Bar Thoughts: Part 1

Introduction

These next series of entries will revolve around my experience taking the California Bar Exam (July 27-29). I finished taking the bar about a week ago. I write to inform of what this process looked like for me. A lot of you may know that I was “studying for the bar” but nothing else other than that. There is really no experience quite like bar-taking. I write this to share what my life for the last 2.5 months looked like and to illuminate some of the process of bar examination preparation. I have read a lot of things about the “tips” people have in “succeeding” with the bar. But I have never seen anything on the inside workings of one taking the bar. I write to explain some of m absence from socializing the last few months. I also share this to give some insight at some of the real struggles I went through during this time. And I write this also for myself as an almost cathartic experience writing things out and letting it go. In writing, I memorialize the memories of what will hopefully become the genesis of my professional career, but also to seek to let go of the stresses involved. It was a very long journey and a process where I discovered a lot about myself in terms of my mental and spiritual preparedness to be a lawyer. It was a very tough road, and one that I hope never to have to go through again.

The California Bar Examination

The California bar examination is a professional exam administered by the State Bar of California as a prerequisite to the practice of law in California. It is considered to be the toughest bar exam in the nation because of the breadth of the subjects, the length of the test, and the standard by which they grade it. It is stated that the exam is a test of “minimum competency.” If you pass, you are deemed to be minimally competent to be a first year lawyer in California.

The exam is three days long. The first and the third days are the “written” portion of the test. There are three essay questions in the morning (for three hours) and one three hour “performance test” in the afternoon. The easiest way to describe the performance test for non-bar takers is that you have to write a memo or something similar to what you would have to write in actual real world practice. Test-takers are given a “client file” with a task memo along with a “library” of cases and statutes. We have to prepare, research, and write what is asked in the task memo within the three hours. The second day of the exam is the “Multistate Bar Exam” (MBE) which is 200 multiple choice questions covering six subjects. Three hours 100 questions in the morning. The same thing in the afternoon.

So just to recap, that’s about 18 total hours of testing time over three days. We get there around 8, leave around 5. Have about 1.5 hours for lunch break. It actually sounds a lot worse than it is (but that’s for a later entry).

(to be continued)