The Days of Reckoning are very fast approaching for the Summer 2015 Florida Bar Exam takers. Having sat for that same exam not very long ago myself, I’ve compiled some tips that play a bit fast and loose with the notions of traditional studying you’ve probably had heaped upon you. I’m not saying my way is the only way or even necessarily the best way, but for a certain type of personality and mindset I think it’s pretty fantastic.
If you aren’t in law school or taking the bar exam, this post will somehow both make no sense to you while also boring you to death. You have been warned. Also, by way of full disclosure, I am not some sort of Certified Bar Exam Guru or anything like that. I don’t work for BARBRI or Kaplan or any other bar review company.
What I did do was pass the Florida Bar Exam the very first time I took it, with Part I and II scores that stood by themselves (meaning I did not have to rely on my FL score to bring up my MBE score or vice versa), when nearly half of my same-law-school cohorts failed that particular administration of the Florida Bar Exam.
This isn’t an article meant for the person who spends 10 hours a day, 7 days a week preparing for the bar. That person is going to be just fine (well, maybe, if they’re studying the right things). This is geared more towards the person who, for whatever reason, has found themselves behind, overwhelmed, or just plain clueless about what to do.
Don’t despair. You have plenty of time. As of this writing, it’s still mid-June.
There are lengthy tomes on bar passage, most of them written by people far smarter than myself. I want to share just a few very big points that I think will make an immediate difference in anyone’s chances of bar passage:
Take the Bar Review Course
This is a no-brainer. I personally took BARBRI, but what I saw of Kaplan looked just as good (incidentally, I used the free Kaplan MPRE review videos and passed the MPRE in every jurisdiction on my first try; the printable outline contained all the information needed). I can’t vouch for alternative programs, but come on, now is not the time to be a cheapskate. You’ve amassed tens of thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars of debt to get that JD. Another few thousand for a bar review course is a drop in the bucket, and that’s assuming your school isn’t offering one for free.
I will say, however, that I feel there was a bit of information overload in the bar review course. I also heard lots of people talking about studying 12-14 hours a day for 6-7 days a week. Much like how 90% of any given law class seems to be in the top 10% of the class, I think these people were probably lying or at best grossly exaggerating their study time.
I adhered to a 5-6 hour a day schedule, Mondays through Fridays, basically treating the course as an almost full-time job. There was ample time for the beach, relaxing, and friends and family. BARBRI (and I assume Kaplan as well) compiles a thoroughly in depth “study schedule” for you every day. Completing every item on this study schedule would indeed result in a 10+ hour day almost every day. Perhaps there are some men (and women) made of sterner stuff than I, but I simply feel that there is no way the vast majority of people can absorb, understand, and retain that much information on a daily basis.
Thus, I recommend that at a bare minimum you should watch the video lecture and fill out the provided outlines as you go. Most lectures are around 3 hours. Take a break for lunch at the 1.5 hour mark or your eyes are going to start glazing over, particularly for things like easements or secured transactions.
On many days, completing the outline and the lecture were the only thing I did.
That leads me to my next and probably most helpful topic:
Study Smarter, Not Harder
Yes, that’s lame corporate jargon, but it actually applies here. I talked to lots of people who talked about doing “1,000 questions” or “3,000 questions” or writing “100 practice essays.” Presumably, based on the bar passage rates for July 2014, many of these people failed. I can safely say that if you are focused merely on the sheer quantity of questions you are doing, you are doing it wrong.
DO NOT LISTEN TO PEOPLE CLAIMING THEY DO A HERCULEAN AMOUNT OF QUESTIONS DAILY.
Here is what I did:
Multiple-Choice: I did MC questions in groups of approximately 15-20. I did not even bother with practice questions until probably June. When I DID practice MC, I would do no more than 50 or so in a day, tops (the only exception being when I took a practice MBE).
The reason for this is that if you do 100 questions in a day, there’s absolutely no way you will remember the ones you got wrong, or more importantly, WHY you got them wrong. By far the most helpful MC practice, after watching the substantive law lecture, is to do them in small groups. Then, even for the questions you get right, read ALL the answer explanations. You will probably find (as I did) that you might be getting questions right, but for the wrong reasons.
Certainly do the couple of practice MBE’s they schedule, but just as endurance tests and to see where you fall on time management. Doing 100-200 questions a day, multiple times a week, is a surefire recipe for frustration, tiring yourself out, and not learning anything.
