It seems the main lesson our Bar Review Diarists are learning — other than the crucial information for the bar exam itself, of course — is that studying for the bar sucks. There is so much information, it’s summertime, they just graduated, and studying is the last thing anyone wants to be doing, so it all seems so unfair.
We are learning each week about their myriad procrastination techniques, useful distractions, and mandatory morale boosters. So what do Andrew, Nathan, and Jeanette have for us this week?
Staci here. Do people who went to lower-ranked law schools have an edge on other bar examinees in terms of subject matter mastery? After all, lower-ranked law schools tend to have a much heavier focus on bar-related courses than you’ll find at HYS, CCN, or other top-ranked law schools.
For example, at most second-tier law schools, you’ll find that the majority of these courses are mandatory (no ifs, ands, or buts about it): Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Property, Torts, and Evidence.
See what Mr. Bar Exam has to say about this — plus catch a glimpse of a BAR/BRI professor playing a special little ditty on a banjo, just for the Above the Law audience….
* What price can you put on freedom (or lack thereof)? Jeffrey Deskovic, who served 16 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit, sued a whole host of defendants after his exoneration — and won more than $5 million. [Cruel and Unusual]
* One way of dealing with opposing counsel is to grope them and expose yourself to them. I didn’t say it was a “good” was to deal with opposing counsel. [New York Personal Injury Law Blog]
* George Zimmerman’s wife was arrested for perjury. Good thing she wasn’t wearing a hoodie while she allegedly lied, ’cause you know how that goes. [Orlando Sentinel]
* When studying for the bar, you have to at least pretend that there’s going to be a job afterwards. Don’t torture yourself with reality. [Law Riot]
* As a boy with a girl’s name, I’m always worried that something like this will happen to me. Trust me, my son will not have this problem. I’ll call the kid Mars Glock The Penismightier Mystal or something. [The Daily Dolt]
* Is the NFL going to end up like Big Tobacco? [Forbes]
* I’ll be moderating a panel at this year’s American Constitution Society National Convention. That means I’m coming to D.C.! If you want to hang out, I’ll be drinking with Marin at Off the Record — which is downstairs at the Hay-Adams — starting at about 8:30 tomorrow night. [American Constitution Society]
Last time we checked in with our 2012 Bar Review Diarists, they were, how shall we say… BORED. That boredom has given way to further procrastination by way of parties, impromptu travel, and motion picture ideas. The midsummer frantic is still some ways off, but at least Nathan, Jeanette, and Andrew seem to be enjoying themselves this summer, despite bar review pressure.
Staci here. A scene like this must have played out in the past few weeks at the law library while everyone was studying for the upcoming bar exam. Someone who is a repeat bar taker tries to explain a legal concept that you’re having trouble with, and everyone around you is looking at you like you’re insane for listening to him. Come on, that guy failed the bar exam. He obviously doesn’t have a clue…. or does he?
Should you give credence to a repeat bar examinee’s advice, or take it with a grain of salt? Can you really trust someone who’s failed the bar exam?
Mr. Bar Exam will give you his thoughts, and he may be sharing the screen with an attractive study partner….
Is Snooki in charge of grading bar exams in New Jersey?
If I turned on MTV and found out that the cast from the Jersey Shore had been given the “challenge” of grading the February 2012 New Jersey bar exam, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll say that again: SNOOKI COULDN’T DO A WORSE JOB THAN THE NEW JERSEY BOARD OF LAW EXAMINERS RIGHT NOW!
They don’t respond to emails. They don’t meet deadlines. They told people that they failed the bar when they did not. Jon Corzine didn’t mess up MF Global as much as New Jersey has botched the administration of this freaking test.
The incompetence is so intense that it’s hard to believe it’s an accident. It seems like the NJ BOLE should have to try to be this bad. Well, maybe they are. Last night, a tipster offered up a possible economic motive for all of the “issues” that have come up with the last administration of the New Jersey bar.
It’s petty and short-sighted, but I’m not sure there’s any level of corruption that you can confidently say is too low for the Garden State….
We have entered June, and most recent law school graduates finished school a few weeks ago. The initial anxious adrenaline rush of receiving your fancy new bar exam study materials has faded, and summer tedium is setting in.
Our Bar Review Diarists are getting a little deeper into their studies. They’re beginning to realize studying for the test isn’t necessarily difficult. It’s largely boring. They are discovering how alluring a pointless shopping trip can be, and they are realizing how long it’s been since they have written anything by hand. In other words, it was kind of a bummer of a week.
Let’s see how Jeanette, Nathan, and Andrew are handling the summertime blues…
Staci here. When you finished law school, you probably thought you’d have some time to relax before bar exam hell started this summer, but you quickly found out just how wrong you were about that.
So instead of going to the bar and getting all wasteyfaced, you buckled down and studied hard for a few weeks. But you still felt deprived. You still felt like you needed to go out and get your partying ways out of your system. It was then that you had an epiphany — come hell or high water, you were going to take a weekend trip to Vegas to escape from your bar exam woes.
Now, this may sound incredibly stupid to some of our readers, and to be quite frank, it is. It’s about as stupid as choosing someone like me as your bar exam study partner. But Mr. Bar Exam didn’t care.
Let’s see the important lesson he learned in this week’s episode….
When we last checked in with our Bar Review Diarists, they were just barely finishing exams and getting ready to walk down the graduation aisle. We checked in with them again this week, and weirdly, they all seem to… be enjoying themselves?
Nathan, Jeanette, and Andrew are all having fun so far this summer. They’re going to weddings, hanging out at coffee shops, and drinking at Disneyland. What the hell is going on here? Let’s hope the good times last, despite the test looming on the somewhat distant horizon…
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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It seems the main lesson our Bar Review Diarists are learning — other than the crucial information for the bar exam itself, of course — is that studying for the bar sucks. There is so much information, it’s summertime, they just graduated, and studying is the last thing anyone wants to be doing, so it all seems so unfair.
