Congratulations New California Attorneys!

You've done it! Last night, you found out that your hard work paid off. For the rest of your life you will remember the moment that you found out. You will always remember the phrase, "The name above appears on the pass list for the July 2009 California Bar Examination." It is the sweetest feeling in the world. The high will take you at least as far as the swearing in ceremony, for those of you who will be participating in one of the pre-scheduled ceremonies.

For those of you that will be swearing in at Loyola Law School, Loyola will be taking care of sending the papers and payments in for your state court admissions. As for your Central District of California federal admission, although a federal judge (for us it was Judge Gary Klausner) will administer the oath, your admission will not be complete until you remit a payment (for us it was $180), either by mail, or at the Federal District Court itself.

I do ask one thing of you, when your new status has finally sunk in: there are some who did not make the list. When you find out who they are, hopefully you will also realize that their status had nothing to do with how smart they are. I know fewer people this year who didn't get the desired result, but I knew plenty from the July 2008 exam. Keep them in your thoughts, and be supportive as they work to join those of us who are now attorneys.

To those of you who did not make it, if you're still reading: you'll be fine! My advice, if you went to law school in California, is not to take the February exam. The only February 2009 test takers I know that passed were those who were taking it for the first time, or had gone to school outside California and thus just needed the first time to get a feel for California style. Remember, on the February exam, there is every possibility that, even if your raw score would have been enough to pass the July exam, it may not be enough for the February, as the State Bar hopes to balance out the (typically) high July pass rate in February. So far, all of those that had been third-time examinees this past July that I've heard from have passed.

And, if it doesn't work after the fourth time, you can always run for mayor of Los Angeles!

Once again, congratulations to the new California attorneys; we are so proud of you!

February 2009 California Bar Exam Results

The California State Bar has posted the stats for the February 2009 bar exam (PDF). The examinees have all discovered whether or not they have passed. The full list of those who passed will be made public on Sunday morning.

The pass rate for this last administration was 33.5%. To put that in perspective, the pass rate for the February 2008 exam was 39.6%; for the February 2007 exam, 36.8%; and for the February 2006 exam, 39.0%. This year's pass rate is the lowest since the 33.4% in February of 2002, and the second lowest since the 28.1% in the Spring of 1987.

Generally, the February bar exam is calibrated to compensate for the July bar exam of the previous year: if the July exam was too "easy", the February exam is made "harder"; if the July exam was too "hard", the February exam is made "easier". Since the July 2008 exam had a passage rate of 61.7%, which is the highest since the 62.9% of July 1997, that may have been an incentive to make this past February administration harder.

On the other hand, the February 1998 exam had a pass rate of 40.0%, so what gives? Perhaps, then, the exams are controlled for number of passing examinees. The July 1997 + February 1998 exams had, respectively, 4,581 and 1,558 people passing, for a total of 6,139 qualifications. The two most recent administrations produced 5,330 passes in July 2008, and 1,368 in February 2009, for a total of 6,698 qualifications. This indicates an increase of less than 9% in the number of qualifications, which seems to track the population growth of California.

Congratulations to those who passed!

Open Book Exams? What Are Those?

Above the Law discusses administrative procedures to cut down on cheating at Syracuse University, and seems rather shocked that a law school would have closed book exams.

Loyola Law School switched to a closed book exam format just in time for the Class of 2008, figuring that it would be better preparation for the bar exam. While it is true that LLS's bar passage rates went up for the July 2008 exam, the same was true of all other law schools. In fact, bar passage rates went up significantly across the nation. The Stud has heard it said that the reason was that the multiple-choice Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), which is identical for all jurisdictions, had a very high passage rate. That, in turn, may be due to the fact that so many experimental questions ere thrown out.

In any case, the jury is still out on whether or not closed book exams improve bar exam performance.

Above the Law does make one good point, though:

Clients generally don't need you to be able to quote statutes and regulations off the top of your head (bar examiners, that's a different story).

The parenthetical sentiment is exactly why many schools have switched to such a format. Higher bar passage rates help a school's ranking, and are thus an important goal for many competitive law schools, particularly in the second tier.

