IRAC is the format nearly every law professor expects on an essay exam, and it is also the format most students misuse. They know the letters. They can recite what each one stands for. Then the exam comes back with a C+ and a note in the margin that says conclusory or where is your analysis? This page is about closing that gap.
Law School Is a Skill, Not a Mystery
Most struggling law students are not lazy and are not short on information. They work hard at the wrong things — rereading casebooks, recopying outlines, memorizing black letter rules they can already recite. Grades in law school come from methodnot from how much you know. The student who can take a messy set of facts and walk a grader through a rule, applied cleanly, one element at a time, will outscore the student who knows twice as much doctrine and dumps it on the page.
Curtis Lewis built this coaching practice around that one idea. The work is not about making you read more. It is about showing you what a graded answer looks like from the grader's side of the desk, and then drilling it until writing that way feels normal instead of forced.
What IRAC Actually Asks You to Do
Each letter is a job, and each job has a failure mode that costs points. Coaching sessions go through them one at a time, using your own exams and your own professor's fact patterns.
- Issue — Naming the legal question the facts raise, narrowly enough to be useful. Most lost points start here, with an issue stated so broadly that the rest of the answer has nowhere to go.
- Rule — Stating the governing standard in the form your professor taught it, including the elements and any exception that the facts put in play. No rule dumps, no reciting the whole outline.
- Application — The part worth the most points and the part most students skip. Tying specific facts to specific elements, and arguing both sides where the facts are genuinely close.
- Conclusion — Answering the question you asked. Short, committed, and not a hedge.
Beyond the four letters, we work on the habits around them: how to read a fact pattern and mark the triggering facts before you write a word, how to budget minutes per issue so you do not run out of time on the last question, and how to spot the issues your professor buried in a throwaway sentence.
You are not being graded on what you know. You are being graded on what you did with the facts on the page in front of you.
How the Coaching Works
This is one-on-one work with Curtis, by phone or video, scheduled Monday through Sunday, 9:00am to 7:00pm. There is no class to keep up with and no recorded course to fall behind in. Sessions are built around whatever is in front of you right now — a practice essay, a midterm that came back lower than you expected, a fact pattern from last year's exam your professor posted.
A typical session has three parts. You write, Curtis reads it the way a grader would, and then the two of you rebuild the answer out loud so you can hear where the points were and where they were not. Over a few sessions the feedback loop does the teaching. Students usually start seeing the difference in their own writing before they see it in a grade.
- Bring a real exam question, a graded answer, or both.
- Write under something close to exam conditions so the timing pressure is real.
- Go through the answer line by line and mark where a grader stops awarding points.
- Rewrite the weakest section on the spot, then take a fresh fact pattern for next time.
IRAC work pairs naturally with case briefing and exam writing, and most students end up moving between all three. The briefing work feeds the rule statements, and the exam writing work is where IRAC finally has to hold up under a clock.
Start With a Conversation
The first step is a conversation about where you are — what year, what courses, what the last set of grades looked like, and what you are actually being asked to produce on your next exam. Reach Curtis Lewis at (903) 651-6999 or by email at curtislewis420@gmail.comand he will tell you honestly whether coaching is the right fit for the problem you are trying to solve.