Original post by stjonksTo begin, law students take four courses each academic year. The courses are predetermined and compulsory for the first two years and options are opened to you in your third. The four courses for the first year are: public law, property I, contract law and criminal law.
For each course, there is one lecture per week lasting two hours. It is unlikely (read: impossible) that you will have more than one lecture per week per course. This means that you will have four lectures per week. On the other hand, tutorials work in fortnightly cycles, with two tutorials per week. So in odd weeks, you could have tutorials in, say, Public law and Property law tutorials while in even weeks you could have tutorials in Contract law and Criminal law tutorials. Thus, each week you should have a total of 8 hours of lectures and 2 hours of tutorials.
Each tutorial lasts for only an hour and usually consists of 7 others of your peers and a tutor who could be anyone ranging from someone who just completed his masters to a full-fledged professor. The tutorials are designed in line with the topics of the lectures you are having each week. The lectures usually only supply you with the necessary information/knowledge that you require to approach the subject. By contrast, tutorials go into greater depth regarding the material you have been introduced in the lectures and are intended to probe you into doing your own further reading so that you may have a fruitful discussion and deeper understanding of the topic at hand.
The exact way in which your tutorial group approaches the topics is entirely up to your tutor. For each tutorial, you will have a corresponding tutorial handout that you are expected to download that tells you what further readings you are expected to do and also questions about the topic to think about. Different tutors have massively varying styles -- some prefer to stick to the questions on the handout whilst others launch into open, sandbox-style debate. Regardless, your tutor ought to provide the opportunity for you to clear any factual doubts you may have regarding the topic.
Regarding additional advice:
1) Law as a subject is rather different from what the typical student is used to; it is an eclectic mix of rote learning (so that you can memorise case names and their ratio decidendi), normative and value-based arguments and pure logic. This may sound intimidating, but you should be able to adjust to this within the first couple of weeks and realise they all fit perfectly together to form a coherent and (typically) common-sensical discipline.
2) Regarding your social life -- you should find nothing lacking. The UCL law faculty and the freshers' fortnight will leave you wanting for nothing in the department of mingling and asylum-worthy madness.
3) Regarding academics -- you probably have two valuable resources to ensure that you're on the right track to getting the grades you desire. First is your personal tutor, a tutor assigned to you to care for your overall wellbeing and discuss whatever issues that may arise in the course of your time in UCL. My tutor helped a lot in teaching me how to approach a subject I was weak at; after all, they were once students too. Your second resource is your transition mentor. UCL has a transition programme and all first-years will be introduced to their assigned transition mentors at the beginning of the year. The transition mentor is a second-year student who is likely to know what exactly you've been through, having experienced the same just a year ago. Transition mentors are usually selected based on willingness to help and a decent academic record which indicate that they are worthy of giving sound advice. I'll be a transition mentor in the coming year too so maybe I'll see one of you then. Mine helped in giving a personal perspective regarding the torrent of events that flooded me when I was a fresher, and will inevitably flood you too. Which brings me on to my fourth point:
4) Having so many events happening at once can be overwhelming. Thus, priorities. Decide what you want to achieve in your first year. Keep in mind that the grades in your first year do not count towards the final grade of your degree. However, also keep in mind that you don't want to suck too badly in your first year because a) you may have to go for the infamous re-sits and b) in general, getting the hang of exams and the core subjects in your first year will save you a lot of trouble in your second and third.
5) You should receive a reading list if you haven't already. I didn't really read much of what was on it, and I turned out fine. The first two weeks of your academic year should have no real lectures, only an 'introduction to law' series or something which is mind-numbingly dull and almost completely pointless. Just attend the lectures for the series for the heck of it, I didn't gain much from it but maybe you would.
Hope you found the above useful. I'm still open to further questions.