By Joseph Keeney, Esq.
Attorney Instructor, LawTutors, LLC

1.  I graduated law school with a 3.5 therefore, I shouldn’t have to take the bar exam.

Comment:  Where to begin with this contention?  For starters, there could be a lot of reasons as to why you achieved a 3.5 and more importantly why you have to take this exam.  One reason that you achieved a 3.5 could be because you flat out deserved it, and this grade point average is indicative of your skill and work ethic.  Too bad you still have to take the thing.  Another reason that you achieved a 3.5 is because the curriculum and your class schedule was soft.  Another reason that you achieved a 3.5 is because the academic semester was more conducive to your preferences ie., work schedule, or finances.  Who knows?  But for now, this standardized approach of the MBE taken with essay writing is the best option on the board (no pun intended) until mind reading and ethical fortune-telling are made available.

2.  I practiced 2500 multiple choice questions, took three practice exams, and studied 8 hours a day.

Comment:  Yawn.  This exam is not about studying hard.  This exam is about studying smart.  Sure, by doing more multiple choice questions, this may allow the opportunity for your brain to become accustomed to the format style of the questions as well as the various ways in which a fine point of the law can be tested.  For that I say, the more the merrier.  However, one must be careful in setting large goals as they sometimes do not account for each student’s needs.  In other words, the student’s desire to answer too many questions can easily overshadow the quality of takeaways that one should yield from each question.  One LawTutors’ recommendation that addresses the takeaways and which has proven useful is for the student to analyze each possible answer to the degree:  “I chose Answer A because…..”  This is valuable because is regimented reinforcement.  Too often, while reviewing assignments with students, we find out that the student’s answer selection by letter choice was correct, but the rationale behind it was wrong.  With incorrect rationale, the examinee is building false misunderstanding of black letter application.

3.  My law school did not require these subjects therefore why should this be on the bar exam?

Comment:  Your law school gave you choice.  Hence, that is why these choices are called electives.  Another angle the bar examiners are testing is your ability to work under pressure and to undertake a vast breadth of material.  As words of encouragement, your understanding of the subjects tested on the MBE should pay dividends on the essay portion of the exam.

4.  I was on law review/law journal but still received 3′s across the board on the essay portion of the bar exam.

Comment:  There is certainly little doubt that the selected student for these organizations possesses analytical ability.  However, there are a few aspects or commonalities that may make students more susceptible to the format of the bar exam.  As you already know, much of what is subject to academic articles can be esoteric or involve much on opinion or can provide as an analytical overview of jurisdictional trends over a particular subject.  Also, there is a good chance that what you are writing or analyzing in these activities pertains to an area of the law or subject matter in which the student is interested.  In a lot of ways, as the author of this scholarly article you can control the direction and format of what is to be written.  The bar exam format is much different.  It covers areas of the law that perhaps involve subject matter that you never studied in law school let alone that you are interested.  Moreover, successful bar exam writing is often the result of disciplined commitment to the IRAC or CREAC method.

5.  Considering I excelled on the LSAT, I had no reason to think otherwise with respect to the bar exam.  I have always done well with standardized tests.

Comment:  The LSAT, in lot of ways, is used as a prognosticator on how well the candidate will perform in law school.  The bar exam, in lot ways, measures how well the candidate for admission to the bar did in law school.  That being said, the LSAT’s approach is to measure certain cognitive and analytical skills within the environment of a multiple choice question.  Is it perfect measurement?  Are the results of the LSAT necessarily a dispositive indicator on how one will achieve in law school and ultimately the bar exam?  No, of course not, but see # 1 above.  Another distinction between the two exams is that the bar exam is measuring more towards what the examinee actually learned over the course of three years and recently in the past eight weeks leading up to the exam.

6.  The format for the exam just isn’t fair.

Comment: There is obviously much debate and study on fairness interplayed with standardized test taking.  Believe it or not, I am not going to make an opinion one way or another.  This is reality, and the more excuse-making that goes on is negative energy and interference.

