486: Preparing for the Bar Exam as a 3L (Part 2)

Episode Transcript
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Lee Burgess (00:01):
Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast.
Today we are looking toward thefuture and discussing preparing
for the bar exam as a 3L.
Your Law School Toolbox hosts are AlisonMonahan and Lee Burgess, that's me.
We're here to demystify the lawschool and early legal career
experience, so you can be the bestlaw student and lawyer you can be.
We're the co-creators of the Law SchoolToolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the

(00:22):
career-related website CareerDicta.
Alison also runs TheGirl's Guide to Law School.
If you enjoy the show, pleaseleave a review or rating on
your favorite listening app.
And if you have any questions,don't hesitate to reach out to us.
You can reach us via the contactform on LawSchoolToolbox.com,
and we'd love to hear from you.
And with that, let's get started.

Alison Monahan (00:46):
Welcome back to the Law School Toolbox podcast.
Today we're diving into essential tips for3Ls who are gearing up for the bar exam.
Let's talk about what students mightwant to know about the UBE versus the
still-lingering state-specific exams.

Well, the UBE and what's coming down the pipe - this
NextGen bar exam - is cool, becauseit includes score portability.
And so you take it in one jurisdiction- typically the jurisdiction where you want
to be licensed - and then if you get acertain score, you can bounce around the
country and get licensed in other states.
Now, it is important to note thatthere are still requirements for

(01:24):
each state, so you may have todo another moral character, you
may have to pay a bunch of fees.
There are going to still be loopholesthat you need to do, but generally
speaking, if you take the New Yorkbar and you get a high enough score,
you could also get licensed inWashington, or Arizona, or Texas, or
any other of these UBE jurisdictions.
And there is a handy dandy chart on theNational Conference of Bar Examiners

(01:47):
website that does list out all of thestates and all of the passing scores.
And one of the things that is interestingis that some states you only need a 260
and some states you need over a 280.
It's a very big score

difference.
That's a big range.

It's a very big range.
So, you should think about thatwhen you pick your jurisdiction.
Yeah.
The other thing to keep

in mind is that generally your score is only good
for a certain number of years.
So, if you do think you wantto be admitted multiple places,
just go ahead and lock that down.
Sometimes if you've practiced for Xnumber of years in a jurisdiction, they'll
let you transfer to a new one, but Iwould say if you know that you want to
be in two places and just go ahead andget that taken care of, I would just
get licensed in both of them as soon as

possible.
Yeah.
The other thing you may want to thinkabout is if you are pursuing a career
path where you just need a license,but you don't need a state-specific
license, I think that's where lookingat these different score thresholds
around the country can be really wise.
If you're somebody who perhaps isconcerned about their ability to perform
on this exam, and you just need a barlicense somewhere, I might choose a 260

(02:58):
jurisdiction to do that in, and not a280 jurisdiction, because it's going
to be a much easier bar to jump over.
Now, again, that doesn't mean thatyou're not going to be a great lawyer.
It's just that you need to be practicaland make sure that you're getting
licensed where you need to be licensed.
And the most important thing isthat you may just need a license.
So just go get a bar license somewhere.
Right, yeah.

That's basically the situation I was in.
All of my cases were in federal court.
I was a patent litigator.
Eventually I got licensedin California, but it was
definitely not mission-critical.

So, you also want to think about if you want to practice
law in California, Californiadoes not have reciprocity.
So you will have to get a barlicense in California, whether you
take what's called the attorney'sexam five years after practicing.
So if you think you might want to sitin California, just get it over with and
just try and get that California license.
Florida is still out theredoing its own thing as well.

(03:51):
Georgia and some places are stillpulling in different parts of the UBE.
It is a time of change right now, withthe impending NextGen bar exam, but
you want to be up on the news, seewhat the different state requirements
are, and pick the best state for you.

Right.
And as we mentioned, starting in2026, some of these UBE states will
start rolling on to the NextGen.
So that's another exciting thing to haveon your radar, but not for right now.

Something that we have been talking about on this podcast since I
think episode like two or three, maybe?
One?

Actually, one.

One after our introduction episode.
But one of our very firstepisodes we did was on mindset.
And so, what role does mindsetplay in your bar exam prep?

