This is the tale of one girl's journey through law school, the bar exam, and the legal profession. An informative guide for anyone thinking about going to law school or entering the legal profession.
As with any proper tale we must start from the beginning, which for me began after graduating high school.
Unlike many other countries, the U.S. has no concept of a gap year. I can already hear many of you asking what's a gap year? A gap year is time off between major life transitions, typically taken after high school and before starting college or entering the work force. Yeah I know, the horror, right?
Since taking a gap year in the U.S. is grounds for an honor killing, your choices after high school are these: 1) join the military 2) get married, 3) get a job, or 4) go to college.
Being only 17, of course I didn't want to do any of these things, but since that wasn't an option, I chose college. Since I never took the SAT's or ACT's, I enrolled in Community College. My first year I took nothing but electives. It was great. It was fun. It was interesting. In fact I ended up staying there for four years! Even though I ended up with 99 credits, they weren't the right combination of courses to earn me an Associates Degree.
Even though I put in the standard 4 years of college, I still hadn't technically completed this phase of packaging. My next stop on the conveyor belt was transferring to a University. I went to a satellite campus that was no bigger than my community college and graduated with a B.S. in Criminal Justice & Criminology. Why? I don't know. I thought I wanted to major in Social Work until I participated in a 'Social Work Summer Abroad' program in Jamaica and ended up crying myself to sleep most nights. After that experience, I thought I might go into Travel and Tourism because I liked to travel, but the prerequisites for the program got canceled because too few students had enrolled. I had to pick something, and I was a CSI junkie at the time, which by the way, I was not after taking those classes.
Okay, I did what they told me to do, my family can now show their faces in public again, I have bettered my life, and the world is my oyster, right? Yeah, not so much...
My First Law Firm
In the U.S. after graduating from a University your choices are: 1) join the military, 2) get married, 3) get a job, or 4) get a graduate degree. I chose number 3. I applied for all kinds of jobs, from retail to government positions. You would think that now that I had my golden ticket, getting a job would be no problem, right? Wrong! I couldn't even get a job cutting fruit.
After 6 months of job hunting I was finally offered a job as a legal secretary at a small debt collection law firm. Having no other prospects, I took it. The firm was located in a converted house. My desk was in the back corner of the kitchen right next to the coffee pot. I'm not a coffee drinker, and after working there, I never will be. One of the founding partners of the firm was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. He was no longer practicing law but got dropped off at the office everyday just the same. He would spend his time reading books, watching the little TV in his office, and making coffee. Now his coffee making routine consisted of pouring half a bag of coffee into where ever it goes, putting in too much water so it would overflow and burn, pouring himself a piping hot cup and then immediately putting it into the microwave, he'd take a few sips and then pour out the cup, followed by the entire full pot of coffee and start the process over again...all day long. I never tried to stop him because he didn't know who I was or why I was there.
The outgoing box for the process server was right next to my desk. When the creepy alcoholic Karl Pilkington doppelganger process server would show up in the afternoons he would linger at my desk and try to talk to me, even if I was pretending to be on the phone. Urgh.
There was no cleaning service so everything was caked in dust and dog hair, due to the numerous office dogs. The floor was littered with staples, and the place was crawling with bugs, little spiders would run across my desk and I once opened a file in the conference room and a cockroach ran out. Hey at least I didn't have to dress up.
I was initially hired only to file law suits. There was another legal secretary that processed all the incoming claims and filed judgments, and another secretary that handled post judgment enforcement.
Unfortunately, there weren't always lawsuits to process, so in my spare time I was supposed to file. Well, after I filed everything there was to file, I became increasingly bored, and this was my first week. After it was apparent that I wasn't being challenged, they began teaching me new things. I took over the bookkeeping and learned how to do pretty much everything except judgments. Judgments belonged to the self-proclaimed office manager, who flat out told me she didn't want to give them up. Um, I wasn't asking you to.
I would prepare the summons and complaint, calendar them out 21 days and if the defendant(s) hadn't responded by then I would file an affidavit of default, and then after 10 days I would put the file in one of the many stacks of files piled up on the floor behind the "office managers" desk so she could prepare a judgment. Now these piles would sit and accumulate for months without her ever doing a thing. In the meantime, calls and status requests from clients would pour in. They would be wondering if we had obtained a judgment yet, a question that I was instructed to answer as "it's being processed". Ha. When in reality the "office manager" was just sitting on it, and by sitting on it I literally mean she would take files from her stack, put them in her chair, and sit on them. (These files were more urgent so they got an elevated status).
One by one the other secretaries in the office would tell the boss that the office manager was running the office into the ground. Without a judgment the clients weren't going to get paid and neither were we. Our attempts to oust her always fell on deaf ears. You see, our boss had once worked for her dad and felt indebted to him, so now he was returning the favor. It didn't matter that she was late every single day, that she spent her days surfing the internet, that even though she was the only one in the office without a college degree she made $5 more an hour than all of us. She would also take boxes of files home to work on them. This, allowed her to load her time card with an absurd amount of hours (with absolutely nothing to show for it). Or, that when one of us other secretaries would go on vacation we would return to find our computer had mysteriously crashed. Donald Trump doesn't have this kind of job security.
After two years of working there, I began thinking about all the ways I would run my own law office, which led me to start studying for the LSAT.
The LSAT
Now listen up boys and girls, your LSAT score is important for several reasons. The most important being this: if you have a high enough LSAT score, law schools will start looking for you rather than the other way around AND they will give you money to attend their school. The reason they want you is to make their statistics higher and to, therefore, look like a better school than it probably is.The other important reason is this, if your score is too low, while you still may get into a law school, your life will be a living hell if you go!!!!
