All you lawyers (or soon-to-be)

Please recommend your tips on how you stayed sane while studying for the bar? In addition, how did you pass? any good tips?

Starting to freak out--- bar in Feb (wedding in august).

Thanks ESQ's :)

Are you taking a course?

I took bar bri and made it my full time job. I'd go to the live class in the morning (at Town Hall), come home and have lunch, then study until dinner time. The first month studying, I'd take the evenings off and one weekend day off. The second month of studying, I took a lot of breaks. I even went to a lot of mets games (which I know you can't do prepping for the feb bar, but I took the July).

I did almost everything they told me to. Instead of recopying the outline and making my own, I got outlines from someone who had taken bar bri the year before and I would come home and review them rather than rewrite everything. I did ALL the questions and essays they told me to do.

I have some really wonderful 'compact' outlines but those are basically for towards the end. I'd be happy to email you them if you'd like.

Mind you, i took the July 2004 bar, so it's a while ago now. But in general, if you take it seriously, all the info will get crammed in your head and you will pass!

The craziest thing to remember... towards the end your brain will be like MUSH and you'll feel like you're not retaining ANY info... but miraculously, you'll be pulling CORRECT ANSWERS out of what feels like your @ss!!! If you've studied like you should've, you need to have faith in these answers... because they're not actually out of your @ss but out of your head and you'll pass.

Good luck!!!!

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Posted by springsandra

Are you taking a course?

I took bar bri and made it my full time job. I'd go to the live class in the morning (at Town Hall), come home and have lunch, then study until dinner time. The first month studying, I'd take the evenings off and one weekend day off. The second month of studying, I took a lot of breaks. I even went to a lot of mets games (which I know you can't do prepping for the feb bar, but I took the July).

I did almost everything they told me to. Instead of recopying the outline and making my own, I got outlines from someone who had taken bar bri the year before and I would come home and review them rather than rewrite everything. I did ALL the questions and essays they told me to do.

I have some really wonderful 'compact' outlines but those are basically for towards the end. I'd be happy to email you them if you'd like.

Mind you, i took the July 2004 bar, so it's a while ago now. But in general, if you take it seriously, all the info will get crammed in your head and you will pass!

The craziest thing to remember... towards the end your brain will be like MUSH and you'll feel like you're not retaining ANY info... but miraculously, you'll be pulling CORRECT ANSWERS out of what feels like your @ss!!! If you've studied like you should've, you need to have faith in these answers... because they're not actually out of your @ss but out of your head and you'll pass.

Good luck!!!!

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Thank you! I am taking peiper. good to hear u took some time off to yourself. it will be my fulltime job tho! nothing else!

First, best of luck to you on the bar.

I won't go into detail too much about my studying tips because, well, they were pretty much non-existent. I have a pretty good memory, and going over the outlines too many times was actually painful for me. That said, I did go to all my live classes. I tried to answer some questions at night (only the multiple choices, couldn't be bothered answering the essays).

The biggest thing I did was stay calm the whole time. Just know that if you fail, the world will not end. And like the above poster said, take some time for yourself. Don't lock yourself in a room studying 24 hours a day - those are usually the people who fail.

Go to jdunderground.com, there's a lot of good advice there for bar retakers.

I took the bar exam several times unfortunately. I finally passed in 2004. My downfall was the MBE. I finally passed when I took Piepers course. He really saved me. I did BarBri, Micromash and a bunch of other generic bar review courses, including personal tutoring. The only thing that made things click in my head was Piepers and thanks to my 15 pt jump on the MBE I was able to waive into other states.

Good luck!

I'm a Pieper person too

It's def very important to keep calm. The BEST advice I can give you is to trust your own study habits. YOU know what works for you, so don't be influenced by how other people are studying.

Also, the practice essays are SO essential. So even though it gets annoying, AND especially if you are not in a live class which makes it so easy to just skip the essays every now and then, def keep up with them!