Well, I think this is definitely where you've got
to lean into the growth mindset.
And for people who aren't familiar,you can go back and listen to very
early Lee and Alison on the podcast,probably with really crappy audio.
But the growth mindset basically is theidea that you can learn things, and that
there's a process and a mindset and away to go about learning things that

(04:58):
is more effective than other options.
So, what happens sometimes with thebar, I think, is people are like, "I'm
really smart, I don't really need tostudy for this test, I'll be fine."
That doesn't often work out.
So, I think going in with theidea of, "I have strengths and
weaknesses like anyone else."
And if you hit a rough patch thinking,"Okay, how can I be strategic about this?"

(05:20):
That's how I kind of thinkabout the growth mindset.
What is my strategy?
I've hit a rough spot, I'mtrying to figure out what to do.
Is the strategy that I just give up?
Probably not going to

work very.
Hopefully don't pick that strategy.
That's not a good

strategy.
I think it can be subconscious.
But people do it.
Yeah, people 100% self-sabotage here.
And I don't think it's consciousnecessarily, but in retrospect
it often becomes apparent.
But it's the idea that really, you haveto figure out what the problem is and a
way to approach it, and to think aboutit as a skill that you need to learn,
rather than something that is somehowinbred in you that you are going to be

(05:54):
able to do or not do, because no one isborn knowing how to pass the bar exam.
No.

I really think this is also something to keep in mind when you
start comparing yourself to your peers.
This is such a toxic game thatis played with law students
and people taking the bar.
How often I hear people talk about whatthey did in comparison to what other
people did, or this person passed, and soI need to do exactly what this person did.
Or even sometimes, you will havesignificant others both studying for

(06:22):
the exam, and then you're comparingthe experience, and then if one
person passes and the other persondoesn't, they're comparing experiences.
You really just haveto play your own game.
Or

Reddit said, someone on Reddit said they did this and they passed.
It's like, okay, great.
That worked for that person.
And I'm not saying there'snot good advice there.
I actually consult Reddit on manythings, including recently learning
how to make better espresso.
But there are a lot of ideas there.
Some of them are probably relevant toyou; some of them are definitely not.

Yeah.
I think that after all theseyears of helping so many different
students study for the bar, thereare definitely some truisms.
One of them is, there's no magicoutline, you have to do the heavy
lifting of the practice, you haveto memorize law strategically.
But some of these nuances, it's reallyabout how we all work individually.

(07:12):
And if you start getting down, I think,where mindset really plays a piece,
is to just say what do you have to doto reset yourself so you can chip away
at this challenge every day and to notget convinced you're going to fail,
to not fall into imposter syndrome,which we've all had show up for us.
But you have to just continueto check in with yourself.

(07:35):
And if you really find yourself spiraling,you must hit "Pause" and go reach out
to your resources at your school, to atherapist, to whoever it is that kind
of counsels you through those moments,because what you can't do is lose
a month to self-sabotage and chaos.
There's just not enough time to fix it.
So, you want to kind of checkin with yourself on a regular
basis, maybe even weekly.

(07:55):
Have a journaling session on Mondaybefore you get started, to see how
you're feeling about the week ahead.

Yeah.
I read an interesting article recentlyby someone who coached Olympic athletes,
and they had this theory that any timeyou're training for something that's
difficult and is long-term - which I thinkthe bar qualifies - it's just natural
that one third of the days, you're goingto feel great about everything and your
progress; one third of the days, you'regoing to feel kind of okay, but not
terrible; and one third of the days areprobably going to be pretty terrible.

(08:23):
And that's normal.
So I think when people hit that spotof like, "Oh, I had a really bad day.
My MBE scores went down.
This is terrible.
I'm tired, I'm burned out" - it'sreally easy to think that's
where you are permanently.
And I just thought that was a greatapproach of just saying, "You know what?
This is one of the one third bad days.
Doesn't mean tomorrow'sgoing to be terrible."
So, I've actually startedusing this in my normal life.

(08:44):
If I'm out skiing and I have a bad day,I am like, "Alright, that was my bad day.
One third of them will bebad, so cool, I did that.
I'm going to get uptomorrow and do whatever."
But I think that might depersonalizethis a little bit for people and just
help them put that bad day in thecategory of a bad day and move on.
And if you have a string of them,then that's more concerning.
At that point, I think you needto evaluate what's happening.

(09:06):
But everybody has bad days.
You're going to get essays you don't know,you're going to get MBE questions that
you do terribly on for whatever reason.
Doesn't mean you're going to fail.

Yeah, I 100% agree.
It is interesting, in athletics,we talk about this all the time.
We - not as we are athletes - butwe, as in people who watch Netflix
documentaries about athletes...