While given its content, I still have no idea how the LSAT exam can predict how well you will do in law school, but it does. Many people I know that were willing to divulge their LSAT score did very well in school and received scholarship money from the school to attend, some even got a full ride! (If you are one of these people you might as well stop reading now, and go on and enjoy your golden debt free journey.)
Unfortunately for me, I didn't know the first thing about going to law school, and I had no idea how important the LSAT could be. I thought it was some irrelevant bullshit test that just gave the LSAC people money. As a result, I only ordered some previously administered LSAT exams from LSAC.org and bought an LSAT prep book off ebay for .99 cents to prepare for the exam. I got a 140. Considering the lowest score you can get is a 120, you don't have to know too much about the law school process to know that a 140 is pretty low. I decided I should take the test again, and this time I dished out some absurd amount of money to take a proper prep course, only to end up scoring a 145 the second time. This was red flag number 1.
The Application Process
Since I had always been a good student, I believe I only missed the honor roll only one semester in my entire life, I figured my GPA would balance out my LSAT score and proceeded to apply to my alma mater's law school. I was quickly denied. What?! I was flabbergasted. How could they not let me in, I had done so well as an undergrad. Then I applied to the only other law school in my state, and they denied me too. Feeling rejected I was determined to get in somewhere just to show those bastards, and ended up applying to 19 different law schools, application fees and all! Why 19? Because I was a woman scorned, and I figured I would get into at least 1, and I did, sort of.
I got my first non-rejection letter, but not quite accepted letter, from a third tier law school informing me I had been put on their hold list, which was higher than their wait list. Okay. That was sort of comforting. I got my second non-rejection letter, but not quite accepted letter, from another third tier law school informing me that I had been selected to participate in their Legal Education Opportunity (LEO) Program. The LEO Program is something most schools have but is not advertised and not something you can apply for, you are selected for it. It's an intensive six-week academic program that develops and assesses fundamental skills for law school. Individuals who are selected to participate in the LEO Program are considered to have the potential for academic success, despite less than competitive performance on the traditional admissions indicators (LSAT scores and GPA). LEO students who demonstrate their academic potential through successful completion of the program will have the opportunity to gain admission into the fall incoming class. Oh, and it's not free, of course. I believe it cost me about around $1,200 to participate.
Realizing this was my best bet at getting into law school, red flag number 2, I quit the law office and drove across the country to attend.
LEO Program
I can only describe the LEO Program as a mini law school boot camp. Basically it was just the first 6 weeks of Legal Research and Writing, Civil Procedure, and Property complete with midterms and finals. Plus an Academic Skills course to help with the transition from undergrad to law school by teaching us how to prepare for class, IRAC, outline, and perform legal analysis.
What a shock to the system. So if you don't already know what law school consists of, here it is: case law, all day, every day, for the duration of your attendance. Even though we were only assigned about 3 cases (usually around 20 pages) of reading per subject a night, it would take me 3 or 4 hours to complete. Why? Because apparently my legal reading comprehension is nil, and it didn't help that in the beginning of each course many of the assigned cases are old, I'm talking about the 1800's old, and they are full of legalize and written by judges, for other judges, you know someone who has been practicing law for 10 or 20 years, not some 25 year old honor student who thinks finishing the last Harry Potter book in 3 days was a major feat. They are full of long run on sentences, Latin, and various other words you've never heard of. So I would have my case book open side by side with a legal dictionary so I could look up every other word. Case law isn't exactly in story form. It made my head hurt. It took me several read throughs before I could even get the gist of what the hell was going on. Half the time I couldn't even figure out who won the case. It's that bad.
Then you have to brief the case, which consists of finding the issue of the case (which there could be several, but the only one that matters is the one your professor is going to talk about, and who knows which one that will be), pulling out the rule of the case (which again, there could be several), analyze the rule based on the facts (this right here is the only thing that will matter for the next three years of your life), and discover what the conclusion is.
In law schools across America, classrooms are filled with nervous tension thick enough to cut through with a knife. Class consists of the professor calling on some unlucky soul to answer a myriad of questions and hypothetical questions about one particular case, and if you have no clue, the professor's not just going to move on to someone else, they are going to make you sweat enough until they are satisfied. It is agonizing. This is why I would read and reread cases to have as much understanding as I possibly could in case it was my day to get interrogated, but even then it was never enough. No matter how smart you are or how much you prepare, your professors will always have the innate ability to make you feel like the biggest fucking moron on the planet. However, if you're lucky enough to not get called on, class is boring as hell, not to mention painful to watch your classmate wriggle under your professor's thumb.
Legal Research and Writing is no treat either. In this class you get to play the role of an intern/law clerk/first year associate at a law firm and your professor plays the partner. The partner will give you a case file of a new client, and it is your job to research the issues the client has presented and write a memo to the partner detailing whether or not the client will be liable/not liable/guilty or not guilty based on the case law. Fun. So sometime in between class and preparing for class, you will spend the rest of your time at the library sorting through case law looking for some case or cases, which are usually nonexistent, that are similar to the facts of your client's case. This will take hours and hours and hours of your life, and get used to it, because this is what being a lawyer is like - yeah they don't show this side of being a lawyer on TV. Oh, and forget everything you learned about writing in undergrad, there's no bullshiting your way through a legal memo. In fact, forget everything you learned about school in undergrad.
