Old Lady Lawyer: Our Shared Nightmare -- The Bar Exam

Have a bar exam horror story? Please share it.

For whatever the reason, and it probably is because the State Bar of California announced the results for the July 2015 bar examination, I have been thinking about the rite of passage that is the bar exam. California’s is the toughest in the nation, and I am sure that those who passed are breathing a huge sigh of relief, while those who didn’t are gearing up for another period of study. I admire those who are willing to give it another go. It’s not easy to be a repeater.

I took the July 1976 California bar exam. (As I write “1976,” I still can’t believe that it was 39 years ago and I still remember the experience vividly, almost too much so.) While I am sure that everyone reading this has his or her own particular horror story about the exam, wherever taken, mine was particularly dreadful. Even now, I’m thankful (cue the reference to Thanksgiving) that I passed the first time. Forty-nine out of my class of 50 did so; we were the only ones left after two-thirds of the class either dropped or flunked out. The one repeater passed the second time, so we had a one hundred percent bar passage rate.

My law school classmate aka morale boosters and I were typists (no laptops in those days). Being the paranoid, obsessive-compulsive type, i.e., well suited to becoming lawyers, we each lugged two electric typewriters and one manual typewriter to the typists’ testing site, which the bar examiners had decided would be inconveniently located on the top floor (only accessible by elevator) of a nondescript building in the middle of Los Angeles. We had rented IBM Selectrics — the gold standard of electric typewriters in those days that typed really quickly, plus the ones we had used in law school — and scrounged up manuals from where I don’t remember. We schlepped them on carts into the elevators up to the fifth floor on the first morning of the three-day exam.

Other test-takers, standing in the lines for the elevators that seemed to take forever, looked at us in amazement, thinking we were crazy for hauling all these machines and, also being well suited to becoming lawyers, did not hesitate to comment about our equipment. Most of them had two electric typewriters, so that if one failed, they could easily switch to the other. Almost no one else (although we took no poll) had brought a manual typewriter. When queried as to why we had done so, we said that these were our insurance policies in case the power went out. We hadn’t spent three years in law school and taken two bar review courses (one on the substantive law and the other devoted exclusively to essay writing) only to go down in flames without typewriters. There was no way that I could write as fast as I could type.

Everyone laughed. There was no way the power was going to go out, so we had schlepped these manual machines for naught. The bar was not going to let that happen as that would then put this particular group of test-takers at a serious disadvantage. Right.

Need I tell you what happened? Ten minutes into the first morning session, the power indeed did fail and was not restored fully until the afternoon session, which began quite late while the bar figured out what had happened and solved the problem.

When the power went out that morning and in rolling blackout fashion, the very large room, with hundreds of test takers, devolved into chaos. People were yelling “Power, power” all over the room. The cries reverberated throughout, making it hard to concentrate. People were unplugging their electric typewriter cords and putting them into other plugs, which triggered more outages. So people who first lost power triggered power failures in other parts of the testing site. All these would-be lawyers were not happy campers, to say the least. Three or four years of law school boiled down to these three days; snafus could not be tolerated.

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Did the bar halt the exam while the power was out? Of course not. Those who snickered at us for having the manual typewriters started handwriting the exam. I pulled out the manual and started typing. Do you know how hard it is to type on a manual when you’re used to the speed and light touch of an electric? Whoops, I forgot; this is the laptop generation. As a result of the problems with my test site, the bar results did not come out until after Thanksgiving. No one had much appetite that day.

So, as I read the bar’s press release about the July 2015 bar results (depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, they’re not great and lend credence to the theory that law schools are admitting and graduating students who may not be the sharpest tools in the shed), I still shudder about my bar exam experience, and I am still grateful that I had to take it only once.

Just to make sure I had remembered the experience correctly, I read a draft of this column to my test-taker buddy. His only comment was “these test takers today don’t know adversity.” Remember that he’s an old man lawyer.

Is he right? What about your bar exam experience? Email me at oldladylawyer@gmail.com and share your horror stories. I am sure we all have them. If they’re printable, I’ll write a column about them (without attribution to anyone who shares a story). In any event, we do have something to be thankful for this holiday: we passed the bar, and however unhappy, unemployed, underemployed or unfulfilled we may be as lawyers, we made it.

Earlier: California Bar Exam Results Reveal Worst Pass Rate In Nearly 30 Years — But It’s Not All Bad News
Which State Has the Most Difficult Bar Exam?

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Jill Switzer is closing in on 40 (not a typo) years as a active member of the State Bar of California. Yes, folks, California, that state west of the Sierra Nevada, which everyone likes to diss. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see old lawyers, young lawyers, and those in-between interact — it’s not always pretty. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.