7.  My commercial material doesn’t exactly mesh with the law school outline that my Professor approved.  I am going to defer to my law school outline.

Comment:  I would like to make the suggestion that you should choose whichever you prefer.  However, this doesn’t go without saying a few comments first.  Several of the commercial entities out there have either been specializing in bar preparation for decades or are accompanied by an entourage of legal authors, professional test takers, and professors.  That being said the commercial outlines are terrific for picking out repeated questions, trends, and proclivities that the Multi-State drafters and Board of Bar Examiners will test.  Sometimes I have found it helpful that if there is a particular area that you find yourself disproportionately weak or feel that you require further review that those outlines and hornbooks may be used in a supplementary capacity.

8.  Because I have been a law clerk for now three years, that practical experience ought to give me an advantage over the people that have just been going to school.

Comment:  Doubtful.  Jobs are breeding grounds for misunderstanding and misapplication of black letter.  After all, who doesn’t plead waiver, estoppel, and laches not knowing the difference.  You may need to know these types of distinctions on the bar exam.

9.  Well, last time I took it, my MBE score was well above the average so now I am just going to focus on the Essays.

Comment:  I dare you to make the mistake.

10.     This time I am going to spend a week studying Future Interests.

Comment:  One common thread between law school preparation and bar exam preparation often comes down to time management.  Why allocate 1 week of eight to a topic that could only amount to 5 percent of the questions on the exam doesn’t make a whole lot of sense?  This could be more judiciously spent in other areas.

Clearly, studying for the bar exam is not the most fun thing you can imagine doing. Though, if doing MBE questions just for kicks is your idea of a good time….who am I to judge?  For those of you that don’t get your kicks from MBE questions, since I can’t make the studying more fun, at least I can tell you how to make it more effective.

Essays: Practice your essays with your notes, looking up rules of law. I know, this sounds like cheating, but I’m not suggesting you do it ON the day of the exam, I’m suggesting you do it during practice. Also, the bar exam is actually testing your ability to analyze, and looking up rules in your outline will not help you there. But, it WILL help you learn the correct rules, which is the first step. Plus, it is more effective then trying to memorize rules by reading outlines again and again, or even flashcards for that matter. If you look up rules as you write, you are actively applying facts to those rules, and practicing your writing, in addition to learning the rules, since you are copying them down. This is all active learning; the doing rather than just passively reading.  When given the choice, active learning is always more effective.

Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE write out your practice essays. Thinking about them in your head, or just drafting outlines, will not help you. You’ve heard practice makes perfect? It’s a cliché for a reason, and now is the time to put that cliché to the test. Write out as many essays as you can in the next 5 weeks. Using your notes, of course.

MBE: As with the essays, you want to be actively learning from the MBE practice questions. If you do not learn from every MBE question you do, you are wasting your time, and just doing that MBE question for fun. As I said before, I won’t judge….but the general feeling is that MOST people have other things they like to do in their spare time. How does one learn from doing an MBE question? Do one at a time, check the answer, and then figure out what you did wrong.

You might have went wrong on substance; forgetting some element of the rule, or just being confused on the black letter law. In that case, now is the time to review our outlines/flashcards/charts, to brush up on the black letter law.

You might have had a reading comprehension problem, reading the call of the question or a certain fact the incorrect way. If that’s the case, take a mental note and be sure to read a bit more carefully in the future.  Having said that, make sure you are consistently paying attention to the call of the question; variations such as “which is the least likely outcome” often throw students off course if they are not paying attention.

Perhaps you were torn between A and C, and don’t quite understand why C is the better answer, since they both seem ok to you. In that instance, read the explanation in the back of the book, re-read the question, consult with a tutor, do what you need to do to assess why one answer was the “best” out of all options. Sometimes the way to do this is to figure out why the other three options are incorrect. Remember an answer has to be both factually and legally correct, and never only a little bit legally correct.