Essay: This is, I think, probably the most valuable thing I learned. I don’t know if it is wholly original, but I didn’t really hear anybody talking about it, either in lectures or online.
Don’t even bother doing any practice essays until the end of June, at the earliest. That’s right. Ignore them completely.
Here’s why: A HUGE part of passing the bar is just understanding the test itself. And the fact of the FL Bar Exam is that the essays are only 1/4th of the whole thing. The remaining 3/4th’s are MC questions (half day of FL MC, full day of MBE).
You KNOW what’s going to be tested on the MBE (Contracts, Torts, Property, Con Law, Crim Law/Pro, Evidence). I guess as of the time of this writing there might be Federal Procedure on there as well, but that’s just one more area. I believe this is actually a benefit, as some of the truly tricky questions from the other areas must now get tossed to make room for the “easy” level Fed questions.
You KNOW that the FL MC will test FL Crim and Civ Pro, plus a random assortment of FL Evidence, Biz Orgs, or Wills/Probate (and I suppose Juvenile law could be thrown in now as well). The FL specific questions are much maligned, but I thought they were pretty easy; simply memorize the FL distinctions. This is a task that should not take you more than a week or two. Almost infallibly, every FL question will have two clearly wrong answers, an answer choice that is the correct Federal/general rule, and one that is the correct FL rule.
You pretty much have NO IDEA what will be tested on the essays, as many bar takers found out to their great woe this past July.
It therefore makes much more sense strategically to put most (but not all) of your eggs into the MBE basket, followed by FL Crim and Civ Pro and MC, followed by the essays.
Here is what I think the best study method for the FL Essay is: Do not even write one practice essay until a couple weeks or so before the bar when you take the final simulated exam. Not even one. The far, far more effective technique is to outline essays.
If you take a bar review course (you did sign up for one, right?), you will receive a massive amount of bar review books. I got through maybe 1/4th of the essays, and that’s being generous. To practice essays, pick an essay from a relatively recent year (I appreciate the thoroughness, but I don’t think a 1972 Property essay will be particularly helpful). Read it. Then outline it. Literally just write little short, bullet-point-style sentence fragments:
– Issue is whether K exists
– K needs offer, acceptance, consideration, mutual assent, etc.
– Parol evidence rule issue
– Consequential damages are appropriate because easily ascertainable loss of profit, etc.
You want to get very, very good at ISSUE SPOTTING. Do not even pick up a pencil or laptop to write a practice essay until you are spotting at least 75% of the issues in an essay (I only did maybe 3-4 practice essays that I actually WROTE OUT. I suppose that may be more important if you have major problems with organizing an essay in the IRAC structure, but most law school graduates can do that in their sleep).
When you flip to the grading matrix in the book, you’ll see that this is how they are graded. I believe this is how the real bar examiners grade as well. These little concepts and bullet-points are checked off. More checks = more points. I think many people go into the bar expecting to wow the bar examiners with The Great American Legal Novel on the essays, and this is just insane. Put yourself in the shoes of the graders; it’s a tiny group of people grading an enormous number of essays. All they have time to do is issue spot.
I know that issue spotting is the key to success on the essays, because I totally bombed my rules. Do you think I knew the elements of NEGOTIABLE INSTRUMENTS or MISREPRESENTATION totally stone cold (let alone all the subtle distinctions and various defenses) going into that exam when I was expecting FL Con Law/Property, Family Law, and Negligence? HAH! I had maybe 25% of the rules correct, but because I spotted all the issues and argued both sides I came out with a very nice FL score. To this day I kind of wonder if they mixed up my exam with someone else’s.
Moral of the story: For FL Essay, issue spot, issue spot, issue spot your way to victory.
In summary: Watch all the video lectures and fill out all the outlines, review said outlines from time to time, practice MC in bite-sized chunks, and practice issue spotting on the essays using the “bullet point” method and I think that will do a lot to clear away much of the mystique and general dread around the bar exam.
NO ONE can possibly memorize all the substantive law that could potentially be tested; it is impossible. Success is about targeting the specific areas you KNOW will be tested and get you guaranteed points (MBE areas, FL Civ/Crim Pro, FL distinctions).
Good luck, and Godspeed.