It is both costly and annoying spending such much money for preparation of the exam and applying for the exam. I also feel my life is on hold because as it is now, I am not an attorney, but not a paralegal either. Thank you for all the support from all those other posters on abolishing the BAR exam.

Marvin

After taking the bar exam this past summer and spending countless hours preparing and worrying about the exam, I discovered the primary reason for my anxiety and stress: uncertainty. There is absolutely no way of knowing what the bar examiners will test on a given examination. While bar prep courses and others will provide guidelines on what the bar examiners have tested in the past, I discovered after taking the July 07 NY exam that many important topics on the essay portion of the exam were not covered (i was not alone in this assessment). After the exam, I thought about the countless hourse I devoted to preparing for and worrying about how a particular topic will be tested, only to realize the topic was barely tested at all.

Not only does the bar exam test a skill that most lawyers do not need to succeed (e.g. memorization), it does not even reward those students who spent countless hours memorizing vasts amounts of obsolete knowledge. It is quite possible that a student could be tested on all the points he was weakest on and none of the points he was strongest on any given examination. This was a great source of anxiety for me in preparing for the exam. I can only hope I will never have to go through it again.

I too like the idea that the Bar could be an alternative to an accredited law school for those who gain an interest, or experience from working in the law field later in life when attending three years of classroom law school may be inpractical and/or unnecessary, but it appears that even in THAT circumstance, the Bar needs to be revised to become a REAL test of one’s legal skills, not just an initiation.

If revenue is the issue, it should still be okay to require a payment of dues that are sufficient to operate a regulating agency for lawyers, I would imagine a good lawyer, just like a good cop, cringes at an incompetent attorney giving them a bad name.

Last, with regard to weeding out incompetent lawyers, you do NOT have to wait until a client’s life is ruined before you identify them. Before a lawyers shows up in court for a trial, they shoud have been in for many hearings, depositions etc. That allows for opportunities for other lawyers to note levels of competence (I once saw an attorney CLEARLY IMPAIRED in a depo) and it would be nice if other attornies would be able to confidentially make a complaint without fear of retaliation or some other subvert consequences.

I am not a lawyer yet, but I am considering a pathway to becoming one and one thing I’d like to see is the rules and ethics for attornies be a bit less vague. It’s tough on rules for billing and handling a clients money, but everything else is rather subjective IMO.

Would it be too much in some states to let people pass in parts? Memorizing a phonebook of information is not easy.

I agree with the people advocating skills test. I’d also suggest a mandatory ‘mentoring’ system along the lines of what medical education mandates.

Anyway, I am a 2006 graduate who recently passed the PA and NJ bar exams. The bar exam is, as someone else pointed out, largely a rite of passage that does not at all test one’s capacity to be a lawyer. Getting rid of it is a great idea in theory.

But let’s face it. The bar exists to regulate the number of lawyers entering the profession and keep attorney salaries fairly high. They are NEVER going to get rid of the bar exam. One or two states might try it but believe me, the bar will be back even in those states. Lawyers will lobby. We are not going to allow our job market to be crowded with thousands upon thousands of MORE lawyers when a simple exam could keep a few thousand out and allow us to keep charging high rates. I’m not saying that it’s fair but it’s a fact.

The bar exam is difficult and admittedly pointless but it can be passed. So people really just need to resign themselves to the fact that they will have to take the bar and it will be hard, and study for it.

I mean, come on. I had to take algebra to graduate from college, a class which did absolutely nothing for me. If I didn’t pass algebra I couldn’t graduate and even GET to law school. I was a wate of time for, but it’s a rite of passage. Every profession has it, sad but true.

Oh yeah: and Vermont’s program- you MUST have a J.D. to do it. The program is that a select number of people (this is an experimental program) graduate from law school they work under the supervision of an attorney for a specified period of time, and can then be admitted to the bar. But a J.D. is required and the program is reportedly very difficult to get into.

Anyway, I am a 2006 graduate who recently passed the PA and NJ bar exams. The bar exam is, as someone else pointed out, largely a rite of passage that does not at all test one’s capacity to be a lawyer. Getting rid of it is a great idea in theory.

But let’s face it. The bar exists to regulate the number of lawyers entering the profession and keep attorney salaries fairly high. They are NEVER going to get rid of the bar exam. One or two states might try it but believe me, the bar will be back even in those states. Lawyers will lobby. We are not going to allow our job market to be crowded with thousands upon thousands of MORE lawyers when a simple exam could keep a few thousand out and allow us to keep charging high rates. I’m not saying that it’s fair but it’s a fact.

The bar exam is difficult and admittedly pointless but it can be passed. So people really just need to resign themselves to the fact that they will have to take the bar and it will be hard, and study for it.

I mean, come on. I had to take algebra to graduate from college, a class which did absolutely nothing for me. If I didn’t pass algebra I couldn’t graduate and even GET to law school. I was a wate of time for, but it’s a rite of passage. Every profession has it, sad but true.