In law school, your grades consist of one thing, and that is your final exam. That's right, no points for showing up, no points for briefing cases six hours a night, there is nothing that gets turned in, it all boils down to one test, and if you're lucky your school might have midterms too, which will only count for a whopping 10% of your grade, but still. Law school exams consist of some stupid fact pattern created by your professor, that they undoubtedly think is really clever, and then you pull out all of the issues the fact pattern raises, then pull out all the rules and their elements from your memory, and apply the facts to the law. What if you're not a good test taker or you can't remember the one or two rules and its elements your professor chose to test out of the hundreds you learned that semester? Then you're screwed. There's no extra credit. There are no redos. You're stuck with your miserable grade. Period. Red flaming flag number 3.
I am not a good test taker. Never have been. (See LSAT score(s) for exhibit A.) The only way I aced my way through college was showing up every day and doing all the work. The one class I got a D in was a class that was graded solely on 3 tests, I failed them all, but I guess I got some extra pity points for showing up every day because mathematically I should have gotten an F. During the LEO Program I was required to meet with both of my Civ Pro and Property professors to discuss what happened with my midterms. Uh, I don't know. Yeah, I studied. What am I supposed to say to two Ivy League law school graduates that have no concept of being exam challenged? Pointless. I didn't learn any tools of how I could have done better, only left their offices feeling like a big fucking moron.
So needless to say it didn't take long to realize that law school was not something I wanted to sign up for. Hell one guy left after the first week. Smart. I, however, stuck it out and completed the miserable six week program. Why? I don't know. I think part of me just wanted to see if I would end up getting admitted. I felt really lucky to have had the experience and appreciated that it had saved me from making a huge mistake, going to law school ill informed and unprepared.
Acceptance-Rejected-Depression and a Second Chance
After I drove back home across the country, I received a letter from the school informing me that I had successfully completed the LEO Program and that I was being offered a seat in their part-time fall program. I think they gave me a full two days to send in a deposit. Not a lot of time to think, but I had made up my mind long before and let the deadline pass. Then something weird happened, I started getting really depressed. I felt like maybe I hadn't had enough time to get into a routine and maybe it would have gotten better. Plus all my new friends were planning on entering the fall class. Shit. Now what am I supposed to do?
Given the first day of classes at the law school I was on the hold list for was quickly approaching, I figured I wouldn't be hearing from them and I ended up enrolling in a Paralegal Studies Program at a community college. I figured it was the next best thing, I was signed up to take virtually all of the same classes as a first year law student would take, I would be finished in half the time, and the cost was a negligible fraction compared to law school.
I was all signed up, bought all of my books, got my parking permit and was all set to start classes on the following Monday, but then I got a strange email Friday night. It was from the law school I was on hold for, they said something about needing to know if I was still interested in attending so they could finish processing my file. My file was still open? According to their website the fall class's orientation had already started 2 days ago and the first day of classes was on Wednesday. Um. I was in shock. I started responding to the email by saying go ahead and close my file because I don't think it would be humanly possible for me to move out of state so quickly having no place to live or any financial aid in place, but then my boyfriend walked in. I told him about the email and how outraged I was that I was just getting this email now. He asked me one simple question: do you still want to go? To which I answered, yes. So I deleted my email and started over: Yes, I am still interested in attending. Send.
The next day, Saturday, I received a call from the school while my boyfriend and I were on our way to lunch. They offered me a seat in the fall class and asked if I could be there on Monday, I said yes.
I got home and applied for financial aid, packed all night long, and said goodbye to my family and dog. I loaded up my car once again and headed out, with my boyfriend in tow, at 6 a.m. the next morning. The school offered to put me up in a hotel down the street for 3 days (aside from the occasional free bottle of water and lunch at school events, to date, this is the most generosity I have ever received from this school).
I show up Monday morning and am handed a binder full of information that I can't decipher and then am sent into the courtyard to go mingle with the others. Ah yes, the others, it's amazing how many friendships and cliques can form within 3 days. Awkward. I find a girl who helps me locate my first day’s assignments in my huge binder. I go to the bookstore, with zero dollars, and get my $1,000 worth of books and cart them back to my hotel room and start reading.
Law School Bloody Law School
Well, I was wrong. It didn't get better. Not. At. All.
I continued living out of the hotel for about week before I found a fully furnished place to rent. I was in class 3-4 hours a day 5 days a week and I spent between 3-6 hours reading every day in preparation for the next day. Even though given the number of students in class, my chances of being called on were greatly reduced, I was still as petrified as ever and the nervous tension in the room could still be cut into slices. People that got called on that hadn't read the assignment were given pink slips, which counted as an absence, and we were only allowed 4 absences a semester or we would be dropped, allegedly. There was no rhyme or reason to whom would get called on. I swear one poor girl got called on almost every single week in one class.
Our school had midterms, which were a complete disaster. In the one class I thought I nailed, I got my exam back with the comments, "This is not a passing exam. See me." Oh. I tell you, there are no words to describe how it feels to go from lifelong honor student to an illiterate red headed stepchild. Unlike baseball, there is crying in law school, and lots of it.
I met with some helper person on staff to go over my exams, and she told me my exam answers looked like they were written by someone who had been practicing law for years. Huh? Well, clearly this isn't a good thing. I showed them to my mentor, and he said nice try. Uh, thanks.
After my last final exam of my first semester, I drove out of the school parking lot and straight back to my home home six hours away, where I collapsed. My body ached like it had never ached before. Within 2 days I developed strep throat, something I had never had in my entire life. Then I got sinusitis, then bronchitis followed by a bacterial lung infection. I felt like death. The stress of law school was killing me. Killing me!