And obvi do as many practice MBE questions as you can every day. That is so important because they reuse fact patterns again.

Don't hesitate to take a break! You don't want to burn yourself out.... so when Pieper gives you your weekly calendar and has 1 night reserved for 'going to the movies' OR (as he sometimes jokes) 'roll around in the sheets' (lol), DEF follow his advice! You need to give your brain a chance to 'reboot'.

Good Luck!!!! FM if you need anything.

Im not taking it until Aug, but a lot of my friends who just passed basically did EVERYTHING they were told to do in Barbri and said it reallyyy helped to take 1 day to themselves so I am planning on doing the same!!!! Good luckkk!!!!

i took the july bar and unfortunately failed by a few points so i'm retaking in february. my mbe score was lower than necessary but i rocked the essays so i'm confident i'll pass in february once i put in the right amount of time.

i took the barbri course as well as the 1 day new york review that barbri offers. honestly, i don't know what i would have done differently. i did everything barbri asked me to do except some of the essays and in the end, i did well on the essays and missed MBE passing by 4 questions (at least that's what barbri told me). i chalk it up to being a bad multiple choice test taker - that's always been my downfall - SATs, LSAT, etc.

i think the most important thing to remember is you need to know the content before you can answer the questions - don't start doing questions for MBE without first learning/memorizing the material.

hth and i'm sorry you and i have to suffer through this until february!

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Posted by DWKSwed

I'm taking the February bar too... I've heard that BarBri is really great but that they don't cover much of the multiple choice and that if BarBri people fail, that's usually why... is this true? Do you *need* to do a supplemental course to cover these, because I've heard of some people taking Kaplan courses to supplement (which I don't want to do because I hate them after teaching their LSAT prep course for like, a day).

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You could get some supplemental MBE practice books elsewhere and use that in addition to all the bar bri materials if you want more practice. I had two extra MBE books I think from Pieper's one-day class, actually, but I only ended up going through one of them. There's only so many hundreds of questions you can do a night (and review the answers and make it stick).

I think I gave my extra one away on CL after the bar results came in. I don't quite remember. I know I dropped my law review books off at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope about 5 years after law school when I was finally moving out of town. No one wanted to buy them and I didn't want to bring them along.

Good luck to the bar takers!!! Stay calm and trust yourself that with hard work you can pass!

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Posted by springsandra

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Posted by DWKSwed

I'm taking the February bar too... I've heard that BarBri is really great but that they don't cover much of the multiple choice and that if BarBri people fail, that's usually why... is this true? Do you *need* to do a supplemental course to cover these, because I've heard of some people taking Kaplan courses to supplement (which I don't want to do because I hate them after teaching their LSAT prep course for like, a day).

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You could get some supplemental MBE practice books elsewhere and use that in addition to all the bar bri materials if you want more practice. I had two extra MBE books I think from Pieper's one-day class, actually, but I only ended up going through one of them. There's only so many hundreds of questions you can do a night (and review the answers and make it stick).

I think I gave my extra one away on CL after the bar results came in. I don't quite remember. I know I dropped my law review books off at the Tea Lounge in Park Slope about 5 years after law school when I was finally moving out of town. No one wanted to buy them and I didn't want to bring them along.

Good luck to the bar takers!!! Stay calm and trust yourself that with hard work you can pass!

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Yikes it seems like everyone takes more than one course? Maybe i need to look into supplemental classes. I am taking peiper though. AHHH

I took Pieper only, and was fine. You will get a LOT of notes, and make sure you do all the essays and get feed back on them.

The mnemonics helped me greatly, there are still things I remember from Bar Review with Pieper (along with my 200 page outline)

Pieper will give you several books, including multiple choice books on the MBE, make sure you do the practice exercises in them.


That being said, I made sure I still had a life outside of Bar review, I would go out with my then FH(now DH), take time to sleep and if I needed a day of recovery, I took it. Its easy to get burned out with the amount of info you are given

I took Barbri also for the July 2010 Bar exam. I would go to every live class and after taking an hour break I would type up my notes and read them over once. Then as I reviewed the notes on the weekend I would edit and only keep the most important points so I would have a nice compact outline to study during the week or two before the exam.