What all of these things boil down to is learning from your mistakes, something your mother has been telling you to do since you were just a wee thing. The types of questions asked, as well as the rules tested, are often repeated, which means you are likely to see them again and again – so what better way to master them then to learn from each question?  Remember merely tallying your score and shrugging, moving on to review an outline without knowing where your weaknesses are, will not help improve your score. You have to know where you went wrong. You have to learn FROM the questions, and I can not stress that enough.

Having taken this all into consideration, perhaps you might have time, after studying EFFECTIVELY, to actually see your friends in the weeks to come. But only once or twice 

Automate Your Blogs

1)      NEVER pay attention to anyone else. This is the absolute MOST important rule. Now, sure, there might be some exceptions, like a study partner, but for the most part you want to avoid others, at least on an academic basis. (Don’t take me too literally and become a recluse!) Everyone works at a different pace, and everyone works best in a different environment. Listening to how many hours Bob, your neighbor in Torts, spent in the library will just stress you out one way or another. Same goes for talking extensively about exams or other homework assignments, it will just make you insane. And let’s face it, law school already makes you a bit insane.

2)      Stay Ahead. By this I mean don’t get behind. I know, easier said than done, right? This doesn’t mean just doing the assigned work from day to day, but UNDERSTAND what you are doing from day to day. Don’t wait until a week before exams to attempt to master something from the first week of classes.

3)      Ask Questions. This is one way to accomplish number 2. Do not be afraid to ask your professors questions – it’s what they are there for! If it seems too intimidating to ask a question in class, schedule a meeting with your professor during office hours. If this doesn’t work, you have lovely people like LawTutors (hint hint! Ha ha!) to help you out!

4)      Use Class time wisely. Remember, you don’t have to understand everything going INTO class, you go to class for a reason, to LEARN. I realize that class can be intimidating, and it seems like you have to go in understanding absolutely everything. This is simply not true. The purpose of class is to help you understand the information. You still want to prepare for class, so that you can understand the cases the professor is going over, and keep up with the lecture, but you do not have to comprehend every nuance of the law before class starts.

5)      Outlining. First understand that there is not a perfect outline. The purpose of outlining is to synthesize and understand the information, and to help you prepare for your exam.  This means that every outline might be a bit different.

6)      Practice, Practice Practice. Do not start practicing exam writing the week before the exam, start practicing day one of class. The purpose of the exam is to see how well you can APPLY the law, not how well you can memorize it. This means that knowing the law is only half the battle. The best way to do this is to find old exams that your professor has used, and many offer them online. This allows you to not only practice, but familiarize yourself with your professor’s style. I also suggest LawTutor’s MiniEssays (www.lawtutors.net), which are paragraph long questions, designed to test just one topic (for instance, battery , or offer) and your IRAC skills. You might also try Aspen’s Examples and Explanations, which are a great source of black letter law AND hypotheticals.

7)      Use your time effectively. Don’t study for the sake of studying – study EFFECTIVELY. How you might ask? By not trying to memorize law, but by applying it. Go through hypos with a friend, practice essays, think of different scenarios in your head, or rewrite rules of law in  your own words. Remember, this is not a game of memorization, it’s a game of understanding and application.

      Master IRAC. Isssue. Rule. Analysis. Conclusion. This will help you through all exams, including the bar, and remember, analysis is the most important part.

9)      Find a good study partner. I’m not a huge advocate of study groups, or relying on others too much, but finding one other person whose study style matches your own can be a benefit. The two of you can answer questions for each other, AND you can bounce ideas off of one another and practice hypos together.

10)   Last, RELAX. Get good rest, as hard as that is, go out once in awhile, and add a bit of humor into your life, like this site! http://overheardinlawschool.blogspot.com/

Hopefully these 10 tips help you get settled in. I’m going to be expanding on these topics throughout the semester.

LawTutors would like to take this time to encourage all law students to join the student division of the ABA!