Bar Tips

As the time grows closer for the Class of 2009 to graduate and think about the bar exam, here are a few bits of advice I shared with a few friends:

Break down
The bar exam is on the last Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of July. On Tuesday and Thursday, you spend 3 hours in each morning doing essays (3 each morning), and 3 hours in each afternoon doing 1 performance test. On Wednesday, you get 3 hours in the morning to do 100 multiple choice questions, and another 3 hours in the afternoon to do another 100 multiple choice questions. Essays and multiple choice questions are familiar formats to us all. The performance test is basically some sort of task, whether it's a memo, a points and authorities, a letter, drafting deposition questions or interrogatories, or the like.

The Essays
This is what BarBri is best at. There are other courses that will teach you the law pretty darn well, and some probably even better; your options include LECC and Flemings, and I believe Prof. Levensohn is hawking Emanuels. I found BarBri's material enough. As long as you stick pretty well to their schedule, you'll get your eyes on enough material to get you ready. Don't feel frustrated if you don't get everything in the model answer; or at least don't let frustration get the better of you. Let it be a motivation to you. You can also look up old questions at the Cal Bar site, which should have model answers as well. They go back quite a few years; you really don't need much past 2000 if anything. The goal by the last few weeks before the bar is to get your eyes on at least 4 essays a day; better is to do 2 essays and outline 3-4 more.

Multiple Choice
The multiple choice section is called the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), and the MBE for the July 2008 exam was hard. It almost made me want to give up on the bar exam ... almost. BarBri does not prepare you for how hard the MBEs are. However, for some reason the passage rate on the MBE portion of the july 2008 exam was the highest in recent years, and as a conequence all jurisdictions saw increased passage rates on their local bar exams. So don't feel too frustrated when you take them; by the same token, don't get too confident when you take the BarBri mock MBE. Definitely look into the 3-day PMBR if you can afford it. I didn't take PMBR and I passed, but like I said, I was scared stiff by the actual MBE. Some others say that the PMBR questions were harder than the actual MBE; reasonable minds can differ. Again, I don't know that taking PMBR will help, but it couldn't hurt.

Performance Test
The performance test is really a test of how well you follow directions. You'll be given a fact pattern to read, along with instructions, statutes,and case law. You will not need all of the case law, especially as the cases sometimes cite each other. Your best bet is to figure out what the format is, set up accordingly, and fill in the blanks. The July 2008 exam's PTs were memos, so we were lucky. The other thing about the PTs is time management, just as with the essays. It's easier to forget that with the PTs, though, because you may find yourself thinking as you fill in the blanks that you set it up wrong. Resist the urge to restructure the whole thing or replace your reasoning; simply refer to the mistaken exposition and say, "but that does not satisfy the standard, because ..." You'll see this in real practice anyway, especially in court. The examiners don't care if you get the law right or get the right conclusion. They want to see you reason it out, and they want to see that you understand the opposing position, so in a sense, getting something wrong at first is doing it right, as long as you don't do a wholesame replace of whatever you've already got down.

Preparation
Here are a few things I did that helped me, personally:

