The Old Man And The New York Bar Exam (Part III): Judgment Day

Did he pass, or did he fail? All will be revealed here.

The news came without warning. Nary a bugle blast or bleating sheep to announce the arrival of one of the year’s most important missives. It simply popped into my phone’s mailbox all quotidian-like, sandwiched ignominiously between a request for a discovery extension and a rather lackluster FRE 408 settlement communication from a rather lackluster defense attorney. It announced itself as emanating from the sinister-sounding BOLE compound, and the subject line gave away nothing at all. That dastardly Board of Law Examiners playing it close to the vest as is their wont. But the lack of ceremony belied its importance: within that electronic mail laid the news that thousands of us, sufferers all that had subjected themselves to the February 2018 New York bar exam, had been awaiting with all of the impatience and most of the trepidation.

At the time of receipt, I was in attendance at a third-party deposition, and the questions were mid-stream. I silently and telepathically urged the questioning counsel to call for a break and with some luck that break eventually came to pass. As the court reporter, counsel, and deponent shuffled out of the room to use the facilities or locate the most efficient manner in which to consume caffeine, I, with trembling hands, retrieved my phone from the interior chest pocket of my green corduroy suit. (What? Corduroy is most definitely back.)

Phone in clammy hand, I considered my options. If I had not passed the New York bar exam, I wouldn’t want to compound the resulting shame with that which would come from shedding tears in the presence of a certified court reporter. So perhaps the more pragmatic approach would be to grin and bear it through the next hour and the one after that and so on until the deposition mercifully came to a close. And then, in the safety of my Lyft, I could check the BOLE results correspondence in peaceful solitude. In those confines, if the tears began leak out, it would only hurt my Passenger Score, which was low in stars to begin with. Yes, that would be the pragmatic approach. But, nope. I immediately swiped open the mailbox app on my phone and pressed a bit too forcefully on the fated email. Congratulations, it said.

Goodbye to pro hac vice applications and certificates of good standing and being forced to leave my beloved telephone and laptop with security when I enter the gorgeous S.D.N.Y. courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. As a member of the New York bar, these indiginities would cease to be. All of the preparation and flop sweat and Number Two pencils that had been worn down to a nub via aggressive Scantron bubble-filling had been worthwhile. The New York bar exam had been met head-on and I had lived to tell the tale.

Of course, as soon as the results were in and the fear of failure had abated, my mind moved to the next question, one that preys on the minds of law-types that have been subjected to a standardized test. Viz., how had I performed in relation to my fellow applicants? As lawyers and law students and the type of personalities that are drawn to becoming one and both, we are burdened with the very pathetic saddle of needing to know how we stacked up against our fellows in such matters. This was bred into us as 1Ls, when we were nakedly and brutally ranked in relation to one another and continues to this day per the determinations of Super Lawyers, Am Law 100s, and other ranking and scaling and judging bodies. It is the most disdainful and distasteful of the characteristics that define us, those within this profession. I, sadly to say, am no better. I am stained with the need to know.

And, while the California bar releases nada informacione other than pass/fail, the kind folks at BOLE dish all the dirt. You get your results in numeric form, perfect for establishing the delta between you and your friends and beloveds and the other test-takers in your orbit.

Astoundingly, it turns out I did pretty darn well, cracking the upper echelon of the score matrix. I credit the result entirely to the tasty almond milk lattes at Rose Cafe in Venice Beach and the Barmaxx app, from which I mainlined substantive law lectures on loop (even when I was doing other tasks and barely listening; it seeps in subconsciously!). And the massive number of multiple-choice practice questions that I ground through until I could just about feel the rhythm and structure of the prompts in my bones. This allowed me, on the exam, to scan a question, respond to it quickly if it was one of the less-difficult of the lot and then move on to the more challenging questions, on which more time could be spent working them backward, eliminating the less-right answers until the most appealing remained.

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While I lucked out, the numbers seem to indicate that about 62% of this session’s test-takers caught a tougher break. A pretty brutal statistic. But fear not, those who were unable to vanquished the exam this go-round — there will be another sitting in a scant few months and there are plenty of lattes and practice questions out there just waiting to had. For this Old Man, though, the bar is closed.


Scott Alan Burroughs, Esq. practices with Doniger / Burroughs, an art law firm based in Venice, California. He represents artists and content creators of all stripes and writes and speaks regularly on copyright issues. He can be reached at scott@copyrightLA.com, and you can follow his law firm on Instagram: @veniceartlaw.

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