If I hadn't signed up for my school's summer abroad program in Europe, I never would have gone back. That's how much I love to travel. I realize how profoundly stupid this is, given the cost of law school could probably send me around the world, twice.
I returned to law school with straight C's in all of my substantive classes and a 3.9 in my legal writing class, huh, the only class without an exam, go figure.
Second semester was as miserable as the first, with the exception of legal writing, my professor deemed my appellate brief the model of how to write a statement of facts, and read it to the class, my one of only two shining moments in law school. I did shitty in all of my substantive classes again, and got called in to see someone in student affairs about my grades. Again, what am I supposed to say? I probably study more than anyone else at this damn school; they sent me to a tutor. My tutor told me that when writing exams I am supposed to write my answer as if I am explaining it to children. Okay.
Europe was amazing. I had a blast and made some friends I'll have for life. Got C-'s in the two courses I took. Jesus.
I decided I had come this far, and already owed a shit ton of money so I might as well finish.
Second year I enrolled in 17 credit hours, my thinking was take a full load now so third year I could work or start studying for the bar. However, at the beginning of the semester the school posted a job opening for a law clerk at a solo practioner's office that practiced in the area of law I thought I wanted to go into, so I couldn't resist, I applied, and I got it. Yep, 17 credit hours and a part-time job. Fuck me.
My Second Law Office
My boss was really nice, super smart, and had a proper law office. It was amazing. I had my very own office with professional furniture and a window. It was nicely decorated and sparkling clean. The place was super organized, hi-tech, and we never got any angry phone calls. Unfortunately, I never had much to do. It seemed like my primary job duty was serving as a witness at document signings. I would print out hundreds of pages of legal documents to get ready for signings, scan receipts into the computer, and enter the contact information from new business cards we would get into various databases. Which I guess worked out, since after sitting in school all day I didn't really have any brain power or life force in me to do anything more.
My second year was a complete blur. I continued my reign of straight C's. No legal writing classes this year.
During my second summer, I took a full load of courses (3) and continued working at the law office. One day at work early that summer, I was moving a computer tower and tweaked my back; it was so bad I couldn't get out of bed the next day. I went to a chiropractor and much to my absolute horror, discovered I had gained 50 pounds!!!! I had been too exhausted to notice. I was going to class, to work, and some days back to class and had to squeeze in time to read so I was oblivious to anything else that was going on, including my increasing waist size. Sure I had been having trouble breathing in my clothes, and I did rip a pair of my dress pants but I just didn't have any time to deal with it, or to buy new clothes apparently. I was so stressed out my body literally held on to every calorie I consumed. Why couldn't I have just become an alcoholic like everyone else?
Spending 6 hours a day in class and working that summer didn't help the matter. Especially since one of those classes was phenomenally stressful. In fact that class's final exam is the only one that ever made me cry, and it was open book! That test was so hard one of the smartest guys in class repeatedly got up during the exam to go out into the hallway to cuss and punch the wall. He lost it big time. I was so upset and shell shocked after that exam I missed the turn into my driveway on the way home, and when I finally got home and shut off my car I just sobbed my eyes out. There is nothing worse than having 3 hours to complete an exam, and not being able to write a single word.
Third year first semester I took 4 courses and kept my job at the law firm. I was burnt out beyond belief. My last semester I quit my job and only had two classes: bar prep and trial practice. It doesn't seem like much but bar prep was grueling and met for 9 hours a week and trial practice was a lot of work. Bar prep was more like a weekly dose of Fox News style fear mongering about the bar exam. Sure we reviewed the law and took practice exams but the only thing I got out of that class was having engrained in me that my life would be over if I failed. Too bad they were of no help in improving my exam writing skills. I took a load of practice exams, which all came back with outright cruel comments on them, not very encouraging. I bound a stack of these exams together with a note with my name, phone number, and email address in one of the professor's inbox asking if I could make an appointment to go over these, but I never got a response.
Trial practice was nerve wrecking and a lot of work but it was also kind of fun. This was the first time I ever felt like I was learning real lawyer stuff. No reading case law here. It was in this class where I received my second and last shining moment in law school. There was no final exam in this course, instead we had a final trial, and my professor said that I had prepared the best substantive argument in the class. Aw shucks, too bad it did nothing to boost my GPA, the class was Pass/Fail.
Graduation
Finally this shit show came to end and I graduated, barely. Time to celebrate, right? Wrong. Congratulations you now have a mortgage on your life. I graduated with $218,064 of debt. Remember how I told you how important the LSAT was, this is why.
Here's a fun fact: the students at the bottom of the class graduate with the most debt. Also, some of their tuition money goes to the really smart students in the form of scholarships that the school uses to bribe them to stay at their shitty school and not transfer to some higher class school. So the people with good grades, on law review, moot court, etc., who will have no trouble passing the bar or finding jobs, (and who will think that I didn't try hard enough in law school and that I'm a whiny loser) will graduate with the least amount of debt, if any at all, while those of us that need the break the most, graduate with a burden we will carry the rest of our lives. Awesome.
Long before graduation day you will be dead broke from paying bar exam filing fees, laptop registration fees, and if you plan on taking a commercial bar prep course that $3,000 is due long before graduation. Assuming you don't have some other means of support, after graduation your options are to move back home and hang your J.D. in your parents house, or to take out another loan(s). I chose the former.
The Fucking Bar Exam
Welcome to hell.
Now that you are completely emotionally and physically exhausted it's time to commit to memory everything you learned, or should have learned in law school, over the last three years into a period of about 10 weeks.
