My California Bar Taking Experience

So for those reading who don’t know, I have graduated law school and also have a degree in systems engineering. This background makes it possible for me to become a patent attorney, a very challenging, but interesting profession where you can learn and protect new inventions from future copying or infringement of rights. Why I chose this profession is actually not as simple as saying I wanted to be around novel technologies all the time, but I will discuss it in my next post.

As as aside, I have passed the patent bar which you can learn how I passed in a previous post.

Simply put, in the past I have struggled with the California Bar, but this post is not about the past. It’s about now and right now the California Bar is as outrageous as ever.

I have accommodations with the California Bar, but getting those accommodations were as hard as the exam itself. I even overhead one person saying that they went all the way back to elementary school to prove they needed accommodation. Again, totally outrageous.

The Bar Exam Format

Let’s talk about the exam before I get to my experience. In short, the California bar exam is like any other bar exam, it’s two days long and six plus hours of testing each day. What makes the exam the hardest in the country is the amount of multiple choice questions you need to get correct. You need a higher percentage at 67% which translates to around 135 out of 200 because 25 questions are experimental questions. Other jurisdictions are anywhere from 62% to 65% needed to pass the multiple choice section. Additionally, the writing section of the exam is much different than the Uniform Bar Exam which has seven 30 minute essays while the California Bar has five one hour essays. The longer essays allow for more issues to be tested requiring a greater breadth of knowledge. I personally believe, the California Bar Exam just has an increased difficulty as compared to other exams. It’s a different kind of experience.

My Experience

The most impactful thing that happened was the erroneous booking of my hotel. I live in Ohio, but I traveled all the way to the Bay Area to take the exam. I booked a room at a Holiday Inn in Burlingame, not far from where I lived in Redwood City, because I booked the hotel well in advanced before they revealed where my testing location would be (they tell you about a month before the exam and I made flight preparations and hotel bookings well in advance). Little did I know they moved the (for the first time) testing site to the heart of San Francisco, at Golden Gate Law School. This is only for people who needed exam accommodations. The exam used to be held at the Crowne Plaza in Burlingame, and my hotel was walking distance to that testing site.

So, I was faced with a dilemma. How do I get to Golden Gate Law School? I had a rental because I had some errands to run because I had not been in California for a year. For example, I have a storage unit it Belmont that I have my Bed and desk and a lot of the belongings I had in my apartment in Redwood City. I thought about driving the rental there and finding parking, which I tested the day before the exam. The down side to that was that traffic going into the city was hectic, and the 20-30 minute drive could fatigue me mentally and I know I need all the help I can get. So I decided to do all Ubers to and from the test site. I’m glad I did this, but it was expensive for sure.

Exam Day 1

On day one I got to the exam site early, to prepare mentally for the hardest day for me. The problem was the bar was not prepared to hold the examination on time with their hired proctors. The proctors where not even in the building until 10 minutes before the listed start time, and we started around 30 minutes later than we were supposed to. My question is why hold an exam in the middle of San Francisco, if everyone you hired lives in San Jose or the South Bay. None of those proctors were San Fran people, they made logistics harder than what it needed to be for sure. Although, I think the bar miscalculated how long everything would take.

The writing section was probably the hardest I have done yet. Although, I believe I managed well for the most part. Essay 1 was Corporations (my weakest area), but the main issues were on the business judgement rule and Duty of Loyalty (avoiding conflicts of interest), so it was stuff that I actually knew fairly well. I lucked out.

Essay two was Property, I think it was one of the easiest essays. Essay three is always professional responsibility. I was much better prepared because although it’s always on the exam, it’s usually objectively speaking the hardest in difficulty. One reasons for this is that the rule statements are very long, but if you can issue spot and organize well that will help.

Essay 4 was a surprise, it was a California Civil Procedure. They never test California Civil Procedure, but they tested a narrow range of issues like the Essay 1, so it was not as bad as it could of been. Essay 5 was remedies with a focus on tort related remedies. I hope to God that I remembered all the Tort remedies in equity. Other than that I thought I did fairly well on the essays, especially at analyzing the all facts given.

The performance test was a failure simply put. I had even given myself extra time, but we had to write a closing argument and I knew it was persuasive, but I was unconfident about the format even though I formatted it right. The fact pattern was extremely long, so I made sure to narrow down on the facts that were most important because I assume they made the pattern that long to test if you could find the facts that were most pertinent to the case. I did not finish my conclusion, it was not going to be long anyway, but I got one out of the two sentences I wanted to write down. I followed the right structure for the Performance test which should be Issue, Rule, Rule Proof (Case Law Summary), and analysis analogizing the cases to your facts and making your argument. The analysis became less and less in my performance test because I knew I was running out of time, the first issue had a ton of analysis, second issue did not have as much. I am praying for an extremely nice bar grader, maybe it can get a 60 score instead of a 55 and I feel I can pass with that. That puts in perspective that much of this is subjective, I had two essays that were 70 on my last attempt downgraded to 55s on a second read by a different person, which tanked my writing score.

Exam Day 2

This day is shorter and more straightforward because it is the multiple choice day. I got 3 hours and 45 minutes in the morning and the afternoon. This section went well because it’s my stronger section I think. I finished confidently ahead of schedule which I have not really done before. I need a high of score on the multiple choice to balance out my essays and performance test. That is a tall order, but it is not impossible considering I was doing well on multiple choice going in. I used Adaptibar, which I believe helped me do the “mind melding” necessary to think like the bar examiners, because when you only do National Conference of Bar Examiner questions you start to better see the patterns to how they write questions and how to arrive at the right answer.

After the Exam

Any other bar exam with my performance I would have passed for sure, but the like I said the California bar is different. The day after the exam I had some time to relax, before my flight. I went to Half Moon Bay which I somehow had never been before. The fuuny thing is that it was only 20 minutes from my hotel (which was on the bay). Half Moon Bay is honestly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. The Bay Area is such a beautiful area. I do not know what else to say, so take look at these pictures.

Half Moon Bay

Beach View from Higher Ground