Exactly.
Even Simone Biles, I'm sure, has a

bad day.
Yes.
Well, watch her Netflix documentary,she talks about it, right?
We can learn a lot from seeing howseriously athletes take mindset.
And I think athletes at the toplevel, many of them have performance
coaches and folks to help themwith their mental state, because
that is how important it is.
They will have a wholeperson on their team.

(09:52):
I know this with tennis players too,because I'm a big tennis fan, but
they will have just someone on theirteam whose job it is to keep them
focused and in the right mindset.
So, it's not like a criticism if thisis something you need to work on.
This is something thatwe all need to work on.
So it's worth spending some timethinking about what you need.
And I like that idea - just acceptingthat sometimes things are going

(10:15):
to be rough, and that's okay.

Yeah, that's a sign of progress.
If you tough it out for that day,and then maybe you take a break and
you watch a TV show and you go to bedearly, and you get up the next day
and you're going to have a better day.
You get up and you'reready for the good day.
That's all you can do.

That's true.
So, if you have a few semesters oflaw school left - let's say you're
not in the second half of your thirdyear what bar prep classes should
people take, or is this even somethingthat they should be worried about?

I think if you're going to take the NextGen or
not, look to see what's on it.
But generally speaking, the one class Ialways think people absolutely should take
- and some of them don't - is Evidence.

You have take Evidence.

You need to take Evidence.
It is a one seventh of the MBE.
It is not a topic that's thateasy to sort of get on your own.
So, I took Evidence my last semesterbecause I wanted it to be fresh for
the bar, and also because the judgeI was working for told me I had
to take it or he wouldn't hire me.
And I think you need to take Evidence.
There are other ones maybe in that basket.
I kind of wish I'd taken Crim Pro, becauseI took an adjacent seminar that really

(11:22):
was not accurate, as it turned out, aboutthe actual rules of criminal procedure.
So I think that's another one that istested on the MBE - not quite as heavily
because it's half of the Crim topic.
But again, I think that one's a good one.
I don't know, what are your

thoughts?
I agree with Evidenceand Criminal Procedure.
And really, how are you going to watchlegal TV if you do not watch those shows?

Yeah, exactly.
You need to know somethingabout these shows so you can be
like, "Oh, that's not accurate.
You

can't do that.
I know.
I'm constantly criticizing legal TV shows.

Or when your friend or family member calls
you up, it's like, "The cops juststopped me and searched my car.
Was that okay?"
I

know, I know.

Because that happens.
I've had that question more than once.
And I'm like, "Well, what didyou say they were allowed to do?
Yeah, you just consented to that.
Sorry.
Next time, don't consent."

Yeah, I think that also it's important to just know what your
friends are going to call you about.
So, I would say employment law, familylaw, criminal law, and evidence.
those are most of the "Hey, lawyerfriend" type texts I usually get.

Yeah.
The Family Law I'm glad I took,because I definitely get a lot of

questions about one.
Yes, for sure.
I think the ones that you can decideon are things like Wills and Trusts,
which right now it's on the UBE,it is tested in California, but
it's not the most complicated law.
Although if you haven't taken FamilyLaw or Wills and Trusts, there's
some crossover in those classes.
And so I do think that you mightwant to take one in that arena,

(12:47):
so that you have at least somebasic understanding of that law.
I know in California, theytest Community Property.
And so, I did not personally takeWills and Trusts, but I did take
Community Property and Family Law.
And so I got some Wills and Trustsmixed in there, because some of
Family Law and Community Propertyis what happens when people die.
You just don't want a whole part ofthis law to be completely new to you.

(13:15):
You want to have some understanding of it,even if it's cursory, so if you have to go
back and learn it for the test, it's notsomething that you have never seen before.
I would put Corporationsin there for some people.
You can learn it for the bar, butcorporations, agency, partnership, all of
that kind of stuff, it is kind of meaty.
So if you haven't had any exposure toit, it might seem a little overwhelming.

(13:35):
Right.
And I think Corporations, theclass, generally lumps in agency

and partnership too, so you get multiple topics that are covered.
I would say you almost certainly need totake the MBE classes and whatever ends up
being in the list of the NextGen, becausethat is very detailed law they're testing.
The essays, I think you can getaway a little bit more with, "Okay,
I have a cursory understanding ofthe rules of community property.
I understand the basicsof wills and trusts."
I mean, those, again, are lifeclasses, so depending on where you're

(14:01):
practicing, they could be usefulfor your friends calling you up.
But I would absolutely say nobodyshould show up to bar prep, not having
taken at least the basic MBE classes.