If you sign up for a commercial bar prep course, after you receive your 40 pound box of books, your days will consist of listening to some asshole who has passed all 50 bar exams lecture too fast, (I'm glad I took the course online because of how often I would have to rewind the video) for 4 - 12 hours per subject, while you literally fill in the blanks of the outline they provide you with. These are not state specific outlines, they are given to everyone! Instead of being useful and narrowing your focus, for example, saying hey guess what negligence has been tested in your state 9 times out of the last 10 bar exams, the outlines cover every single miniscule rule, which leads you to the mistaken belief that you have to know everything...just in case. Every chance your lecturer gets s/he will rave about how their outline is the bees knees and how lucky you are to be receiving this wonderful honor. Do yourself a favor, study your state's past exam questions and prepare your own outline accordingly, if negligence has never been tested in your state, keep it off your outline, otherwise have fun studying 40 pages of irrelevant mess.
After the lecture you're supposed to do like 3 practice essays, which for some reason time and again they would assign these zinger exams that I had no fucking clue how to answer. Plus, this was a complete waste of time because I didn't have the law committed to memory to be able to answer these closed book.
After a week or two of this I was completely broken down, catatonic, and crying every day. My boyfriend and I went out to lunch one day in about the second week, and I got so pissed off at him we didn't talk for pretty much the duration of bar study. Studying for the bar left me zero tolerance for just about anything.
One day driving home from grabbing lunch I started to feel this pain flaring up in the back of my shoulder and into my wrist. I figured it was just a cramp from being hunched over my desk for the last 6 or 7 weeks. I took Tylenol, I tried to rub it out, I adjusted my posture, got a book holder, made a pillow for my wrist, all to no avail. I got no relief and my neck started hurting too. The next 3 days I tried to study in my recliner but still no relief.
Then I randomly got a newsletter from my chiropractor about carpal tunnel syndrome. Oh shit! All of my symptoms matched to a T. I immediately made an appointment, but I didn't have carpal tunnel, I had a pinched nerve on the side of my neck! I left his office with the first relief I had from pain in a week. It was so bad it felt like I had whiplash, I couldn't turn my head, or lift it off my pillow.
Unfortunately the pain came back about two days later. Then I started feeling it on the other side of my neck and so on and so on and so on. I would sit in my recliner with an airplane U-shaped pillow packed with ice packs stuffed down between it and the two pinched nerves in my neck while I tried to memorize 17 subjects of law. One night the pain was so intense I just wanted someone to take me to the E.R. It wouldn't stop pulsating. It felt like fire. I was moving from my bed to the recliner to the couch all night sobbing my eyes out because nothing helped. The worst thing about it was I knew I was the one causing it. I had so much pressure, fear, and stress going on my fucking head nearly popped off.
Unfortunately for me, those last 3 weeks leading up to the bar exam were critical in that, that was the time to cement all those fucking elements into my brain. It was at this point I realized there was probably no chance in hell I was going to pass this thing. But I also realized all of the things I did wrong in preparing, namely, following my commercial bar prep's schedule to a T. They give you one full day to memorize Constitutional Law, one day for Property, some days they put 2 subjects on one day. Yeah, this didn't work for me. Feel free to adjust your study plan accordingly, after all you know how you learn best, they don't even know your name, you're literally just a number and a dollar sign to them.
I signed up for an additional commercial bar prep course just for the MBEs. I did a shitload of MBEs and no matter how much I studied I would always score somewhere between 50 - 60% on my practice tests. So not only can I not write exams, I suck at multiple choice. If I hadn't already used up all of my red flags, I would insert one giant flaming one here.
In the weeks leading up to the exam you will receive a packet of instructions from your state's examination committee. Please, please, please follow these instructions. For example, if they tell you to wear soft rubber soled shoes, then wear them! It's for a reason. Otherwise you will be the asshole that disturbs the entire room every time you go for a sip of water or a pee. Don't be an asshole.
The night before the bar exam I couldn't sleep at all. I woke up early and drove my ass down to the testing center. Got lost, found it. Paid my $16 to park and got in an enormous line worse than one you'd find at the airport.
Expect long delays in getting registered as the only people who volunteer to proctor exams are the very elderly. The line took forever and it was hot as hell, people were visibly sweating through their clothes. Since no water bottles or bags of any kind were allowed I had to hold on to my heavy ass laptop and try not to pass out.
Once I got through the security line I walked into this huge warehouse of a room where they usually have expos and conventions but today there was nothing but tables for as far as the eye could see.
So after 3 years and 10 weeks it all comes down to the next two days.
The first day of the bar, essay day, went by fast as hell. I was amazed at the questions that I got, they were actually doable. They tested all the major concepts of law that anyone just graduating law school would know. Too bad I spent so much time learning miniscule little rules that I didn't know rather than focusing on the obvious. I couldn't believe that everything that had been engrained in me for the last 7 months about the bar exam was complete bullshit. I was furious. All the fear mongering from school and the bar prep lecturers nearly caused me to have a spontaneous decapitation.
The second day, MBE day, however was a different story. By question 30 I realized my eyes were glazing over and I wasn't really reading the question thoroughly enough and I was having trouble concentrating, so I got up and splashed some water on my face and tried again. It helped wake me up a little bit, but I still struggled. I was just beat and sore as hell, I had a huge knot in my neck both days. The same thing happened to me during the afternoon session. The MBEs are just exhausting, but I made it through it and lived to share my tale.