• I forced myself to stay at the library for very long hours, but I didn't force myself to work all the time. I made sure I had time for meals, and I took breaks if I felt too confused.
• I refilled my large bottle of Smartwater every night and drained it every afternoon, after lunch, while I was in the library. (Coffee ruled the mornings.)
• I made sure I had time to go to the gym at least twice a week.
• I always took at least one day off on the weekends, during which I would follow an old personal custom, which is to go to a bookstore and read magazines to catch up on the real world in some small fashion.
• I also drew up my own master outline, which I've attached. I compiled it from my skeleton outlines for each subject, and for me, the process of whittling it down to fit on fewer and fewer pages would a terrific learning process. Each skeleton outline was compiled after the lectures; but note that some of the subjects ran 2-3 days.
• I was lucky to have my dad drive me to the test center each day. Depending on where you take the exam, be sure you have rehearsed your drive or walk so you know the timing.
• Have an analog timepiece with you.
• Make sure the last day before the bar exam, Monday, is relatively light. If you feel comfortable enough to take the whole day off, so much the better. Even if you do a half day, don't do substantive work. Instead, do your printing, and skim your outlines or flash cards or what have you.
• I never did do flash cards. For me I guess doing the outlines after each lecture was my equivalent.
• Prepare your food, or at least scout out your testing center to know where you can find food. Don't do anything exotic--go with food you know won't induce a reaction.
• Don't worry about anybody else. Last summer I sat at a particular desk in the LLS library, right in front of the map of the United States, near the double doors upstairs. People thought I was crazy to be near a high-traffic area, but it trained me to ignore ambient noises. It also made me easy to find if people had questions, or if they wanted to go on break. Learning how to handle yourself when you're not the only one in control is very important for another reason: just before the end of the morning session on the first day of the July 2008 exam, there was an earthquake--we felt it all the way out in Century City, although the epicenter was 10 miles east of Ontario--and I just kept going, pausing just long enough to let the earthquake finish up.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. If you have any questions, let me know, and if you know anyone who can benefit from this, pass it along. Good luck! :)

July 2008 California Bar Exam Results for Loyola Law School

Of the members of the Class of 2008 from Loyola Law School that took the California Bar Exam, 87% (or about 323 students) passed. This represents a 9% increase over July 2007. However, that still puts LLS behind Pepperdine Law School, which had a pass rate of 89%. Passage rates were up statewide, according to the California State Bar.

While LLS has definitely improved its bar passage rate, it still has some work cut out. The Stud hopes the Class of 2009 will keep LLS bar passage numbers strong.

Vindication

The results of the July 2008 administration of the California Bar Exam were released to the examinees on Friday 21 November 2008 at 6pm. At 5:30pm, I was running errands. I felt a certain discomfort in my stomach. Chalking it up to hunger, I headed for a local Chipotle. The line was a long one, and I considered leaving to go home and get online at 6pm. I resisted the urge.

As it turned out, I was online by 6:09pm. I entered my application and file numbers, and the California Bar Association web server spat back a screen. The most important sentence: "The name above appears on the pass list for the July 2008 California Bar Examination."

I read it several times to make sure I didn't misread it. Each time I felt my eyes welling up more and more. I had done it! I passed the California bar exam!

The remainder of Friday evening was filled with joy as friends who passed shared the good news. Many happy people combed their Facebook friends lists, over and over again, hopeful that all of their friends would soon be reporting good news.

After a lull in the insane Internet updates, I bought a 750mL bottle of Glenfiddich to savor at home. People were celebrating, but for once I decided to stay in to celebrate privately.

Not everyone passed. Unfortunately, some people that were close to me were not on the pass list. According to the California Bar Association, 61.7% of examinees passed, including 83% of first-time takers from ABA-accredited law schools in California. This is a higher pass rate than before, and the report notes that examinees across the country had performed very well on the multiple choice portion, the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), which is standardized across all jurisdictions. Having taken the MBE, I am surprised at that number, and conjecture that perhaps many questions had multiple acceptable answers. Either that, or most of the crazy mortgage-based questions were experimental, and thus not considered in the final accounting.

Another concern, for examinees in Southern California, was the impact of the Chino Hills earthquake. According to a report commissioned by the California Bar Association, the impact seemed to have been minor. The Bar Association adjusted exam scores by using the tests from Northern California as a control group. For some strange reason, although the earthquake occurred closer to the Ontario testing site, Ontario examinees were adjusted by only either 1 or 3 points, while San Diego examinees were ajdusted by either 3 or 5 points.

In any case, the result has been a vindication of three years of hard work. To those who passed with me, my heartfelt congratulations to you, you have worked hard and deserve it! To those who fell a little short, this is no judgment on your intelligence or your work ethic. If you decide to continue pursuing a career in the law, take the exam again, because I cannot wait for you to join me!

Denouement

On the third day of the California bar exam, my true love gave to me ... another contracts remedies essay question! Well, I guess trying to predict the frequency with which subjects will arise on the California bar exam is a bit like predicting, well, earthquakes.

