How To Prepare For The Bar Exam In The 21st Century

Modern-day tech tools -- and meditation! -- can make taking the bar exam easier.

Getting ready to kill it on the bar exam next week.

Dear Graduates Who Are Getting Ready for the Bar Exam,

I passed through where you are at several years ago. You worked hard through undergrad to get into one of the toughest graduate programs in the country. Then you worked hard to get through that program. And now you just worked hard to get ready for the bar exam, which is now one week away. What you’ve done in the last seven years and what you will do in the future is what defines you, not how many times you can correctly assess who owns Blackacre in a race-notice jurisdiction next week.

As a trial lawyer, a professor who has been teaching for eight years, and a tech enthusiast, I’d like to share with you some things I have learned about learning, remembering, brain science, and some modern-day tech tools that you can use to make next week easier.

The Best $13 You Will Spend This Month

You probably spent several hundred thousand dollars on your education so far, on top of the $1,000 to take the bar exam, so what’s another $13? I’m talking about the Headspace app – the ancient wisdom of monks downloadable on your phone. So, why do you want to get the Headspace app right now? It helps with your focus, concentration, and memory. Most of you don’t meditate, so I’ll spoil the surprise right now – mediation is not about sitting cross-legged and chanting until you achieve nirvana. I do it in my office chair for 10 minutes.

Imagine you are going on a trip and you have a huge suitcase and you throw a bunch of stuff in there. Like, 100 pairs of socks and 300 pants, and 70 jackets. You get to where you are going and you rummage through your suitcase to find what you are looking for. It’s all in there, it just takes some time to find things. That’s what’s happening with your brain right now, only it’s not socks and pants, it’s the elements of adverse possession and hearsay exclusions and intestate succession rules.

Sponsored

What meditation does is helps calm your brain and organize your thoughts. Your brain is constantly saving and retrieving information. It uses 20% of your body’s oxygen and burns about 11 calories an hour to power all of the synapses that are firing nonstop. Even when you sleep, it’s not really off – it’s still doing stuff. That’s why you can work hard, go to sleep, and still be mentally exhausted and burned out when you wake up. It’s hard enough to pull out the right memory when you need it at the right time, but when you are burned out, it’s much harder. So, mediation will help you get to a deliberate state of calm, which helps organize the facts you are putting in there for better, faster, and more accurate recall.

Here’s what they say on their site about the science of using mediation to help concentration and memory:

Source: https://www.headspace.com/science/meditation-benefits. Just remember: someone went to school to learn how to draw this Mr. Peanut knock off, and someone else higher up liked it so much that they agreed to use this as the final image. No matter what your score is next week, you are better than at least these two people.

When you subscribe, there are different mediation programs you can do, such as Basics or Creativity. You can choose the duration of the program, so you can choose to do the Basics program for 4 minutes or 10 minutes each day. You can sit in a quiet place alone and listen for 10 minutes with your headphones on your phone. Just try it. It’s a huge help in organizing your brain, calming anxiety, and helping you focus.

How to Help Remember all that Garbage

Sponsored

One thing I do when I’m getting ready for trial is I record my opening with a voice recorder app, and I speed it up to about 120% speed, and I listen to it over and over and over until I have the entire thing memorized. Take your bar exam outlines and record them using a voice recorder app. You can download the free audio mixing program, Audacity, to play with the speeds and get it to a comfortable, but fast, listening speed.

This does a couple of things for you. The subject matter gets reinforced in your brain when you speak it out loud. It also gives you an opportunity to listen to it over and over when you are exercising (something else you should definitely do because it reduces stress and increases blood flow to the brain). Get in as much repetition as you can. Repeat it out loud if you are in your car. Before you know it, you’ll have it down.

Good luck next week. Now get back to studying.


Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

CRM Banner