I know.
I've got say, if you are going to lawschool in California and you ever plan
on being married, having a domesticpartnership, or a parent in California,
you should just take Community Property,so you understand what you're biting off.
I think it's

wise.
And owning property,turns out you need trusts.
I signed up for Wills and Trusts, andthen I dropped it to take Federalism
and the Family as a seminar.
And I would argue that class was actuallyreally useful in the end, given everything
that's going on in the country now.
But I do kind of wish I'd taken thebasics of Wills and Trusts as well,
just for basic life stuff, because theseare things that show up in your life.

(14:47):
You find out you need atrust when you own property.

What does that even mean?
There are lots of different kinds.
What does it mean to be a trustee?

Yeah.
All these

things.
Yeah.

This is one we get a lot (14:57):
How do you avoid burnout during the bar?
Because I talk to a lot of people that saythey suffered from burnout or are burned
out or in the process of burning out.
So this is something I feellike I'm hearing more and more.

Well, and I hear from it too, a lot of people tell me
they were burned out from law school,before they even started the bar prep.
And so, I think that's somethingto be aware of your final semester,
is, are you setting yourself upfor burnout when you start your bar

prep?
Yeah, I think that's true.
So, this really relates to, how manyhours can you practically study a week?
Not as many as you may be sold that youcan practice by your bar prep company,
like 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week.
Guys, there's not great stuff that'sgoing to happen in those 70 hours.
You're just going to end up filling timeand not being restored from that time.

(15:54):
You're just going to probably leadthe fast track to burnout or self-
sabotaging behavior, like stayingup all night watching Netflix.
You want to really avoidcramming into the night.
So often I talk about when do youhave your best brain to study?
Most people's best brains arenot at 11:00 o'clock at night.
And so, if you're staying up and findingthat you're getting diminishing returns

(16:16):
in the middle of the night, then stopstudying in the middle of the night,
because you're probably going to just leadto being super tired, not being able to
sleep well, and that's no good either.
So you really need to prioritizequality over quantity, and I would
much rather have less hours of studyingwhere you are focused and restored
and able to work, than 10 hours ofburndown study where you're probably

(16:39):
not retaining much of anything.

Yeah, and I think sometimes some of this can become a little
compulsive, particularly with the MBE,which almost gets gamified a little bit.
So it's almost like, "Oh, I'mjust going to do one more, and one
more, and one more, and one more."
And if it is 11:00 o'clock at nightand you should be sleeping, but you're
compulsively doing MBE questions thatyou're not really getting right, or you're
not really retaining - I just think you'vegot to put some boundaries around that.

(17:02):
And I understand it's really hardbecause people think that they need
to do this insane volume of work, butultimately it's not the volume that
gets you there; it's the quality.
And you're going to be betterand more effective if you're
studying less in a lot of cases.
And again, this kind of goes back towhat are you doing in those study hours?
Because if it's really active work andyou're doing practice questions, you're

(17:25):
really looking at them - that's goingto be a lot harder for your brain than
if you're just passively watching alecture, but in the end it's probably
going to be leading to less burnout,because you're actually making progress.
You can feel yourselfmaking that progress.
And frankly, it's probably moreinteresting than just sitting
there passively watching something.

Yeah, I know.
It's just better to get work done.
Create a to-do list, cross itoff, you get the dopamine hits.
It's just great for everything.

Yeah, I think you need a structure.
And I think it can be hard to go offscript with these schedules that you're
presented with, but if you know that thisis not going to be the best way for you
to move forward, I think it's really...
I mean, I sometimes just give permissionto people to say, "You know what?
If you know that watching fourhours of lectures a day is not as
effective as studying an outlinefor two hours and doing a practice

(18:12):
test, then drop the lecture."
And they're like, "But I paid for it."
Yeah, but so what?

But you paid for the test too, and it's going to be
really expensive to sit for it again.