The morning session was, as expected, quite a bit tougher than Tuesdays morning session, sans earthquake. But still, it wasn't what I would call "evil".

What was truly evil was the afternoon performance exam question. Never mind that the situation was set up such that it was very difficult to agree with the position we were supposed to take, but it was in essence a points and authorities memo in support of a motion in opposition to a motion to exclude evidence. We were given enough evidence only to realize that it was a "he said she said" kind of situation, with insufficient facts to really support either side. And, on top of that, there was no sample of what a points and authorities memo was supposed to look like!

Fortunately, such memos are the stuff of first year law school--except that was two years agoo!

At last, the dreaded "evil" written question has surfaced, in the last leg of this 3-day endurance test we impersonally call "the California bar exam".

Tidbits from the bar exam:

• As we took our seats this morning, one of the proctors revealed that at one of the other testing sites, a bar applicant had been kicked out and disqualified because her phone had gone off 8 minutes before the end of a session. I don't really feel bad about that one, honestly.
• We were told that another bar applicant had been kicked out and disqualified because when he fell asleep during the MBE, his snoring was bothering his neighbors. That's a little iffy, and I hope that wasn't true.
• One girl started doing cartwheels just before the AM session.
• Others were doing yoga. Wow.
• Another girl started dancing in her seat at the end of the AM session. I wonder how she felt when she read the prompt for the PM session!

Anyway, the bar exam has been quite an experience indeed. That's really all I have to say about that. If you just finished taking the California bar exam, are near the downtown LA area, and need a stiff drink like I do, drop me a comment, and we'll figure something out!

On Day More

The Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) was today, and it was a killer. There were varieties of forms, thus a variety of arrangements of questions. This was a lot harder than what we'd learned through Bar/Bri, as the questions addressed details of the law that we hadn't really covered to any degree. Fortunately, as Professor Honigsberg has said, "If you don't know it--NOBODY!"

Upon some reflection, I suppose the point is this: this is how the California Committee of Bar Examiners intends to break us down. I can throw in a lot of sports analogies, for both how I felt after the AM portion ("it was like I deviated from my fundamentals, tried to recover, set myself up for one good basket, bricked it, and then ran out of time to correct it and to score a winning basket"), and how I must treat this next step ("I've gotta have a short memory like a quarterback, and keep coming back, play after play, drive after drive").

It's late now, but I'm just here to remind everyone not to let today get to you for more than 10 minutes or so. Remember, today's over, and you have all of tomorrow. Don't give up, because you've worked so hard already. One day more, folks, one day more!

Shake, Rattle and Roll

I had decided to go into Internet silence, but two things have compelled me to surface tonight. First, in order to finish submitting my answers from this, the first day of the California Bar Exam, I had to connect to the Internet and upload the answers. Second, I felt like I should comment about the earthquake that struck today, about 20 minutes before the end of the morning session.

There we were, in the Century Plaza Hotel, typing merrily away about implied-in-fact contracts, when the building started to shake. At first we thought it might be a semi rolling by, or the sound of construction. But then the pillars in my testing room began to blur. And this being only the first day of the bar, I knew it wasn't just my eyesight. It had to be an earthquake.

The room shook for a few seconds, then there was a second or two of relative calm, before a second convulsion shook the room. "You've gotta be kidding!" some people started exclaiming. I wondered if I was supposed to duck and cover, but decided instead just to keep typing, especially since there were no emergency announcements. The head proctor spoke at the podium a few seconds after we were sure there were not going to be any aftershocks and used the same reasoning. So 500 or so people kept typing away at their essays.

In the morning, some of us had bemoaned the fact that our testing room was in what seemed to be an old parking lot or storage room of some sort. We envied the other 500 or so people who got the ballroom, with the beautiful chandeliers. As it turned out, a piece fell from one of the chandeliers in the quake, and dropped on the table behind one of my friends, who only then considered doing the duck and roll.