I made one more visit to the chiropractor after the test and then poof all of my neck problems were gone.
I'm not exactly sure what it was I did for the next few days, probably just vegged. Unfortunately a few days later I had to take the MPRE for the second time. Stupid.
After I started to recover from the bar, I felt like I had been to war or something. I didn't want to see or hang out with any "civilians" who didn't know what I had just been through. I felt different, and not in a good way. A classmate of mine's husband is a psychologist and he told us we were suffering from post-traumatic stress. I believe it.
Bar Results
After 3 months of limbo, the week that bar results came out finally arrived, and I felt like I couldn't breathe. I emailed anyone who cared, the link to the site where the pass list would be posted ahead of time so in case I failed I wouldn't have to tell them. I was so anxious, nervous, and scared shitless I could hardly take it. Then that Friday when the clock struck 5:00 p.m. I went online to look at the pass list and feverishly looked for my name, it wasn't there. FUCK THE WORLD. I felt like I was being gutted. All that work didn't count for shit. I pretty much just sat in my room and cried. I eventually had to go to the bank and get some food. Two different tellers at the bank asked me if I was ok. NO.
The next day was pretty much the same. I knew I had to get it all out of my system because I was meeting up with a law school friend that was coming to town the next day. By Sunday I felt better. I felt free, like I could put all of this behind me and go on with my life. I started looking for all kinds of random jobs like crazy. I thought if I could land a job before January I wouldn’t have to take the Feb bar. I was willing to work anywhere! Monday I got my test scores in the mail. I failed by 12.3 points. I also got the paper work to register for the Feb bar, I only had two weeks to register, so I did, just in case.
Never got a single response from any of the jobs I applied for.
My neck started flaring up again within 2 weeks of starting back studying. It felt like a big ball of flame on the right side of my head. Not to mention all the tension in my shoulders was killing me too. Still had 48 days left of this shit.
During this time there was a feature article in the New York Times about the loosing game of law school. It made me want to quit studying and look for a job. I learned about a post graduate intern position at a law firm run by two alumni, and I applied.
At this point, the last 8 months of my life had revolved around the bar exam. I studied all day every day. I hadn't had a paycheck in 14 months. I owed, and currently still owe, over $200,000 in student loans. I lived with my parents. I was basically the most miserable I had ever been in my entire life, or so I thought.
My Third Law Office
I got an interview for the post graduate intern position. I talked to the two partners for almost an hour about how much practical exeperience they could offer me before they revealed to me that the position would be unpaid. I accepted the position and then came home and cried.
As soon as I walked into the office on my first day, my new boss, says, "I'm so not ready for you." What?! You know this volunteer gig is cutting into my study time. He didn't even know which office he was going to set me up in. So I spent my first hour of work reviewing my Evidence outline which I had thankfully stashed in my purse, while he set up a computer for me.
Then, still having nothing ready for me to work on, I spent the next 45 minutes browsing files and just clicking on random stuff. Then he brought me an audio clip of a hearing he wanted me to transcribe. It was a 7 minute hearing consisting of him arguing, well more like being a complete dick, to the judge in the case over a traffic ticket.
Once I was finished he was on the phone for a half hour, he took all of his calls on speaker phone, and I didn't like the way he talked to people. He came in and asked me if I would drive to the next city over and pick up his new business cards! It was already 4:30 and I had no clue where I was going. Before I left he asked me if I wanted gas money, I said yes! I told him I get 12 miles to the gallon. He gave me $10. It was bumper to bumper traffic the whole way there and it was hard to find this little print shop but I finally found it. I didn't get back to the office until 5:30 (I'm supposed to leave at 5:00). When I walked in he says, "Oh, I was getting worried about you." I said uh yeah it's rush hour, you know, bumper to bumper traffic out there. He said, "Yeah I know!" WTF?! Then he apologized profusely for not being prepared and that he would have two projects ready for me next time. I wanted to kick this guy in the balls.
On my second day of "work", I spent the first hour and a half drafting generic character reference letters for a client who wanted to get his criminal record expunged. The rest of my time was spent working on a 14 page appeal for a client who got a red light ticket from a traffic camera. I almost walked out. This is not how I wanted to spend my unpaid time.
I felt like I was losing my mind. I was so full of rage between this and studying for the bar. The first time I took the bar exam I cared too much. This time around I could care less. I felt like it would be in my best interest not to pass because then I would be free. Freedom is what I want above all else. Getting my license would be like putting a two ton anchor around my ankle and shoving me off a dock. I knew what was in store for me and my patience was running out. I could feel it in every bone of my body.
I came across an article on the internet about a girl who graduated 3rd in my class, passed the bar the first time, and was now folding sweaters at a retail store. Hey, at least she was getting paid.
On what was supposed to be my third day of "work", I arrive at the office to find all the lights off and the doors locked! I was pissed for about 20 seconds, and then I realized what this meant - I was free! I waited in the parking lot reviewing an outline for about 15 minutes and then I left. I wrote my boss an email saying that I had went to the office but no one was there, I had waited for a while but then decided to go home and study and that I didn't plan on coming back.
In typical asshole fashion, he replied to my email by blaming his secretary, who is sick.
Um, yeah, I don't come in until noon! I think you had plenty of time to call me. Oh well, thank god he didn't. I'm free!
Bar Exam Round Two
With three weeks of bar study left to go:
Three days after this law firm fiasco I got an email from the school wanting me to fill out an employment survey. I filled it out and got a response in about 15 minutes asking if I wanted to talk to someone over the phone about my job search. I responded with the story above and left my phone number, no one ever called me back.
