Scott Green

Last week I wrote about the character and fitness requirement to passing the Bar, about which I’d like to remind Bar examiners I was just completely joking around in a totally good-natured way and would like to be removed from the blacklist now, please.

But the hardest part of becoming an attorney is the Bar exam, a 12-hour test given over two days so difficult and requiring so much technical legal know-how that you have to study a lot.

This is why most students enroll in a prep course called BAR/BRI, which costs more than $3,000 for a seven-week session. It’s very expensive, but BAR/BRI covers a lot of ground, including law topics like evidence and criminal law and contracts. Though they don’t cover price gouging.

What you get for your money is a series of about a dozen books, packed with legal stuff to memorize.  Here’s an excerpt that I swear is real:

A PMSI in goods other than inventory and livestock (e.g., equipment) has priority over conflicting security interests in the same goods or their proceeds if the interest is perfected before or within 20 days after the debtor receives possession of the goods.

Of course, that’s just common sense. You can’t have people going out and perfecting livestock before or within 20 days or the next thing you know your daughter will be pregnant and Canada will have the bomb.

But my point is, there’s a whole lot to learn, and there’s really no way to do it other than sitting down in front of a foot-high stack of books, gritting your teeth, and getting down to business by cleaning your apartment for five or six hours before taking a nap.

The other major advantage of BAR/BRI is that they hold daily lectures taught by top law professors. There’s no substitute for being in the presence of great legal minds, so naturally BAR/BRI makes most of its students watch the three-and-a-half hour classes on video, which you can’t even access at home unless you want to pay a four-figure surcharge. This is all true.

For six weeks I had to take two 45-minute bus rides to watch the lectures in a classroom in downtown Chicago. But they did provide a lot of information.

For example, in one of them, I dutifully took the following note, which I rewrite here in its entirety: “Steamtable beats bank.” If there’s a question on the Bar dealing with who would win in a fight between a bank and a steam table, I can answer with confidence, unless I forget.

But the most relevant thing we learned— a point emphasized by more than one of the lecturers— was that nearly 90 percent of Illinois applicants pass the Bar exam on their first try, meaning we probably didn’t need such an overly comprehensive review course to make us lawyers. This was after everybody’s $3,000 checks cleared.

Naturally people still prepare like crazy. Many of my law school classmates formed study groups that met for up to 12 hours at a time. These were extremely humorless sessions in which tomorrow’s top attorneys meticulously reviewed the finest points of the law. Or so I’d imagine, because nobody thought I was a serious enough student to invite me. Their loss. I would’ve done a real thorough job cleaning the host’s apartment.