Passing My Own Bar & Flying High
February 21, 2020

    But even my winning genetic lottery ticket takes work – real work – to cash in.  It's not like it cashes itself in.  If I have a decent poker hand, I still have to play it – and all the more so if I don't have a decent hand.  Them cards ain't gonna bluff for themselves.  And they ain't gonna fold by themselves neither, if that's the better part of valor in a particular situation.  

    I've got to take control of my game – or at least take as much control of it as I can.  So much is beyond my control, it's true.  But no one really knows where the "I got this" ends and the "it's outta my hands" begins.  There's a potentially vast, foggy gray area in the middle between control and chance, where I'm mostly flying blind.

   And that's where I have to act as if I wield a great deal of control.  That's where, like a commercial airline pilot relying on their minimum 1500 hours of required flight time before flying their first jetful of passengers, I fall back on my preparation.  

 * * *

    My last year of law school, I teamed up with two of my classmates and started studying for the bar exam long before most of our other classmates started.  I planned to take the bar in July of 2010 (following graduation in May), but my friends and I started meeting a couple times a week at the beginning of the spring semester of our last year – so, in January of 2010 – to work on practice questions and discuss answers.

    A little background about the bar exam might be helpful here.  It's a two-day test in most states (although in some states there's a third day as well), and it's only administered twice a year, in July and February.  You take the bar exam for a particular state, but all states administer the test at the same time.  This is because one of the exam days consists entirely of a battery of multiple choice questions that are the same across all states.  In other words, on that one day, every aspiring lawyer, everywhere in the country, answers the very same set of multiple choice questions.  These questions are supposed to reflect knowledge of the broad principles of law that apply anywhere in the U.S.  The other day (or days) of the test is (are) is devoted to a series of essay questions, and in Oklahoma these are state-law specific, which means the universe of material to know should be more limited (in theory).  Plus, the essays are developed and graded by practicing Oklahoma attorneys, who have an interest in making sure there are enough attorneys to handle the public demand for legal service, which usually means they're pretty lenient (in theory).  So it's the multiple choice part of the exam that most people worry about.  It's killer.

    There's a lot riding on the test, obviously, for all recent law grads.  In my case, in January 2010, I had already accepted a job offer at one of the largest and most prestigious firms in the state of Oklahoma, with a six-figure starting salary (quadrupling that of my first teaching salary).  But keeping that job was contingent on passing the bar.  And since Brad and I were financing our professional degrees with student loans (at the price of a decent home, in the Oklahoma housing market), I also knew the payment train would soon be upon us. 

    No pressure.  No pressure at all.

    I was not going to screw up this opportunity.  I had a normal courseload that last semester, plus my ongoing responsibilities as Managing Editor of the school's scholarly legal journal, the Oklahoma Law Review (which effectively constituted a full-time – though unpaid – job in and of itself).  But I was going to make time to start studying for the bar, because I was not going to screw this up.  To the extent that it was within my power, I was not going to get into that bar exam in six months and freak out and fail.  And I knew it could happen.  Before law school, I had never had test anxiety, but law school exams were different, and I had whiffed just enough of them to know what it was like to freeze up and perform poorly.  And there was just too much riding on this one crazy test to let that happen.  

   I knew I needed to be prepared enough to open that multiple choice test booklet on multi-state day and not be overwhelmed with nerves.  I knew I needed to be familiar with the style and format of the questions.  I knew I needed to understand the standard gimmes and gotchas.  I knew I needed to know, as much as possible, what was coming.

    And so I studied.  I studied my ass off.  And went to class.  And managed the law review.  My two friends and I met once or twice a week that whole spring semester to work and discuss our multiple choice practice sets.  And then, right after graduation (law school graduation is kind of cruel, by the way – what, with the bar exam still two and a half months off), I turned right around and started the formal bar prep course, which consisted of about four weeks of three- to four-hour daily training sessions, four or five days a week.  Plus, I started independently doing at least one, one-hour multiple choice practice test a day, every day, with another hour to review the answer explanations afterward.  Oh, and I was still working on law review editing that summer, for at least another three to four hours a day. 

    It was like training for a marathon.  It was grueling.  

   All told, I calculated later, I spent about 500 hours studying for that two-day bar exam.  That might not be the 1500 flight hours that a commercial airline pilot has to log before his first passenger flight, but it is a ridiculous amount of time.  In some sense, I waaaaaaaayyyyyy overshot what was necessary to pass.  But my nerves stayed within manageable limits when it was show time, and those crazy multiple choice questions felt like familiar territory.  That was the bar I needed to pass.  That was the fog I needed to fly through.

    And I passed.  With flying colors.