I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.  – Thomas Edison

Some people take the California Bar Examination repeatedly – chronically - and never pass. 

The explanations for their failures appear to make sense.  They didn’t attend top law schools.  They aren’t native English speakers.  They prepared for each examination too hurriedly. 

One problem with these explanations is that they’re irrelevant. Even if they’re accurate, they can’t be changed. They don’t explain the college and law school successes that preceded each person’s string of frustrating bar exam failures. Most importantly, everyone’s background is a mixed blessing, so why put that “in play” at all.   

Another problem is that nearly as many folks (in my experience anyway) fail chronically without a single explanation that makes any sense.  They were upper echelon students in good colleges and good law schools.  They “made” law review.  They interned in federal courts.  They were “golden children." At least until now.

Since California bar results were released, I’ve had discussions and exchanged e-mails with applicants in shock, with applicants under all sorts of pressure and at the end of their ropes. The next exam is only six or so months out and passing is their highest priority. They’re willing to do anything to prepare, if only they could figure out what it should be.  They ask me “what should I do?”  Much of what I suggest, they’ve already tried.  It feels overwhelming to me; I can only imagine how it feels to them.  And so, I am attempting to write my way through my feelings about this enormous dilemma today, to my truth of it, one that I can share.

I think it is this.

Despite the vast number of bar preparation courses, on-line offerings and other study aids, easy options for multiple repeaters are actually few.  This may be because the very nature of “cram courses,”  limits what and how much can be taught and absorbed.  Simply moving from “Column A” to “Column B”  on the “bar prep” menu isn’t likely to be enough for a repeater.  An entirely new approach may be the only way.

That could be not to “prepare” for the next exam.  Insofar as the very word “prepare” anticipates a fixed event or result, it could be not to “prepare” at all. 

“Preparing,” as I have used the term, assumes facts that are not in evidence.  Such as that one’s legal education was adequate to make only this hurried and cursory review (as compared to law school) sufficient.   Or such as, that despite a sound legal education, the “aha” moments of true legal insight are still too few and far between.  A mnemonic for exceptions to the parole evidence rule won’t get it done if one hasn’t yet learned to recognize when – and why – those exceptions may apply.

 If one hasn’t yet entirely achieved the core elements of legal reasoning necessary to pass the California Bar Examination, then preparing by  “not preparing” could be an open-ended project though, with a frighteningly uncertain outcome. And how does one go about THAT?

I’m comfortable suggesting that doing the same things again is not how to go about it.  It could mean “going back to square one.”  Adding hornbooks and even case books to one’s packaged “outlines.”  Actually briefing cases, if that helps to “connect the dots” concerning when, say, exceptions to the parole evidence rule apply, and why.  For extroverted students who talk their way through the things that puzzle them, a good old-fashioned study group may be an approach.  Or a close working relationship with a trusted tutor or mentor.   Most importantly, it could mean not working backward from the next exam, but, instead, postponing the next reckoning until one has changed – really changed – really grown.

So then, what does it take to really grow?

In Antoine St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, the outer space-traveling narrator and the Little Prince discuss “the catastrophe of the baobabs,” seeds whose existence threatens the viability of the asteroid that they share. The Little Prince exhorts his reticent companion to make a beautiful drawing to warn other space travelers to avoid their considerable risks.  It is only through the greatest effort that the drawing is made, but it is the most beautiful in the book. 

“Perhaps you will ask me, the narrator says, ‘Why there are no other drawings in this book as magnificent and impressive as this drawing of the baobabs?’

“The reply is simple.  I have tried.  But with the others I have not been successful.  When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity.”

How much does passing the Bar Exam really mean to you?