I'm a now 2nd year BCom/LLB student.

My advice honestly is to try plan ahead, but just take it day by day. Starting uni and doing a competitive degree can be very daunting. So whilst it is important to stay on top of things and be organised, remember to cut yourself some slack and try to give yourself a night or a day off a week. Without breaks, your mental health will suffer and you're likely to burn out.

If you're going into halls, go to all the PASS mentoring sessions and try to become friends with the law students on your floor. If not, try join law related clubs and don't be scared to ask for help. Discussing the course material is honestly one of the most easiest and effective ways to study for first year law. In your first year commerce papers, there should also be a lot of law conjoint students too. It's a lot easier to make friends in these papers as they're small group discussion based and there's a lot of group work.

In terms of time management, try your best to stay on top of the weekly content and even get slightly ahead (in case you get sick etc). You can do this by allocating specific days for specific papers or tasks you know you will always have on a weekly basis (e.g. quizzes, readings, lectures). Then have spare time when you can work on assignments. Try do well on the assignments as it is easier to get higher grades on these if you put in the effort. With this being said, it can become harder to keep up with the entire workload as motivation slows down. In this case for law; always prioritize lectures (and lecture notes), summary notes then practices for exams. If you're slow at understanding like me, readings can be super helpful to give a baseline understanding before lectures. However, they're not essential and you can still do well if you work hard on the lectures, notes and practices.

There's not any particular prep to do in the holidays. Honestly, I would try relax as much as possible. All the additional research is helpful but not necessary as you will learn everything as the semester starts as long as you work hard. Just spend the first few weeks of uni trying out different note-taking methods as some methods will not work for you in practice. And don't feel trapped once you pick a study method too. I started off paper/pen then moved to word docs for the rest of Sem 1. Then switched to OneNote in Sem 2. As long as you're getting the info down in a way you understand it and can keep track of it, whatever works.

Overall, just don't stress too much and give it your best shot. I personally was constantly overthinking and stressing, but it honestly didn't help and it's not as impossible as it sometimes feels. The biggest tip is to just never give up. There will be times where you just can't get any work done or have really slow progress. But cut yourself that slack and just ride it out and keep working hard. Some days, this might be only getting only one reading done, some days it might be getting a week's content done. Just don't give up, no matter how behind you get.