Public Interest

Another Way For Aspiring Public Interest Lawyers To Save

The case bar exam self-study for aspiring public interest lawyers.

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A 3L intern told me the other day that she’s beginning to get ready for summer bar prep. This means not only paying somewhere in the neighborhood of one to two thousand dollars in total for the two exams she plans to take, but also shelling out another couple thousand dollars (or more) for a bar prep course. She doesn’t know exactly how much she’ll pay because she hasn’t picked which one she’ll enroll in yet.

After accumulating six figures of educational debt, many law students look at that final chunk of money for bar prep as just another drop in the bucket. But if you’re planning on going into low-paying public interest work, it’s worth remembering that this is a drop you can avoid.

No, I’m not counseling skipping bar prep altogether. But I am suggesting that you strongly consider self-study rather than paying for a course.

BARBRI posts a rate of $3,895 for its New York bar review course. Kaplan charges $2,595 for its New York course. Others come in lower, but I don’t know of any that cost less than buying someone else’s books off craigslist. For example, as I’m writing this there’s a listing offering Kaplan’s New York materials for $200.

To the best of my recollection, that’s about what I paid for my set of secondhand bar prep materials some years ago. I spent the summer after law school treating bar study like a full-time job, and a flexible one at that — one that I could do at home, in coffee shops, at the library, or outside on a nice day. (I also spent some breaks unwinding on an old N64 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; this was time well spent.) When the three-day ordeal (I took two states’ exams) arrived, I was no more or less stressed than the next person. And in the end, I passed both states’ exams.

At the time, though, some people thought I was nuts — after all, everyone takes a bar prep course. Others said they’d have loved to save the extra money but wanted the extra structure of a formal course. Still others said they valued the confidence they felt as a result of the test companies’ assurances. But to me, none of these was worth taking out a private loan at credit-card level interest rates and that I might well still be paying off a decade later.

And in any event, bar exam self-study takes the same sort of diligence and discipline that you’ll need as a public interest practitioner. Why not stretch those muscles before entering practice? In every job I’ve had, at least, most of my time has been spent in the trenches by myself. From legal services, where I was dropped into court my first morning on the job, to the city attorney’s office, where my work took me on solo jaunts all over the city, to my current job, where much of my time is spent by myself in litigation planning and support. Self-directed bar study helped set me up to do well with little supervision.

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So it all comes back to what I always recommend to interns interested in pursuing public interest law: you should strongly consider bar exam self-study. Take stock of your current debt and your future plans. Recall that bar loans are generally private, the terms are not great, they can’t be refinanced with your federal loans, and they aren’t eligible for any of the federal repayment and forgiveness programs we’ve discussed before in this space. Recall that on a public interest salary, you might actually miss the $30 or so you’ll be spending each month to repay the loan you took out to fund your bar prep course. Consider whether the structure and confidence you might receive from a formal course are worth the thousands of dollars you’ll end up spending in principal and interest when all is said and done.

And remember that, though most law students shell out big money for bar prep, many don’t and yet still pass the bar.

Earlier: Public Service Loan Forgiveness Might Be Capped — You Can Help Stop It

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