A few days later I came across an article about how Americans don't travel and the difference between us and the rest of the world. It talked about how people in other countries take a gap year in between periods of transition. I decided to start mine February 24th.
I got my credit card yearly statement and discovered I had spent $5,082 on the bar exam! Oh my god the places I could have gone with that money. That doesn't even include all the money I had to dish out at the chiropractor for my pinched nerves. Fuck!
I got so burnt out on studying. I think bar exam re-takers should get extra points on the exam, and in life.
The morning before the bar exam, I awoke from my first pleasant night's sleep in god knows how long and then things started to take a terrible turn. I felt paralyzed and like I was going to throw up. I started crying and was feeling scared shitless. Nothing like starting off the day with a panic attack. When it eventually passed, I tried to get up and take a practice exam, but then I started to feel sick again.
Didn't sleep a wink the night before the exam. Got my ass down to the exam site at 6:45, there was a lot less people this time around. I had to sit in my seat for 2 hours waiting for the exam to start and there was this girl in the row in front of me yapping non-stop, her voice was like a chainsaw cutting down my skull.
The morning session flew by. I felt like I started off really strong, but then each essay question just got harder and harder, I was on my second to last one when I realized I was toast. My body was starting to shut down, everything hurt. My skin hurt, my legs hurt from the chair, my forearms from the table, I was miserable and just wanted out of there. I finished my essays with about 45 minutes to spare. I got up and splashed water on my face and tried to review my answers, but there was nothing more that I could do, and I couldn't sit there for another half hour waiting for the jack off exam proctors to read the instructions on how to turn everything in, again, so I left. I was in bed by 7:00.
I got a few hours sleep and then headed back down there 2 hours early, luckily I did, because there was a convention going on and it took me 20 minutes to park.
I finished my morning session of MBEs in 2 hours and 10 minutes. I had no energy or brain power to review my answers. Plus, there's no point, I always score about 55% no matter how hard I try. So I left early and headed for lunch. I had 3 of the most expensive and smallest tacos I've ever seen. I doubt the tortilla was bigger than the palm of my hand. It was nice to eat in peace. I just started my last taco when the convention let out. There was a shitload of people pouring out, so I finished my two bites of taco and went to my car, lathered up with my prohibited items (chap stick & lotion), and listened to Nirvana Unplugged until it was time to go.
Went back in and listened to chainsaw girl run her mouth until they passed out the test. I finished in about the same amount of time. My brain and body were aching, reviewing my answers would have been futile, and so I left. I left knowing that either way it turned out that I would NEVER be back.
My Fourth Law Office
After I recovered from round 2 of the bar I started applying for jobs like crazy. The only opportunity that came my way was unpaid. Didn't care that it was in the Appellate Court, there was absolutely no way I was going to accept it. I did not go through all of this shit to work for free. Even indentured servants get room and board. I refused. I would rather take a paid non legal job than do legal research for free.
After not getting a single response for months from the gaggle of resumes I sent out, I decided to take law school off of my resume and wallah I got a call for an interview for a legal secretary position within a week. Before the interview I struggled all night about whether to come clean about law school, but that dilemma was quickly resolved when within the first 2 minutes of the interview at the fancy two-story law office, the attorney said, "Can you believe I had two attorneys apply for this position?!" Needless to say I kept my mouth shut and quickly threw away the key. The interview lasted 40 minutes, and 2 days later I was hired.
What the hell?!
So, the law firm where the interview took place is just one of the conference rooms the attorney rents out on occasion. She actually works out of her house. My "office" was located in their son's bedroom. He doesn't live there anymore, but you wouldn't know it by how much of his stuff is still there. The posters plastering the walls were an ode to Quentin Tarantino. There was a giant picture of Uma Thurman leering down at me. Files were stuffed in every nook and cranny of the house, there was a wooden plank on top of the son's bed stacked with files, their pool table and dining room table was covered with them, and stacked underneath them. It was like file hell. My desk was the size of a child's, there was absolutely no workspace. There was a dresser next to it. I would open one drawer and find a hole-puncher and the next would be full of boxer shorts. Lovely. My boss's husband was also an attorney but recently retired, and seemed to be nearly deaf, as my boss had to shout her conversations with him and he would watch TV on full blast. They had a 24 year old daughter that still lived there and was planning on going to law school in the fall, although she only applied to one law school, and she hadn't been accepted yet. They had two little yappy dogs at the house. The outgoing secretary was 61 years old and seemed to be adding a lot to the already insurmountable chaos.
Although my boss did have her own computer, my daily duties included printing off all of her emails, reconciling all of her bank accounts (business & personal), paying her bills (business and personal), and answering the phones (business and personal). She would handwrite or dictate her pleadings and letters, and then revise them 42 times. One 2 paragraph letter took 2 hours to complete. The things she would handwrite took even longer because I couldn't read her handwriting, so I would have to get up and ask her what it said every other word. It was exhausting. Learn how to use a computer! Also, each day she managed to realize there was some pertinent pleading that’s deadline was due that day, so I never left on time. It was a complete clusterfuck.
I knew on my first day at lunch, that I shouldn't go back, but I talked myself into believing it would get better once the outgoing secretary was gone.
Within my first week, I came into work to find my 62 year old boss in a bath towel and for some reason her daughter walked into my "office" one day in her underwear and just stood there without saying a word, and then left. What the fuck?!
Things didn't get better. After my first day on my own, I knew I had to quit, and that was by lunch. Later that day, I overheard a conversation my boss and her husband were having in the hallway outside my "office" about why she married him, and he said because of his dick size. I'm done.
