Article written by Nemr Chaer, Future Trainee Solicitor at Clifford Chance and finalist Law student at the University of Warwick.
As a law student, it is inevitable that you will be asked to solve a legal problem question (PQ). This is a question whereby you are given a problem scenario that has several legal issues which you will be asked to analyse. Alternatively, you could be asked to advise a fictitious client in the scenario. The purpose of legal PQs is to test whether you can correctly filter your way through complex areas of law in a meaningful way. This short article will provide my top three tips for solving legal PQs.
Understanding the difference between a legal PQ and a legal essay is of paramount importance. This is because it allows you to understand where and how you should concentrate your efforts when it comes to answering.
The main difference between answering a legal PQ and an essay is their respective goals. The intention of a legal essay is to critically evaluate the law with reference to academic debates and opinions. As a result, your efforts are concentrated on fleshing out the nuances of the law in a scholarly manner. This means that you are commonly going to write an introductory paragraph contextualising the law and provide several academic arguments. Even the language that you will use in the essay will be a lot more free-flowing and explorative. This differs from legal PQs. For the latter, your intention is to advise a fictitious client. If this client was real, you would not provide an elaborative introduction and flesh out the scholarly debates in the law. Instead, you will be conscious to provide structured, concise, and authoritative advice with the support of case law. In other words, a PQ requires a greater sense of certainty relative to legal essays. Keeping this difference in mind will allow you to make the slight mental adjustment needed to answer a legal PQ.
As a law student, it is likely that you would have heard of the IRAC technique for answering legal PQs. What does IRAC stand for and how does it work?
Adopting the IRAC method is beneficial because it allows you to structure your legal advice in a way that is easy to follow. Here are some extra tips that you should note when using the IRAC method.
The IRAC method is definitely the optimum way to solve a legal PQ, but it is also advised that you do not apply it so rigidly. Indeed, there will be instances where the Rule and Application components of IRAC coincide.
If you want to master the art of answering a legal PQ then you must practice it over and over again. This will allow you to find your own technique for answering a PQ whilst also consolidating your revision. The reason it consolidates your revision is that it will eliminate the areas of law that you might have thought were important but are not necessarily so. In other words, practicing answering PQs allows you to work smarter, not harder. The way to practice is to simply refer to previous exam papers, find a question, answer it, and then mark it!