The job: orientation, not mastery. Know the test’s shape, the 2 LR jobs, the 6 skeleton files, the 4 RC questions, and the autopsy protocol. If you’ve read this book to here, you are, right now, most of the way through L. A few evenings with Part 2 and a handful of untimed official questions to see the ideas in the wild, and you’re done.
Materials, while we’re in L, because this is the only phase where you buy anything. The list has 2 items. LawHub, LSAC’s official platform, which is where every real PrepTest lives (tiers and prices change; current guidance sits on the resources page), and a notebook. That’s the complete inventory. Anything else you purchase this month is trap 1 with a receipt.
The trap, and you can name it yourself: L is where trap 1 lives. The phase feels safe and infinitely extendable. There’s always another video. So L gets a hard ceiling: 2 weeks, maximum, ever. Chapter 3’s tell applies; when hours consumed dwarf questions attempted, L has expired whether you feel ready or not.
Exit test: you can explain, out loud, to an unlucky friend, what the why-chain is and why drilling alone plateaus. Explanation is the exit exam, not familiarity.
A: Accuracy (the longest phase, often 4 to 8 weeks)
The job: get questions right, with the clock off, and find out why when you don’t. This is where Predict First’s mastery gate lives, where your skeleton journal gets its first 20 entries, where the 20-minute autopsies become routine. Untimed doesn’t mean leisurely; it means the only opponent in this phase is you. This is also where the 2/3 Rule starts steering: LR-heavy by default, your miss ledger holding veto power, recount monthly. The length and the position are both deliberate, and the reason is a sentence worth keeping: speed is what understanding looks like from the outside. You cannot pace your way out of comprehension problems; a student who’s inaccurate untimed will be inaccurate-plus-panicked timed. Every week you’re tempted to skip ahead to the stopwatch, remember that the clock doesn’t add a skill; it reveals which ones are missing.
The trap: perfectionism, trap 1’s sneakier cousin. Some students won’t leave A until they’re flawless untimed. You don’t need flawless. You need the exit test.
Exit test: across your last 50 untimed official LR questions, accuracy comfortably above what your circled number requires (for targets of 165 and up, that means roughly 85 percent; the score-to-accuracy table lives on the cheat sheet), and every miss got the full autopsy. (RC: last 6 passages, same bar.) The second clause is not decoration. 50 questions with checked answers is just a thermometer reading. Open the invoices and the same 50 become a foundation. S: Sections (2 to 4 weeks)
The job: introduce the clock, 1 section at a time. A full test asks 2 questions of you (can you pace? can you last?), and bundling them is how students learn neither. S isolates the first. The mechanics: timed individual sections from LawHub at full official conditions, 35 minutes each, 2 to 4 sections a week, each followed (same day or next) by its full review block. This is where you build your pacing system, and its constitution has 3 articles. Article 1: bank the easy points first. LR runs roughly easy to hard, so the early questions are where speed is safe and the late ones are where your banked minutes get spent; RC has no reliable order, so you set one with the 30-second triage from chapter 9. Article 2: the flag is a tool, not a defeat. 2 minutes stuck is a question telling you it’s priced wrong for right now; flag it, leave, return rich with time. The flag is Predict First’s pacing twin: a decision made in advance so the clock can’t extort you mid-section. Article 3: never leave a blank. There’s no wrong-answer penalty, so a guess is a free lottery ticket and a blank is a torn one. Those 3 articles are your pacing constitution. Write them in the notebook as 3 lines, your wording, because chapter 12’s mid-section script will quote them back to you under pressure.
The trap: score-watching. Section scores swing (2 or 3 questions between any 2 sections is normal variance, and full-test scores wobble harder than that), and students in S ride the swings emotionally, declaring breakthroughs on Tuesday and crises on Friday. Judy’s heart-monitor year was this. Single sections are weather; the climate is what you’re building.
Exit test: 3 consecutive LR sections finishing within time with accuracy within 2 or 3 questions of your untimed baseline, and 1 RC section likewise. Translation: the clock has stopped costing you understanding.
E: Exams/Endurance (the final 4 to 6 weeks)
The job: stamina and simulation. The real test is 4 sections back to back, 3 scored plus 1 unscored experimental dressed identically, with a 10-minute break after the second section. Section 4 is where untrained test-takers donate points, not because question 90 is harder than question 10, but because their reading precision, the exact skill this test grades, degrades with fatigue. Endurance isn’t toughness. It’s accuracy that survives hour 3.