As we gathered after lunch for the afternoon session, one of the bar applicants reported that she and her friends who were taking the exam in Ontario had spoken, and it turned out that they had to ride the quake for more time than those of us in Century City did, because they were closer to the epicenter. Despite Professor Honigsberg's anecdotes during Bar/Bri, the proctors did give the Ontario applicants extra time--all of two minutes.

On the other hand, the questions didn't seem particularly difficult, which is really only to say that there was nothing being asked that made most of us wonder where it had come from. As it turns out, students who had taken Fleming's bar review course knew the second question, which their instructor had predicted almost word-for-word. Bar/Bri students, on the other hand, had never seen the topic before, but were able to pull through using the reasoning they developed over three years.

All this might mean that Thursday is going to be the day of the really hard essay questions. But on this first day of the California bar exam, Tuesday 29 July 2008, the only thing that shook us was the earth itself.

Update: (2008.07.30.21:35 PDT) There's a great roundup of reactions from all around the blawgosphere at Ash Blog Durbatulûk: "Earthquake disrupts California bar exam"

Good Luck on the Bar, Class of 2008!

So the last-minute plan underwent some changes. Outlining took a little longer than I thought, but then, I was trying to cover 14 subjects, and did so at a pace of about 3-1/2 subjects a day. Nevertheless, the process of creating the comprehensive compact outline forced me to learn, and in so doing, substituted the efficacy of actually doing essays. And now that I have the huge outline, I've got all the subjects floating in my head; hopefully they'll stick around long enough for me to write about them for the actual bar. And, just for comfort's sake, I'm reading through some sample essays this morning.

But enough about me; this is about you, about us.

We've been through three (four, for some) years of law school now. We know how to do this. Most of the things we need to know are floating in our minds. We law students as a group tend to be a bit obsessive, so the entire feeling of not knowing what's going to happen bothers us. It's going to bother us, too, in November. But being bothered isn't going to help us.

What's going to help, in my personal opinion, is the ability not to freak out, or at least to bring things under control when and if we begin to panic. Like I said, we have the knowledge. But to an extent, a lot of us always seem to feel like nothing we do is ever good enough. Is that really true? Why not let the examiner decide that? Don't ever decide on their behalf that we're not good enough!

This past Saturday, I came home after 14 hours at the library, feeling fine physically, but emotionally drained, in the sense that I'd been giving so much of my mind and energy to finishing the monster outline that I hadn't really had time to step back and assess my own humanity. I had become a law machine. My friends and I had begun the summer joking about applying the law to every factual scenario that raised itself, including discussing how we could sue the bar association for intentional infliction of emotional distress, or California for imposing an unconstitutional speech litmus test on us. Or even wondering, yesterday, if the way the outer shell of a law school building was constructed might expose the school to liability should the wall fall on us (it cannot, unless the school had reason to know or could discover that there was a problem with the construction that poses an unreasonable risk of harm to us, invitees--and then we discussed whether we were invitees or licensees, in which case the school would only be liable for known risks of harm). Mo, Alex, Lety, Katie, Aleksey, Bear, I love you guys, but seriously, at that point, we were not human beings.

So my point is that on this, the last day before the three days that we've been preparing three years for, please remember to take a step back. My epiphany on Saturday night (well it was really Sunday morning because I'd stayed at the library pretty much until midnight) is that there's no way we're going to succeed without love. That sounds mushy, and warm and fuzzy, like Professional Responsibility, but I'll tell you why I think it's important.

The practice of law inevitably demands that we deal with people, many if not most of whom have only a superficial understanding of the law. They will come to us hoping for answers, and needing us to listen; they won't want to hear us ticking through the elements in a monologue as if reciting a bar essay answer. And while ticking through the elements is useful for the bar, it's counterproductive if it blinds us to common sense. And where do we get common sense from? We tend to get it from years of dealing with people, especially the people that we love and that love us, our friends, family, and significant others (for those who have one). They keep us grounded. They let us do our thing this summer (for the most part), and when we're done, they'll be there for us still.