I think the most helpful method is to assign the same question to everyone in your group. All will prepare a list of the legal theories they spot in the question. Under each legal theory, they should write a rule for the theory and the words from the fact pattern they used to decide which legal theories were applicable. When the group meets, you can share your insights. What one person doesn’t find, another will. When you have agreed on a list of issues, send everyone home to write out an answer. When everyone has a written answer, meet again to share. You can compare the organization of your answers and discuss the problems you had in writing.

As you near exam time, practice under timed conditions. If the question you choose to work on is an hour question, give everyone a half hour to prepare their notes for an answer. Then meet and share notes. Next everyone should take a half hour to write the answer. If you have written answers to one-issue fact patterns throughout the semester and have started your exam preparation by practicing with the multi-issue questions, you should be prepared. You should be able to spot the issues in a long fact pattern, know which words are in it for what purpose, and have a workable format for an answer. At this point in your exam preparation your major concern should be the organization of the answers to your professor’s complex questions.

This method works just as well for policy questions for which this book cannot prepare you. You and your classmates should be able to list the professor’s favorite “buzz” words and figure out how to use them to answer a question.Your undergraduate essay and paper writing have probably prepared you adequately for this type of question once you have determined just what your professor is after.

Howard Stern repeatedly and willfully breached his written contract
with CBS Radio over the last 22 months of that contract,
misappropriated millions of dollars worth of CBS Radio airtime for his
own financial benefit, and fraudulently concealed his interest in
hundreds of millions of dollars of Sirius stock while promoting it on
the air.

That on or about January 9, 2006, Sirius paid over 34 million shares of
stock, valued at approximately $220 million, to Stern and his agent
because Sirius exceeded by the end of 2005 certain subscriber targets
that were set in the Sirius-Stern contract. The complaint alleges that
the Sirius-Stern contract provided that Stern was to receive this stock
payment in 2010, but it had an acceleration provision that allowed
Stern to receive the compensation as early as January 2006 if these
subscriber targets were met. All of Stern’s actions for which he
received this expedited compensation occurred during the time that
Stern was under exclusive contract with CBS Radio, when the Sirius
payment terms to Stern were kept secret.

This contract thus provided a compelling incentive for Stern to do all
that he could to help Sirius reach the subscriber targets by the end of
2005 so that he could receive his Sirius stock payment as soon as
possible while Sirius’s stock was extremely valuable. Without the
accelerated payment, Stern would risk the decline of the Sirius stock
value. By taking action on CBS Radio’s airtime in 2004 and 2005, Stern
assured himself of immediate access to $200 million in assets that
could be readily converted to cash.

By engaging in continuous promotion of Sirius on CBS Radio airtime
without any payment by Sirius to CBS for these advertisements and by
pocketing over $200 million dollars for his personal benefit, Stern
misappropriated millions of dollars worth of CBS Radio airtime for his
own financial benefit and the financial benefit of Don Buchwald, his
agent, and Sirius in contravention of repeated directives by CBS Radio.

That Stern also breached his contractual obligation to inform CBS Radio
of plans that might have a bearing on his future. Under the Agreement,
Stern had the obligation to give CBS Radio the first opportunity to
discuss participation in radio projects that are conceived during the
term of the Agreement, even if the concept or project was launched or
implemented after the term. Stern ignored that responsibility, and
negotiated and concluded his agreement with Sirius in secret.

To this day, Stern continues to breach his contract by refusing to
return property that belongs to CBS Radio — the recordings of his CBS
radio program that, under his Agreement with CBS Radio, belong to the
company.

The suit further charges that Sirius intentionally interfered with and procured Stern’s breach of the Agreement. Sirius knew that Stern had a contractual obligation to maximize the prospects for the success of the CBS Radio program and to comply with his duty of good faith. Sirius intentionally induced and caused Stern to breach these contractual provisions by offering to accelerate Stern’s payment of millions of dollars in stock options to promote Sirius on CBS airwaves and by concealing Stern’s stock interest from CBS Radio.
The complaint in this lawsuit was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York.