The mechanics: full 4-section practice tests under honest conditions, same start time as your real administration when possible (your brain is a creature of schedule), phone in another room, break timed to the second. Use an official or self-assembled fourth section so the length matches the real day. Cadence: 1 full test a week is the default; 2 is the ceiling, and only if both get full review. More on why that’s the ceiling in a moment, with arithmetic.
The trap here is the book’s oldest villain, back for the final month: exam-stacking. Scared students torch 5 tests a week, reviews shrinking to score-checks, scores sliding down as fatigue compounds, panic rising, more tests prescribed.
It’s the Drilling Trap and the grind holding hands, and it eats more final-month points than any skeleton in your journal. The week’s rhythm that prevents it is below.
Exit test: there isn’t one, exactly; E ends on test day. The readiness markers you want: 3 to 4 full tests where section 4’s accuracy sits within a question or 2 of section 1’s, and a 5-test average at or past your target. (The average, never the best test; a best test is an anecdote, and the average is a forecast. And remember from chapter 1: schools generally take your highest official score, so the forecast can afford honesty.)
R: Review (always)
You already own this phase; chapter 6 was its manual. Here it just gets its budget protected, because R is the line item every panicked schedule cuts first, and cutting it converts your whole plan back into thermometer-reading. 2 rules:
The 1:1 rule. Every hour of timed testing buys an hour of review minimum, before the next timed anything. Chapter 4’s top scorers ran richer ratios than that. You don’t get to run poorer.
The arithmetic, done once, honestly. (My old book mangled this badly enough to imply 5 hours reviewing a single question. Let’s retire that typo with real numbers.) Say a full test leaves you 12 misses plus 8 troubled rights, 20 invoices. Full autopsies at 20 minutes each would be nearly 7 hours, which is real but front-loaded thinking: by E phase, most invoices are reruns, skeletons already in your journal, and a rerun needs 5 minutes (confirm the bone, add the tally, check rule-of-3) not 20. So a realistic E-phase test review runs 2.5 to 4 hours: full autopsies for the 4 to 6 new specimens, rerun-rate for the rest. Now you can see why 2 tests is the weekly ceiling: 2 tests is about 5 hours of testing plus 5 to 8 of review, which is a full honest week. A third test doesn’t fit; it can only be paid for by cutting R, and you know what that purchase is called.
The shapes: your months on 1 page
3 timelines. Find yours, copy the shape into your notebook, then let the exit tests adjust it.
5 to 6 months (the recommended build). L: 2 weeks. A: 8 weeks. S: 4 weeks. E: 6 weeks, with a deliberately light final week. This is the shape with slack in it, and slack is a feature: life happens across half a year, and exit tests sometimes say “2 more weeks.” (My 5 students from chapter 1 all lived inside roughly this shape.)
3 to 4 months (the compressed build). L: 1 week, this book plus orientation questions, done. A: 5 to 6 weeks. S: 3 weeks. E: 4 weeks. Compression comes out of L and A’s comfort margin, never out of R; the 1:1 rule is identical at every speed. Under 10 weeks (triage). Honesty first: this is not the recommended path, and if your registration allows a later date at no great cost, the next chapter will help you think about moving it; Annie’s cancellation was the best decision in chapter 1. If the date is truly fixed: L is 3 days (Part 2 of this book, twice). A is 3 weeks, LR nearly exclusively, the 2/3 Rule at full strength, skeleton journal from day 1. S is 2 weeks. E is 2 to 3 weeks at 1 test per week, never 2, because at this compression a panic-spiral costs proportionally more. The triage student’s edge: you have no spare hours to spend in traps, which, grimly, is a kind of clarity.
What Tuesday at 7pm actually looks like
The email at the top of this chapter deserves a literal answer. A default week in mid-A phase, for a student with 12 to 15 hours (evenings plus 1 weekend block), the most common real schedule I coach:
Monday, 90 minutes: 10 LR questions untimed with written predictions, then full autopsies on the misses.
Tuesday, 90 minutes: same. (There’s your 7pm.)
Wednesday, 60 to 90 minutes: 1 RC passage with the 4 questions in writing, autopsy anything troubled, then 15 minutes with the skeleton journal, checking tallies against the rule of 3.
