Jenny’s Somewhat Helpful, Tongue in Cheek Bar Exam Tips

I realize its approaching that wonderful time when law students start to panic about the bar exam.  In the interest of helping out poor law students (I am still young and green enough to remember BEING one of those poor law students) I offer these somewhat helpful, somewhat tongue in cheek tips for the bar exam. Caveat (that’s a nice lawyerly word to use on your exam by the way — makes you sound smart, see tip five), I’ve only taken one exam and I’ve only taken Ohio’s test AND I self-studied.

1.  Study the state distinctions in the rules.  At least for the July 2005 edition of the 2.5 day torture fest, the examiners loved testing where Ohio’s rules differed from the “Model” rules or the Federal rules (i.e. in Civil Procedure).  If you were up on those areas, you were golden on the essays.  I was not.  (I ruled the MBE — except for criminal law — which is how I think I passed)

2. PMBR makes CDs with taped lectures.  Put them on your ipod and listen to them even when you’re doing other things (like exercising).  They are excellent.  As I said, I rocked the MBE and I think that’s why I did.  Also I followed the advice in tip four below.

3.  Take the bar courses during law school.  It really helps.  I guess its a little late for that advice. Still, I didn’t take Criminal Procedure, Secured Transactions (that’s UCC Article IX ), or Estates / Wills and I passed. Mainly by following the advice in number five.

4.  The MBE is cruel — either you know it or you don’t, and they try and trick you, so even if you do know it, it looks like you don’t.  The MBE is black-letter law.  So if you’re good at memorizing, you’ll be good at the MBE.  I recommend learning what some of the rules are and then using the process of elimenating answers.  For example, although there might be just ONE question on the MBE about, say, the Rule Against Perpetuties, RAP kept cropping up time after time as a potential answer in the Real Property area.  You might be tempted to just not study or know RAP since its only one question, but knowing what RAP is (and don’t ask me what RAP is because the day after the bar exam I erased it from my memory and replaced it with Civil War stuff) makes it easy to knock it out  as an answer and it probably will appear more than once as a potential answer.  Also, do lots of practice questions … you’ll start to learn how the examiners try and trick you.  Treat each of the multiple choice questions as a true/false and you should do ok.  It worked for me (and c’mon, we all know I am not the brightest star in the sky).

5.  Even if you have no clue what you’re talking about on the essays, pretend you do.  Throw in all those cool terms you learned during bar review for the topic and hope you sound smart and the examiner figures even if you don’t know your stuff, you’ll be good at faking it. Hey, part of being a real world lawyer is sometimes faking it or, at least, adapting on the fly. So show them you KNOW how to be a real lawyer and maybe they’ll have pity on you.  Someone had pity on me.  Somehow I actually got points on the Will question and I was way, way, way out in left-field.  In fact I was so far out in left-field I wasn’t even in the same time zone as the examiner.

And one last tip … if you did decently in legal writing, I wouldn’t even bother studying for the Multi-State Performance Test (the MPT).  I didn’t spend one minute on it, and got two excellent scores.  I know no-one who did bad on it and no-one who failed because of the MPT.  So I think you might have to be particularly talented to blow the MPT. Seriously, if you did well in your legal writing classes or you have some clerking experience writing stuff, you should be fine.  (That said, don’t blame ME if you don’t study for the MPT and you don’t pass!)

NOW, I am going to go work on my website.

Tags: bar exam, humor, law school, lawyers