The next day as soon as my boss came in my "office" I stopped her and told her that I'm not cut out for this job. To which she replied in horror, "Why not?!” I told her I'm used to things being more systematic (rather than doing things without rhyme or reason, and waiting until the 11th hour to get things filed...every day!) and I don't like how I have to work on something as simple as a 2 paragraph letter for 2 hours. She is outraged and proceeds to blame me for taking the job in the first place and that I should have told her in the interview if I had reservations. Oh, sorry I didn't know you and your family were batshit crazy. Anyway she said she needed someone there and that she had something else that needed to be filed that day! So I ended up staying all day. Twenty minutes after that conversation she came in while on the phone and scolded me for not putting some important thing in her calendar! WTF?! Jesus christ I've been here for a total of 1 day and 20 minutes on my own and it never occured to you that maybe it was your previous employee that fucked up?! Also, you realize I just quit, and for some ungodly reason I'm staying here to help you out. Fucking lunatic.
Luckily later that day she came in and grabbed the mountain of resumes that had come in, many from law school grads. I overheard her creepy deaf husband ask her why don't you call one of these lawyers? She said because she didn't want to pay someone $40,000-50,000 a year! What?! I told her that I knew a law school grad that never passed the bar who was working the front desk of a hotel (true story) and that the job posting clearly states what the pay rate is so they wouldn't expect to be making that much. Her creepy deaf husband agreed with me, but it fell on even deafer ears. Hey, I tried. The creepy deaf husband came into my "office" later and begged me to stay until they could replace me because they can't function without someone there. Yeah, no shit. I said I would, only because I hadn't had two dimes to rub together in god knows how long, and told him the sooner the better.
Unbelievably, things proceeded to get worse. One day my boss gave her daughter a project to do involving one of the cases she was working on, and the daughter proceeded to have a complete nervous breakdown. She started yelling and stomping her feet. She screamed at the top of her lungs that it would take her a decade to go through that box of shit and that this project was making her feel like a fucking idiot and that she would feel better if her hair was on fire. This went on for an hour. All the while, creepy deaf dude was having a casual phone conversation at the table next to her. As soon as he got off the phone she started laying into him calling him a deaf fucking asshole, while my boss proceeded to dictate a pleading with all of this going on in the background. Meanwhile I was just stuck sitting in my "office" listening to all of this unfold, because I needed to have my boss decipher her handwriting and there was no way in hell I was going to go out there. What a fucking nightmare.
Each day after, the daughter seemed to at some point during the day, breakdown into a crying, screaming, foot-stomping fit. Yeah, good luck in law school. Psycho.
Bar Results
While I was working for these nut jobs I got my bar results. It's official I'm a 2 time bar failer. I failed by 4.3 points. I am free!!! I was at complete peace. I gave this thing ALL that I had and knew there was nothing more I could have possibly done to prepare. I came, I saw, and it kicked my ass, spirit, and dignity. I'd never been so ready in my life to just move on. This had been wrong from the start, and I did it anyway knowing full well I would hate every minute of it. What's done is done. I may not have my license but I have an arsenal of tools I can use to battle whatever life throws at me and no one will see it coming. I felt like that day was the beginning of my new life, the world was my oyster. What a 180 from when I got my bar results the first time.
Because I came so close, I decided to appeal my score just for the hell of it. It was a lot of work. I basically had to prepare a proper court style appeal and cite specific instances of unfair or incorrect grading. A little difficult to do seeing as how my essays only had a score on them and not a single comment. I did my best and thought it was really good - if there is one thing I learned in law school, it's that I can write. I had an attorney look over it before I sent it in, and he said he was impressed.
I lost. They didn't give me one single point.
In the interest of moving on, I took out a bar study loan (genius, I know, just what I need, more debt) and moved 3,000 miles away.
The End: My Fifth and Final Law Office
Within 3 weeks of my move I got a job temping as a legal secretary.
Oh. My. God. What did I ever do to the law office gods to deserve such karma?!
It was like de ja vu. This attorney didn't even have a computer in his office. I had to print out every email he got and take it back to him, wait for his response, draft it in word complete with the to and from section and subject, print it out and give it back to him, get it back with revisions, fix it give it back to him until I got his approval to email it, and then print out the sent email to show him I didn't mess it up. He didn't seem to understand the concept of an attachment, so in every email it would say see attachment when really he was referring to some email or discussion he was forwarding. So time and time again people would reply that there was no attachment, and instead of just saying see below, he would say yes there is you sent it back to me, or in one case he replied what are you smoking (and because of the process described above this would take 30 minutes) and this was just dealing with emails.
My first day I made a lot of mistakes and instead of just telling me hey I need it done this way, like a normal human being, without saying a word, he would just put whatever it was I messed up back on my desk with the same instructions that I fucked up in the first place. At the end of my first day, I had to stay late stuffing envelopes while he sat and watched me, sighing heavily the whole time, and this guy knew I had a J.D.
After my last day there, I nailed the coffin in my legal career. I never want to work in another law office as long as I live. I think if I ever work in another law office again, I might die.
As of right now, I am making it my mission in life to make sure people make an informed decision before deciding to enter the legal profession or law school. Don't believe what you see on TV, it's fiction!
Like I said, this is just one girl's story. Hopefully, your story is nothing like this. I would love to hear from others and post your stories here, whether positive, negative, or somewhere in between, to help inform and maybe even entertain others. Email me at contact@disgruntedlyyours.com
~Disgruntedly Yours