Thursday, 90 minutes: LR again, aimed at whatever the journal’s tallies flagged.
Friday: off, and off means off.
Saturday, 3 hours: the week’s big block. Late in A phase that’s a half-test plus its full review. Early in S phase it becomes your timed section plus review.
Sunday, 45 minutes: the weekly ledger (below), plus next week’s plan, so Monday starts with 0 decisions.
That’s 9 to 10 hours, with slack left under your 12 to 15, LR-tilted per the 2/3 Rule, R woven through every day rather than appended, 1 full rest day guarded like a scored section. Scale it up or down; keep the proportions. And yes, life will wreck a week now and then. Wreck it, log it, resume. The plan survives contact.
And the caps, from chapter 3’s third trap, now in their permanent home: 5 to 6 focused hours a day, ceiling, even for full-time studiers. 1 full rest day a week, non-negotiable. A rest day is not lost progress; consolidation is when your brain files the week’s skeletons, and the test grades fresh precision, not accumulated suffering. You cannot read “most” as most on 6 hours of sleep and 19 straight days. I’ve watched hundreds try.
2 more weeks, for 2 more lives
The Tuesday-at-7pm week assumes 12 to 15 hours. 2 common lives don’t have that shape, so both get a build.
The working-parent build (7 to 9 hours): the same proportions on a smaller frame, with 2 changes. The daily sessions shrink to 60 minutes and 1 of them moves to wherever your day has slack (a lunch break runs an autopsy just fine; the journal fits in a phone note until Sunday transcribes it). And the Saturday block becomes the load-bearing wall: 2.5 to 3 protected hours, negotiated with whoever shares your household like the appointment it is, because at this hour count, losing Saturday loses the week. What never shrinks: the rest day and the R. At 8 hours a week, cutting review to add questions is trading your only compounding asset for volume, and you have the least volume to spare of anyone. The timeline stretches instead; the 5-to-6-month shape is your default, and that’s a feature, not a penalty.
The full-time build (25 to 30 hours): the danger inverts. You have room to hurt yourself, so the caps do the steering. 2 blocks a day, morning and afternoon, 2.5 to 3 hours each, hard stop at the daily ceiling even when motivation says otherwise, because chapter 3’s third trap recruits hardest from the unemployed and the summer-break crowd. The extra hours go to depth, not volume: richer review ratios, a second weekly RC passage, earlier and more frequent ledgers. They do not go to extra full tests; the 2-per-week ceiling is identical at every hour count, for the arithmetic you just read.
The ledger: 15 minutes that steer the month
Once a week, Sunday slot, 4 lines in the notebook. Hours by section this week (recount against the 2/3 Rule). New skeletons versus reruns. The ratio falling is what improvement looks like from inside, and it usually moves 2 to 3 weeks before the score does. So the method’s first visible payment is often invisible. Week 4 readers, that sentence is for you. Anthony’s 9 flat weeks in chapter 1 were this paragraph, lived. Rule-of-3 alerts (any bone at 3 tallies is next week’s Thursday). Phase check (am I passing my current exit test, and if I’ve stalled 2 straight weeks, which trap’s tell from chapter 3 do I see?).
That last line is your early-warning system. Plateaus announce themselves in the ledger 2 to 3 weeks before they show up in scores, and a plateau caught in the ledger is a Thursday-session fix, not a crisis.
2 Sundays, filled in
The 4 lines are abstract until you watch them work, so 2 real ledger entries from the same student, 5 weeks apart, lightly cleaned.
Week 3 of A phase: “Hours: LR 6, RC 3.5 (ratio fine). New skeletons 7, reruns 2. Rule of 3: ‘after = because’ just hit 3 tallies, Thursday is causal questions. Phase check: untimed LR at 72 percent, below bar, staying in A.” Plain, slightly worried, just what week 3 should look like. The 7-to-2 ratio says she’s still meeting new bones, which is what early A is for.
