Bar Exams

Bar Prep Company Provides Flat Wrong Legal Lessons, Balks On Full Refund

Imagine your bar prep course fed you wrong information. Would that make you mad?

By  
on

For most lawyers, the bar exam is the last test they’ll ever take. At least the last one that doesn’t end with, “I’m so sorry, but you have syphilis,” but you can’t really study for that one. In any event, combining the gravity of the bar exam with the collective neuroses of the pool of examinees, and the bar prep industry can convince law students to part with a hefty chunk of change to pass. It’s a tremendous responsibility and bar prep companies work hard to put out the best product they can to help their customers pass.

Or at least most of them do.

Then there’s Bar In A Flash, a company making flash cards for the California bar exam. While the company claims to update its cards annually, that would certainly be news to some of its customers based on these screenshots.

Perhaps you remember Rule 5 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?

Um, nope.

For those who don’t remember Rule 5, subpart (d) states, in relevant part with emphasis added:

Any paper after the complaint that is required to be served—together with a certificate of service—must be filed within a reasonable time after service.

Sponsored

Sure, lawyers may talk about “filing” colloquially and that new-fangled electronic filing makes this distinction largely moot. But you know who doesn’t care? The bar exam. “File” vs. “Serve” is precisely the sort of detail that the bar exam uses to crash hundreds of students upon the jagged rocks of failure.

Pop quiz hotshot:

Do you see the problem? Well, $75,000 or more is different than “exceeds the sum or value of $75,000.” It may be one penny different, but that’s what the bar exam is all about.

Seems like there was a whole mess of litigation on that subject TWO YEARS AGO.

Look, mistakes happen. Perhaps this set is the Inverted Jenny of the Bar In A Flash universe.

Sponsored

One bar examinee doesn’t feel she’s struck on a misprint. Indeed, she spotted these mistakes throughout the online edition too, and she asked for her money back ($305) since the cards are, you know, wrong. Unfortunately, Bar In A Flash agreed to a partial refund of only the packs of cards she could return, and they even grumbled about that:

And because those 12 decks that we receive [sic] from you have obviously been used, we are unable to re-sell them, which will require reprinting the entire set of 2000-plus cards.

Hm. Was there some big market for reselling unused bar prep materials after the bar exam? Because if the company reprints a new edition every year, then it’s not really clear what resale value of this year’s cards could ever have had. And that’s before you take into account that this set was already outdated.

I wonder if Bar In A Flash understood California’s implied warranty of merchantability? In any event, they seem to understand it now! The current version of their website comes complete with a lengthy Terms of Service document that explicitly informs future customers that the products are provided “AS IS.”

Look, a disclaimer on accuracy isn’t an uncommon step for bar prep companies — bar exams create a robust population of bitter potential litigants ready to blame someone else for their misfortune, and no matter how hard one tries, bar prep materials will mess up something at some point. But that’s why it’s so important for bar prep companies to embrace customers willing to call them out to get them on the right track. In some corners, that’s actually called “the learning process.” Without waiving its “AS IS” disclaimer, a bar prep company should gladly refund money — they can call it a reward if they wretch at the precedent of the other “R” word — to anyone who calls out mistakes like these. It can only make the overall product better for the next set of customers. How much would that be worth to a company that stakes its business on a reputation for accurately teaching the law? Because Bar In A Flash is actually fighting this bar examinee over $60!

There’s only one bright side in this patently cynical dispute. Perhaps this whole affair is an elaborate performance art scheme to impart the most underappreciated lesson to young lawyers:

The correct legal solution may not be the right business solution.

If the business-side folks at Bar In A Flash come to their senses, we’ll loudly proclaim their virtuous decision in an update. We’ll be waiting.

Topics

, ,