I am an undergraduate student who would bomb the LSAT if I ever dreamed of taking it. I just “took” two practice essay q’s online for the NYS BAR. Obviously I was unable to write any essays. However, I was able to get 3/3 of the issues correct on the first Q and 1/3 correct on the second Q. Not bad for a 2.6 GPA.

If I had 3 days to answer 10 essays, at home, with books, I might have been able to do okay. I might not have passed, but I would have improved.

My point: while memorization and familiarization techniques are important-they lead you to the correct portion of that law book that has the case law/statutes you need to prepare your argument/brief-it is not a good measure of competency as an attorney. Law students are not the only students that are taught to conduct research in order to prepare arguments and answers to god-awful essay questions. Why then, does modern education insist on testing our memorization skills, and not our ability to “go find” answers? I understand that you should have some previous knowledge in the area you are working in, but it is unrealistic to think that an attorney will not use his/her research tools to better his/her arguments. What a fool you would make of yourself in court if you base your oral arguments on something you learned 3 years prior in Contracts! Each case potentially has an individual component that was not in the previous case you argued, and was, oops, not discussed in Contracts. The key is to figure what that issue is, research it, prepare it, and argue it.

This is what students taking the BAR should be doing. They should be showing us how they can find answers or prepare arguments, not how they can memorize the law, that will come with time and practice in your specific field of choice.

Make the BAR a take home, its not cheating, its evaluating skill.

Wisconsin operates just fine without a bar exam requirement for graduates from their approved schools that the ABA just so happens to recognize. You can also thank the ABA for your astronomical tution fees. The individual determines the calaber of attorney not the school and not the bar exam. Actually, some states still permit an attorney to receive their training by law office study/apprentiship. At one time the bar exam was a beautiful right of passage and example of one’s commitment to the law until the ABA began influencing states and schools and basterdized the legal profession. I find it odd that the ABA will not recognize some law schools but will automaticly enroll a graduate of that institution into the association when they enter the legal profession.

The bar exam is not a great introduction for a young lawyer into the legal community but it is the system we have in place. I wanted to be an attorney more than anything in the world so I studied and passed it just like all the other tests I took in law school.

I suggest that this is true, precisely because the bar exam “is” a right of passage. It’s simply a throwback to the ancient guilds of the middle ages, which sought to maintain exclusivity via punitive means, so as to impress upon their membership, the value of the honor bestowed.

There is only one reliable test of lawyering — providing real clients with real relief in the real world. Everything else is nonsense — voodoo witchcraft, for lack of a better name.

The fact that a person graduates from an ABA-accredited school, or that he/she obtains a high LSAT, MBE score, GPA or the like, is all very interesting, and may serve to give potential employers some sense of ability in their choices for new legal talent. But, at the end of the road, nothing would serve the public interest more successfully than to force aspiring legal practitioners to spend a year handling about 50 real cases under the watchful eye of an experienced litigator.

Is such a major change likely to occur? Not a chance, because it would severely cut into the revenue of law schools, and it would render ABA-accreditation, and bar review vendors, almost meaningless. Yet, this is exactly the sort of on-the-job training that the medical profession insists upon.

One of the unfortunate failings of a representative democracy is that a vested interest group can promote and maintain its interests in the face of the interest of the general public.

Abe Lincoln did not need to sit for the bar exam — Thomas Jefferson did not attend an ABA-accredited school and James Madison did not have an LSAT score (of course, he wasn’t even a lawyer). But, their understanding of the People’s legal needs was legendary, and how many of us modern lawyers, with all of our statistical metrics and tests would take a crack at rewriting any of the laws of our predecessors?

Answer: not one of us.

The legal profession needs an injection of medical profession style training. Anything less is not nearly enough to bring about any meaningful change.

PS. I frequently read from some attorney graduate of an ABA-accredited school, about how bar passage rates would be comparable in California if all those non-accredited applicants were not permitted to sit for the bar. However, if you read the statistics published by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, and only compare bar passing rates of ABA-accredited applicants, the California Bar is still considerably more difficult, on average, than any of the other 49 bar examinations.

The point is not to promote the value of non-ABA lawyering or to denegrate ABA schools (or even to show that California does things right vis-a-vis other states, because it doesn’t, in my opinion), but rather to emphasize that the only thing that really matters is the individual’s determination to learn the law and to act in the best interests of his/her client.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

I am currently studying for it in Iowa. No, I haven’t passed it yet, so yes, there may be some value to it that I don’t understand yet. But I seriously doubt it. The fact that everybody – and I mean EVERYBODY – I have known who has taken it denounces it as a waste of time counts for at least something, in my opinion.

I say again – I am in Iowa. If there is anybody else in Iowa who reads this and agrees with me, and wants to do something about it, you can contact me at jaudlehelm@yahoo.com and we’ll try to figure something out. I want to be in the last class that ever takes it in this state.