Week 8: “Hours: LR 5, RC 4 (RC misses up, ledger overrides the default this week). New 2, reruns 9, and 6 of the 9 died in under 5 minutes. Rule of 3: nothing new at 3; ‘walked the door backwards’ down to 1 fresh tally in 3 weeks. Phase check: last 50 untimed at 86 percent, every invoice opened. Taking the S exit test next week.” Look at what the instrument caught that a score log never would: the ratio inverted, the reruns got cheap, a section override fired on evidence instead of mood, and a phase transition got scheduled by data. Her practice scores across those same 5 weeks, for the record: nearly flat until week 7. The ledger called the breakthrough 2 weeks before the scoreboard confirmed it, which is the entire reason the 15 minutes exist.
When the ledger says stall: the triage
2 straight weeks failing the same exit test, or 2 weeks of scores drifting down, triggers a 4-step triage. Run it in order; most stalls resolve at step 1 or 2.
Step 1: name the trap tell. Reviews shrinking while tests multiply is trap 2; hours climbing past the caps is trap 3; a sudden new-materials shopping urge is trap 1 trying to re-enroll you. The fix is the cap you’ve been violating, reinstated, and nothing else changes for a week.
Step 2: read the ratio before declaring a plateau. If new skeletons are still arriving at 4-plus a week, you’re not stalled. You’re digesting, and Anthony’s 9 flat weeks are what digestion looks like from the scoreboard side. Flat scores with a falling ratio is the silence before the move. Hold.
Step 3: separate variance from level. Pull your last 5 scores: if the spread is 5-plus points, you don’t have a level problem, you have a floor problem, and the variance work in the next chapter’s second archetype is your prescription, not more content. Step 4: if it’s truly the level, intervene by phase. An A-phase stall is almost always autopsy depth: audit your last 5 templates against chapter 6’s, and if the why-chains stop at 1 why, there’s your leak. An S-phase stall means the clock is taxing comprehension: drop back untimed for 1 week and re-baseline, because you may have left A on the calendar’s signature instead of the exit test’s. An E-phase stall is volume: cut to 1 test, restore the 1:1, and watch the next 2 Sundays before doing anything dramatic. A plateau caught here costs a week. Diagnosed by panic, it costs a month.
Choosing the test date itself
Work backwards, with 3 constraints. 1: your phase math above, plus 2 spare weeks, sets the earliest honest date. 2: law school applications generally reward earlier submission within a cycle, so count backward from when you want applications complete. 3: plan the retake into the calendar from day 1, not as a contingency you’ll feel ashamed of. The test runs 8 or 9 times a year, schools generally take your highest score, and Zach’s second sitting, the 169 that became a 176, was worth more than most students’ entire prep. A first date chosen with a built-in second date behind it removes half the test-day terror at zero cost. Registration deadlines, fees, score-release dates, and the score-preview option change too often for print; current details live on the resources page.
•••
Tonight, 20 minutes, pen.
3 entries in the notebook. 1: your phase, right now, honestly (most readers of this sentence are late L or early A; retakers are often mid-A wearing an E-phase costume, which is itself a diagnosis). 2: your timeline shape, copied in, with real dates against each phase and a candidate test date plus its backup. 3: your default week, modeled on Tuesday-at-7pm above, bent around your actual life. Then book next Sunday’s first ledger, 15 minutes, in whatever calendar you actually obey. The plan’s job starts tomorrow: deleting the nightly negotiation.
•••
Free companion #10: the Weekly Ledger. The 6-row Sunday ledger, the 3 timeline shapes, and your pacing constitution’s 3 lines on 1 sheet you’ll reuse every week. A short written walkthrough builds the whole week with you. Free at unpluggedprep.com/books.
•••
KEEP THESE 3
LASER: Learning capped at 2 weeks, Accuracy until your untimed numbers clear your circled number’s bar with every invoice opened, Sections until the clock stops costing you accuracy, Exams until section 4 holds and your 5-test average clears target. Exit tests outrank calendars.
The R runs under everything, protected by the 1:1 rule and honest arithmetic: a full test’s review is 2.5 to 4 hours (full autopsies for new bones, 5-minute rerun-rate for tallies), which is why 2 tests a week is the ceiling.
Caps are part of the plan: 5 to 6 focused hours a day, 1 sacred rest day, a 15-minute Sunday ledger. Your average forecasts. Your ledger steers. Your best test is an anecdote.
•••
You now have what January’s email was asking for: the sequence, the week, the date. The calendar is set. Next: the chapter for the reader on round 2, because the retake you planned on day 1 deserves better than a do-over. First-timers, read it anyway or skip ahead; either way, the chapter after it armors the morning.
