Examples and Explanations: The Bar Exam

. . . and we're back.

I apologize for the long delay between posts, but the bar exam was an all-consuming task. Now, life is closer to normal again. I wanted to spend one, and only one, post explaining the bar exam process. I'm going to write a follow-up post about my trip up to Columbus for the actual task.

After graduating from law school, there is very little satisfaction from completing the task. This is because the true gatekeepers to the profession are the bar examiners of each state. So, the week after graduation, I started taking bar review courses in a program called BarBri. This program costs a few thousand dollars and includes several books of substantive outlines and practice questions and lectures from law professors on all of the topics. I took the bus up to the University of Cincinnati's College of Law every day and listened to live lectures or taped lectures that hit the highlights of the material for about five weeks straight. While I did learn a lot of the topics in law school, the bar exam is quite different. Here are the topics that the Ohio bar exam covers:

• Civil Procedure
• Criminal Law*
• Criminal Procedure
• Contracts
• Business Association (Agency, Partnership, and Corporations)
• Commercial Paper*
• Secured Transactions*
• Evidence
• Constitutional Law
• Wills*
• Professional Responsibility
• Torts
• Property

The asterisks note the classes that I didn't take in law school. Fortunately, these particular topics were easy to pick up. I actually loved Wills and wish I had taken it in law school.

The Ohio bar exam is a 3-day exam. The first day is a series of six essay questions in the morning, and you get thirty minutes to get something down on the paper or computer screen (I chose to handwrite my exam). You get the essays two at a time, so the tricky part is to apportion the right amount of time to the topic depending on its demands. In the afternoon, the bar examiners provide two, closed-universe, practice-based essays that you get an 1.5 hours each to complete. Basically, you get a "memorandum" from your hypothetical boss that tells you about a hypothetical client with a hypothetical problem. Then, you get to read a few made-up cases and statutes that give you a few rules that you might or might not use. Then, you get to see your client's hypothetical case file that includes interviews, letters, and anything else that might provide relevant or irrelevant facts. Then, your job is to follow directions and put some final product together for your hypothetical boss. I found these exercises to be the most enjoyable part of the exam.

The second day is a multiple choice test that most states have adopted: the Multistate Bar Examination. This six-hour test covers six major topics in 200 questions. If you want to answer a few questions from a sample test for giggles, click here (the answers are at the end). I recommend question 15 as a "typical" or "average" question in length and difficulty.

The third day is another set of six essays (again, thirty minutes per question in sets of two). The Ohio bar examiners group the substantive topics into 11 testable areas, and you will get a question on each of those areas. After Day 1's six essays, you know exactly what topics are going to come up, but a topic (probably from the first day) will repeat. I heard one person refer to this as "the grab-bag question." It was like nails running down a chalkboard. "Grab-bag" sounds ridiculous, and I hate the way it rolls off of the tongue with its shallow vowels. "Toss-up" might not be as appropriate or evocative, but it feels more robust and adult.

So, that's the basic explanation of what the bar exam is. If you have any questions, please stand up and wave your arms (what you do at the bar exam if you're [1] in need of proctor assistance or [2] dying).