I also suggest trying to keep up with all of the questions they assign. Even if you don't have time to write out the essays I would try and read it and look over the sample answer. That helped me a lot!


Good Luck!

Also, I do not think you need any supplemental course.

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Posted by HoosierCouple

Yikes it seems like everyone takes more than one course? Maybe i need to look into supplemental classes. I am taking peiper though. AHHH

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I didn't actually take a second course. I only got the MBE question books from it. You don't need more than one course. It'll confuse you because they teach you different ways to study.

im really happy that this post was created!

im graduating college at the end of the month, and will be taking about one year to study for the LSATS......do you guys have any tips on LSAT taking?? im not a good test taker, and i need one year to study b/c of how the enrollment at Law school is setup plus the wedding/my 10mth old baby etc....you get the idea! so i REALLY want to dedicate my time to do well.....the questions on the LSATs are SO tricky and mind boggling!!

any tips??

P.S.>>>Law school is so expensive,! LOL

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Posted by thefloreswedding

im really happy that this post was created!

im graduating college at the end of the month, and will be taking about one year to study for the LSATS......do you guys have any tips on LSAT taking?? im not a good test taker, and i need one year to study b/c of how the enrollment at Law school is setup plus the wedding/my 10mth old baby etc....you get the idea! so i REALLY want to dedicate my time to do well.....the questions on the LSATs are SO tricky and mind boggling!!

any tips??

P.S.>>>Law school is so expensive,! LOL

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if you can, take an LSAT prep course, I did, and it helped raise my score so I could get in. I took Princeton Review.

and yes, Law school is expensive. I WISH i had gone to a state or city school so I wouldnt be so weighed down with loans from Law School

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Posted by thefloreswedding

im really happy that this post was created!

im graduating college at the end of the month, and will be taking about one year to study for the LSATS......do you guys have any tips on LSAT taking?? im not a good test taker, and i need one year to study b/c of how the enrollment at Law school is setup plus the wedding/my 10mth old baby etc....you get the idea! so i REALLY want to dedicate my time to do well.....the questions on the LSATs are SO tricky and mind boggling!!

any tips??

P.S.>>>Law school is so expensive,! LOL

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Oh boy. Where to begin on this one. Well, not to be a debby downer but law school isn't that great a career unless you go to a top law school, get a significant scholarship at a lower ranked school and/or have someone already in the legal field that can hook you up with jobs (ie networks). Many of the posts over at JDU confirm this - feel free to check that board out along with Auto Admit.com and a few others as well.

Right now, a law degree is a wash because the job market is ridiculously saturated (NY state alone has 15 law schools, and now they want to open up 2 more at Stonybrook and Binghamton ). Tuition just keeps going up and up, up while entry level salaries for most remain stagnant (40-60K for small firms), Only a few who come out of top schools and/or top grades from non top schools are lucky to land the big law firm jobs (the ones that everyone salivates over because they pay $160,000/year to start - and even THOSE jobs are significantly less now due to outsourcing).

As far as admissions go - the only 2 things law schools care about is LSAT and GPA. Have a 3.99 GPA from Farmingdale State but only got a 151 on your LSAT? Then good luck at trying to squeeze into SUNY Buffalo or Hofstra Law. However, get your score up to 165+ and you have a shot at schools worth going into 150K debt for (NYU, Columbia, Cornell, etc).

Any other q's, feel free to FM me, I served as my law schools Orientation Counselor for several years and currently on their Alumni Admissions Volunteer list (I went to BLS).

I'm just writhing this so you know the good, the bad AND the ugly side of law- you don't want to look back in 5 years and feel miserable about being unemployed, license-less (like this thread suggests, if you fail the Bar Exam - life sucks for several months) with a 150K student loan price tag hanging over your head.