Bar Exam Secrets

You Must Get Ready for Your Bar Exams in your Second Year of Law School.

This article is by no means comprehensive or related to all aspects of Bar Exam basics but we will give you advice practically no one else can give you.

The Bar Exam is a test administered by state Bar organizations which law school graduates must pass before being licensed to practice law. In some states, there may be other requirements, such as having completed three years of legal education. Each state’s Bar Exam is unique but almost all states use a two or three-day format incorporating the nationally administered Multistate Bar Exam, (MBE) a six-hour, 200 question multiple-choice exam as a component of their test. To learn more about the MBE please click on the MBE section to the left. State-specific law is often tested on a second day, usually in essay format. In most jurisdictions, the bar exam is offered twice a year, in February and July. We will address preparing for the essay portions of these exams in this article.

Prepare for your Bar Exam in your second year of law school. The first issue you should address when preparing for the Bar Exam is to pick the state(s) you want to be licensed in. Once you have figured it out, then you want to prepare for your Bar Exam while you are still in law school. It is highly recommended that you make a list of the topics tested in the Bar Exam from each state and that you take those courses while you are in law school. Too many students graduate from law school without taking courses for the topics tested on their bar exams. The average Moron and we do mean Moron, does not even take the time to figure out such simple issues while they are still in law school. The time to prepare for your Bar Exam is when you are in law school and not hoping that a Bar Exam review course will get you through.

Get Copies of Old Bar Exams.

The second issue is to get copies of all the old Bar Exams given in that state. Many states have them on line and many states sell their old Bar Exams and many states put the old Bar Exams in law school libraries in their states. One thing is for sure, Bar Exam creators are predictable creatures of habit and they are lazy and they have a strong tendency to give Bar Exam tests that look a lot like each other. This author carefully reviewed the California State Bar Exam over a 40-year history and shucks to our surprise the same verbiage, the same issues, practically word for word in many instances the same Bar Exam tests repeated themselves with an unbelievable frequency. To not get old Bar Exam copies would be a serious mistake. A random sampling of four other major state Bar Exam tests produced the same results in each and every state Bar Exam.

You must practice taking as many of the old Bar Exams as you can get your hands on. Many states even give you model Bar Exam answers so you can check your work and know if your answers are up to snuff.

Good Bar Exam Preparation Involves Researching All the Casebooks used in all the Law Schools in the State.

The next issue also involves some simple detective work. Each state Bar Exam has a number of law schools in the state and some states even have non ABA approved law schools. To prepare for the Bar Exam in the states you want, call the bookstores of all the law schools in that state and find out for each area of law tested what casebooks each of the schools uses. To prepare for a Bar Exam you must study the cases in each of those casebooks. We discovered this issue when we took the California Bar Exam. The criminal portion of the Bar Exam was a eulogy to rape. Unfortunately, we had used the Boyce Perkins Criminal law casebook and it had a few cases about rape. Only after the exam when looking at another criminal law casebook did we find out where they got all the fact patterns for rape from. It was another casebook which was used in the law school 40 miles down the road. Had we just skimmed those cases we would have aced that portion of the Bar Exam. That is one of the reasons why so many students have problems passing bar exams. They never learned the material in all the different casebooks but just the one they used in class.

Rom Law™ has a Large Amount of the Casebooks used in Law School.

We recommend the Rom Law™ product from Study Partner because you get 280 or so casebooks briefed and you can easily skim the briefs and the fact patterns and the scope of the cases can be learned quickly. You also get flash cards, outlines, and all the reference material you will need to review for the exam.

You May Want to Take a Bar Review Course.

Taking a bar review course for the state you intend to take the Bar Exam is recommended. We will not recommend anyone herein but we will give you some sage advice for picking a bar review course. First determine all the companies that offer courses within your target state. Get all their used literature you can from ex-students who have used them as well as pricing and discount offers. Determine if they have any actual pass rate statistics for their attendees and ask for it. Don’t fall for the con job pass rates that have those little “see the notes.” There is only one pass rate (total passers/total takers) and if they don’t list that as the only metric avoid them like the plague because they are pulling a con job. Any material about pass rates that is not certified by an outside company or is qualified in any manner should immediately create an extremely wary attitude. How do you know when a Bar Exam review company is lying to you? When they are moving their lips.

Buyer beware. If they do not have any verified statistics you should look carefully at guarantees and ask for references.

Bar Exam essays are just like law school exam essays. The best product we know that tells you in massive detail how to write a law school exam essay is the MP3 Exam Writing Lecture. The same advice given in that lecture applies to Bar Exam tests. If you were not smart enough to get it and follow the advice in law school get one and follow the advice on your Bar Exam.

For the last tidbit, take the Bar Exam seriously and practice, practice, practice at least six months or more before the Bar Exam date you have chosen. You do not want to take a Bar Exam twice.