Exactly.
Great, you paid for it.
That's called a sunk cost.
Maybe you took Economics, maybe not.
But point being, you're notgetting that money back, so let's
figure out what to do moving

forward.
Right.
But to throw out another economicsterm, I do think this is where return on
investment is a great mindset to have.
What are you getting from thetime that you're putting in?
And if you're putting in fourhours and not getting anything out
of it, then you need to sit downand strategically ask yourself if
that's the best use of your time.
So, I don't like wasting time, because I'msuper busy and I have other things that

(18:50):
I would like to do if I have extra time.
If I'm at CVS for 90 minutes and wastingmy precious time off doing something
like that, that really annoys me.
I will not do that again.
I think that's where you want to keep inmind that you can be strategic about how
you spend your time and just make surethat if you're studying - which is not the
most fun activity in the world - just beas efficient as possible so you can move

(19:12):
on and do something else with your life.
It is much more fun to feel that you cango do something in the evenings because
you were focused and got a lot of impactfrom your studying of six, seven, eight
hours in a day, than sitting in thelibrary until 11:00 o'clock with other
stressed out people who are all justpassively looking at the screen blankly,

(19:34):
not really retaining any information.

Yeah.
That's just not great, because you'renot studying and you're not resting.
So it should either be study or not

study.
Yes.

This kind of blending together of everything into this mushy
kind of nothingness is not usuallywhat's going to work that well.

Yeah.
Well, another thing that we are verypassionate about is practice, and the
importance of practice in your bar prep.
So how can students effectivelypractice essays and performance tests?

I think this is a great question, because oftentimes we hear
from people, "Oh, I couldn't do thepractice because I didn't know the law."
So, it becomes this chickenor the egg question.
We have actually created our Writingof the Week program, where we give
you the law and walk you through howto apply the law and you do it with
us, to circumvent this question.
I think you can alsocircumvent it in other ways.

(20:24):
For example, there's no reason youcan't do the question open-book to start
with, particularly if you're still a 3L.
Nobody expects you to suddenly jumpinto a closed-book timed essay.
You have to work up to that.
So, maybe your school has given youresources or classes, but you can also
just go get a lot of these questions.
A lot of them, depending onthe state and jurisdiction

(20:45):
are floating around out there.
We have our Brainy Bar Bank for theCalifornia and the UBE, where we've
categorized them by topic or subtopic.
This is actually even a greatway that you can study as a law

student.
It's true.
I also think that you can really focusearly when you're studying, even if
you're doing them open-book, on yourIRAC, your process, your formatting, using
clear headings, having concise analysis.
What does that even mean, right?
Thinking about the time managementpiece of this, how you're going to mark
up your scratch paper, all of that.

(21:17):
All of those are early test takingskills that you can absolutely
work on while practicing, evenif you're doing it open-book.
And the reason why this practice is soimportant is that we're testing legal
analysis in theory on the bar exam, andyou can only test that by practicing.
You can't do that bylistening to a lecture.
That's not how it works.

(21:38):
So, even if you are referencing thelaw, looking at facts and applying
the law to the facts and workingon that legal reasoning is such a
critical skill, and it's one thattakes time and practice to develop.

Right.
And I think you want to look atwhich tests are you taking and how
are those questions structured?
How long are they?
They could be 30 minutes,they could be 60 minutes.
Sometimes there are statesthat do things in between.
But a 30-minute question, I thinkfor a lot of people is going to feel
really rushed, compared to what yougenerally did in a law school exam.
So, that's also something where youjust need to get used to that kind

(22:14):
of very focused, generally, question.
If you've had law school exams,particularly that maybe were more rambling
or they were three hours long and you hadtime to talk about all kinds of things,
the MEE approach is very, very focused.
Yeah.

So, no matter which bar you're sitting for and what the
format of the bar, executing questionsearly in your bar prep is just going
to help set you up for success.

Right.
And I think it's going to help put whatyou're learning in context too, because
you need to think about, "Okay, ifI'm learning this rule", you probably
want to do it element by element.
So if it comes up on a question,you're ready to go with
that like, boop, boop, boop.
And I think that's going to help you kindof understand what the level of knowledge
you're aiming for is, in a way whereit's not just, "Oh, I need to learn this

(23:00):
entire topic and then start applying it."
I think the application piece - aswe say all the time - super critical.
If you enjoyed this episode of theLaw School Toolbox podcast, please
take a second to leave a review andrating on your favorite listening app.
We'd really appreciate it.
Be sure to subscribe soyou don't miss anything.
And you can check out the BarExam Toolbox podcast as well.

(23:22):
If you have any questions or comments,please don't hesitate to reach out to
Lee or Alison at lee@lawschooltoolbox.comor alison@lawschooltoolbox.com.
Or you can always contactus via our website contact
form at LawSchoolToolbox.com.
Thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon!

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486: Preparing for the Bar Exam as a 3L (Part 2)

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