Bar Stories

There is a robust tradition of Bar Exam lore. The Bar Exam is such a crazy process that the bizarre and outrageous are inescapable. There’s the one about the person who wrote “I am depressed” on their performance exam. Then there’s the one about the woman who had appendicitis on the first day of the exam but put off surgery until the test was over.  And of course, last year there was the earthquake.

I didn’t have anything quite as extreme happen, but it wouldn’t have been the bar exam if things didn’t go wrong on the first day.  A section of the room where I was didn’t have any power so we started a little over an hour late and didn’t get any time for lunch.  Then towards the end of the first essay portion, the Examsoft program on my computer stared malfunctioning, making it so I could not backspace or delete anything.  And because these things always come in three; a couple of buddies and I decided to get pizza after the first day.  Good Idea? Fabulous! (that’s a Barbri joke) No it wasn’t.  Chris and I both got food poisoning.  Not cool.

Everyone who takes the bar has a funny story too.  And no, the food poisoning story is NOT funny!  But this one is: There were a bunch of applicants at the convention center, all from a certain fourth-tier law school, wearing green shirts that said: “Do it once, do it right, and never do it again!” 

As my friends and I were walking back from lunch on day-two, we started talking to a guy from that law school. One of my friends said to him: “I’m glad that you’re not wearing one of those stupid shirts.” To which he replied: “That’s because this is my third time.”

If you were to just ignore the six hours a day for three days of complete misery and the fact that I was sick, taking the bar was kind of like a nice little vacation. It was fun hanging out with my friends that I hadn’t seen for a while.

I’m so glad I’m done.