summer of bar review

The thing about law school graduation is that it's rather anti-climactic. Sure you feel a great sense of pride when you walk across the stage after three long years of discipline and sacrifice to be handed the most expensive piece of paper you'll ever own. But the feeling of accomplishment is fleeting, because you know that you aren't really done with this arduous process until you pass the bar exam. And this knowledge hangs over you like a menacing storm cloud through each champagne toast and every celebratory meal with family and friends.

So I'm now the proud holder of a Juris Doctor degree from a regionally renown law school, but I'm not a lawyer yet. No, the bar exam still stands between me and the practice of law. The bar exam varies state by state, since the Supreme Court of each state has plenary power over who may practice law in their jurisdiction. Most states these days utilize a standardized test of common law principles called the MultiState Bar Exam (MBE), and then throw some essay and/or performance questions specific to that jurisdiction to drag the ordeal out for an extra day. But not Louisiana; Louisiana is special.

Because of Louisiana's unique history, being a relative late-comer to the nascent United States and all, the civilian tradition of Spanish and French law permeate and distinguish the law of Louisiana from that of her 49 sister states. And so the Louisiana bar exam is unlike that of any other American state. For starters, the exam is the longest of all the states, with 21.5 hours of testing over a three day period. Also, it's mostly all essay questions, with a sprinkling of short-answer and multiple choice questions thrown in for good measure.

I'll be sitting for the Louisiana bar exam in July. So my life for the next two months will pretty much consist of nothing but learning Louisiana law. I'm taking the de rigueur Bar Review Course, which lends structure and guidance to my studies, with lectures six days out of the week for the next six weeks. After the course term ends, I'll have three weeks to continue to study the materials on my own, according to their schedule but without the lectures. (I'll be sitting for the Mississippi bar exam in February 2013, which means I'll be doing this all over again come the first of the new year.)

The first week of Bar Review was overwhelming. The second week wasn't quite so bad, but only yesterday did I come to the realization that this feat of memorization is indeed possible. Prior to this realization, I had been actively banishing fears of failure from my mind, but I lacked a firm conviction that I could indeed conquer this material and formulate a sufficient command of the law that I will be able to demonstrate my minimal competence to the bar examiners. (Thankfully, the bar exam tests for minimal competence, not maximum mastery, as is the case with law school exams.)

So I'm now genuinely confident in my ability to do this thing. And that feels good. Despite knowing how incredibly tedious the next several weeks will be, and how hard I'll have to work, I'm sure that I can do it. I just have to accept that the contours of Louisiana law will necessarily permeate my every waking thought, and I will become a living, breathing encyclopedia of legal knowledge. So it goes that, with this update complete, I must return to making of flashcards on the classification of property and the dismemberments of ownership.

pro bono and a tangential rant

Pro Bono Publico: For the Public Good. That’s the literal translation of the Latin.

Usually shortened to pro bono, the phrase is now synonymous with free legal work above all else, both within the profession and to the public at large.

Most law schools these days require students to serve a minimum number of pro bono hours in order to graduate. (As it happens, my school was the first to introduce this requirement.) Generally, a student’s pro bono requirement can be met by doing a variety of tasks at a variety of organizations, so long as the work is uncompensated and law-related. Basically it’s legal community service.

At Tulane, the pro bono requirement is 30 hours. I was determined to complete this obligation before my summer session abroad and before my 3L year (which begins the week after I return home), so that I’ll have one less thing on my plate during my final year of law school. The way the timing worked out, I didn’t get to start my pro bono work until last week, and I just finished yesterday, which was less than ideal since it made our final weeks before the trip a little more hectic than the rest of the summer has been. Now that the obligation has been met, though, I’m feeling greatly relieved. (Not to mention super stoked about packing and departing in three days!)

For my pro bono service, I worked at the Lawyer Referral Service of the New Orleans Bar Association. It was a fairly easy job as far as I was concerned, because it required little of me other than a skill I perfected for 5 years at my paralegal job: fielding telephone calls, listening to folks describe their legal problems, and sending them to an attorney who can help them, if at all possible. So it wasn’t very difficult, even though it did require me to resurrect my Sweet Southern Girl telephone persona.

But I’m very pleased with the experience, because it demonstrated for me in a very concrete way the continued need and demand for quality legal services. There’s a Big Worry among my cohort of law students about job scarcity upon graduation, because big firms aren’t hiring at the rates they used to, but since folks continue going through the law school grind, there’s no shortage of lawyers. Of course this leads to increased competition across the board, but particularly in areas like government which used to be something of a safe harbor for law students without impressive GPAs. So there’s lots and lots of law students right now, all across the country, fretting about where and whether they’ll get jobs after graduating. And their worry is actually well founded, because the system which perpetrated $100k+ salaries for newly-minted lawyers is, IMHO, unsustainable.

The thing is that there’s no shortage of need or demand for legal services. (I knew this going into law school, and it’s the reason that I’m not worried about my prospects for enjoying a decent standard of living after graduation; it’s just nice to have been viscerally reminded of this fact during the course of completing my pro bono requirement.) Even still, most newly-minted lawyers are not equipped to meet any of this need or demand for legal services, because all they know about the law is from the classroom and their casebooks. Most law graduates simply lack the real world experience to walk off out of the classroom and into the courtroom if they hope to competently represent anyone’s interest.

And that’s tragic. The way I see it, legal education is severely flawed in many ways. It’s something I hope I can work towards changing once I get my fancy credentials, which I'm one step closer to having now with my pro bono requirement out of the way.

suiting

First thing this morning I had an on-campus interview, which meant (1) that I was frigid during the outdoors portion of my morning commute, and (2) that I was stuck wearing a business suit all the day long. Lounging in the student center reading for class, walking around on campus, eating lunch, and going to class all had to be done in a damned business suit, none of which felt right.

Now, I realize that I’m going to have to become more accustomed to wearing suits. But this realization has two caveats. One, if all goes according to plan, I won’t actually have to wear suits all too often, and certainly not all day, every day. Two, the wearing of suits that I will be doing will be better suited for suits than the things I’ve been doing today. That is, ideally, I’ll wear suits for court, depositions, and an occasional super-important meeting, but for doing everyday legal work I can simply wear put-together, professional-looking attire that isn’t necessarily a suit. And when I am in a suit I (hopefully) won't be in an environment where I stick out like a sore thumb as the only one wearing a suit amongst a bunch of 1st year law students and undergrads.

There’s just something about wearing a suit that makes me feel stuffy and uptight. Hopefully that will pass as I wear suits more often, but for now I’m happy to be home in yoga pants and a flannel shirt...