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You said you did it with minimal studying. How much time did you devote to studying and what strategies did you use?
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Not counting the last couple weeks of the semester when its basically all day, or when memos were due, when it was all day, I rarely did any work. Obviously this is not advisable and not practical for most.
My biggest suggestion in terms of getting a good effort
utcome ratio is to realize why you are studying and doing work. This is 1L, you are not here to learn some abstract material. You are in direct competition with your classmates to see who can get the best grades. Believe it or not, the knowledge will come.
Don't do work to prepare for classes, do work to prepare for tests. Sometimes these overlap 100%, but often they do not. Who cares if you look like a shining star in class, its all about that final at the end of the year.
For each class you have, get the textbook and the correspoding High Court Case Summaries, and also get a hornbook such as Examples and Explanations, Gilbert's, Chemerinsky, etc.
Read the case summary, figure out why you are reading this case. Then read the case. Highlight the important bits that correspond to the capsule summary in the commercial brief.
If you still don't get what is going on, go to the hornbook for clarity.
Once you learn the ins and outs of each class some will necessitate more, some less. I had one class where the professor recapped the highlights of the cases up front, which made reading the canned briefs unecessary.
There was another that never mentioned the cases, only the rules, so some times I wouldn't bother reading the cases, only noting what rule they corresponded to.
Unless it is the professor's rule, don't bother making your own outlines. No matter how smart or anal you are, someone has already made a better one, so don't reinvent the wheel. Most schools now have online outline banks, and many (Columbia, NYU, USC) are open to public.
Find the most recent one, hopefully someone that had your professor and same case book. Then use that as your base, and build upon it by trimming down, adding things from your class notes, any new cases, etc. Find flow charts and graphs elsewhere, combine outlines, look to the hornbooks, etc.
I know, I know, some people learn while they write. This may have been true in undergrad, but when there is a 75 page outline waiting for you, spend 10 hours editing it to your liking, instead of 50 making your own.
Study groups:
Don't study with dumb people. If you are constantly the one explaining things to people, stop, make an excuse, and leave.
Thankfully I found a good study group to do practice tests with, so I always got as much out of it as I put in.
Straight numbers? From Sept.-Dec. 1, I probably did <1 hour of work each day, and maybe 3-4 on the weekends.
When it came to the 15 days before finals, then it was time to go all day long.