On this last day before the bar exam, talk to them, if only for 10 minutes. Call them up, and offer your appreciation. You'll be refreshed by the love in their perseverance and patience. And, most of all, you'll remember why you made this undertaking to begin with. After all, in the end, this isn't just a degree, not just a license. Well, that it is as well, but it's more than that; my point is, no accomplishment is worth that much in the long run if you're not human, if you don't have someone to share your triumph with.

So call, and talk, about anything but law. (Yes, you can still analyze facts mentioned in the conversation under the law, but do it with your inside voice.) Tomorrow, you will be refreshed; you will be ready.

Best of luck to all of you, I wish you good fortune and much love, and I'll see you on the other side!

Last-Minute Plan

Things seemed to go so well at first. Bar/Bri's schedule was not, in retrospect, terribly difficult to follow. Of course, on lecture days, it was a good idea to outline lecture notes before starting on suggested assignments. And many people let things slip, but by a couple of days after the end of lectures on substantive law, people were beginning to catch up.

But not everybody learns the same way. And I found myself staring at piles of essays, which Bar/Bri had recommended us to "outline". I had been overcompensating for falling behind earlier in the summer by actually doing full essays, sometimes even spending more than one hour on a few essays (and thereby practicing how not to do them).

Then, yesterday, the Tuesday night before the California July 2008 Bar Exam was to begin, I realized that there was no way I would remember everything if I stuck with Bar/Bri's suggested schedule. So I actually went home before 11 p.m. I rested a bit. I devised a new plan. And, as I enjoyed a late dinner at Denny's with my brother, the plan gelled in my head.

It's a bit late, really, to start coming up with a plan. But the process of coming up with a new plan, one that best recognizes who I am and how I study, was therapeutic. And simply knowing that I have a plan is calming, even in a sea of bar applicants struggling with their own misperceptions about their adequacy: they are all human, with idiosyncratic flaws, but lack of intelligence is not one of the flaws. And so, I stayed up until 6 a.m. the night before to start on the new plan, just to give it a foothold; and I came to the library late, giving myself a chance to stock up on some groceries and get some sleep. And on campus, though I couldn't really say that I was really better prepared than anybody else, I could at least say that I had a plan.

It's simple, really. I would execute a new outline, compacted from the lecture notes and adjusted to better fit Professor Sakai's outlines. And I would "outline" and read as many essays as I can through lunch on Friday. Then I would do a set of 100 multiple choice questions Friday evening, and review. Saturday would be given over to a practice performance question. And Sunday would be dedicated to doing a full essay from each area I feel weak in or that is most likely to be on the exam. Then, Monday morning, I would skim over the new outline, before quitting studying to hit the gym.

I honestly don't know with any certainty if this plan will work, or if I will pass the bar exam. But at this point, just having a plan is going to be helpful, because it puts me at a place where I feel I have some control. And that's really it, isn't it? Most law students, yours truly not excepted, are control freaks, compared to the general populace. And nothing terrifies control freaks like the bar exam, because we don't know what's going to be on the exam, the breadth is immense, and we won't know the results until just before Thanksgiving.

So this little island of calm will help at least keep me sane. And that's probably all any bar applicant can ask for, 5 days and 11 hours before the bar exam begins.

What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know

The bar review period is now well and truly under way. Already, students find themselves falling behind, for a number of reasons. For those attending Bar/Bri, the assignment backlog is starting to pile up. Although on any given day, the workload seems reasonable, the material is scheduled so that every single day, a student must be operating at much closer to 100% than any other period except finals. Further, there are no weekend breaks, and the entire program is about 10 weeks long. In essence, many people are learning first year law school material all over again.

The Stud himself has fallen behind as well, and in his efforts to catch up, he stopped reading some of the preview materials, which means that when he does practice multiple choice questions, he sometimes gets thrown off. But more interestingly, in one of the sample essays, he got thrown for a real doozy: "There's a First Amendment right to attend a trial?!" First, if anything, the amendment one would most expect to find that in is the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a right to a public and speedy trial.

So, as with many others, the Stud finds himself learning things he didn't even know that he didn't know.