Congratulations to everyone who took the bar exam last week. I’m sure you feel like you just ran a marathon. I do hope none of you are stupid like I was and had to start you new jobs yesterday, the first Monday after finishing the exam. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, I wasn’t.

Like Beanie said, I don’t ever want to take another bar exam, but I’ll probably have to. If I recall correctly, MBE scores are transferrable for three years, which gives me two more years to take another state w/out having to do the MBE. That would be smart to do, wouldn’t it? I wonder if I’ll be that smart….

Making coffee this morning, I had to use our tiny little 4-cup coffee-maker b/c our fancypants Cuisinart Grind & Brew seems to have kicked the bucket after about 3.5 years of very faithful service. Although we’ve been using this little coffee-maker regularly for a couple of weeks now, for some reason filling the tiny little water reservoir today reminded me of the six weeks last summer I spent in Missoula “studying” for the bar exam. It was one of those nostalgic moments, a flashback to the simplicity of a daily existence that consisted of little more than waking, coffee, class, and “studying.” Nevermind that it was its own sort of torture b/c of the anxiety of it all, and forget the fact that other big things were also going down at the same time — job interview, getting job, new house, new floors, new life, etc. In that instant of making coffee, the little mind-trick was that my time in Missoula was simple and invigorating, a little like a good cup of coffee. Or something like that.

The point is: The mind is a crazy trickster. Who would have ever thunk I would look back with longing on studying for the bar? Even for a second? [tags]nostalgia[/tags]

Congratulations to Luminous Void, a friend of mine from GW, and Screaming Bean, a friend from the internets, who both passed the New York Bar Exam! They got the news on Tuesday but I’m just catching up. If you’re also late to the party, don’t hesitate to offer your congratulations—they’ve both certainly earned it! [tags]friends[/tags]

Jeremy Richey passed the Illinois bar exam! If you’ve got a minute, stop by and wish him the best!

I know a couple of other people who took the Illinois bar in July; I haven’t heard from them but here’s hoping they got the same good news Jeremy got.

Also, congratulations to imbroglio reader PG who learned last week that he/she passed the Indiana bar exam.

It’s true that lots of people pass the bar, but trust me, there’s really not much that compares to finally getting that confirmation that you’re really done, that you’ve successfully completed the long, expensive, and rather demanding process of becoming credentialed to practice law.¹ So if you know someone who recently passed, or if you soon learn about someone who passed,² be sure to give them a kind word. Better yet, The Disassociate has the perfect congratulations card.

1. Unfortunately, even after you’ve passed the bar exam, you can’t actually practice law (meaning you can’t give legal advice or sign legal documents or appear in court unsupervised) until you’ve paid a few hundred dollars to your state’s bar association and you’re “sworn in” and thereby licensed by your state’s bar association. My boss keeps saying I better hurry up and “get sworn at” so I can really get to work.↩
2. I expect, for example, that Monica, Energy Spatula, Beanie, Half-Cocked, AP, and many others will be getting some good news soon. Sadly, it looks like if you took the NY Bar like Luminous Void, you’ll have to wait until November to hear.↩

For a little while it looked like I was going to have to wait until tomorrow for the news. I came home around midday and waited for the mail; when it arrived there was no letter. As I was working up my gumption to head back to work to wait for another day I got a call from the office.

“Where are you?”

“I’m just on my way back to work. I was waiting for the mail…”

“Well we have a couple of letters here for you that you probably want to see. One’s from the Board of Bar Examiners and the other is from the Clerk of the Supreme Court.”

I had to catch my breath before asking, “Are they big envelopes or little envelopes?”

“Just regular size business envelopes.”

And then I knew. The bar examiners told us that if we got a little letter, we passed. If we got a big letter, we failed and the letter would instruct us on how to prepare to take the test again. Of course, it wasn’t real until I opened the letter and actually read the words you see above.

It’s hard to believe, really, but there it is, in black and white. Three years of law school, two months of bar study, three days of bar examining, and two months of waiting. Now I’m pretty sure I’m a lawyer.

Crazy, don’t you think?

Sometime back I switched to Flock as my default web browser. It was new and fun w/all these supposed great goodies. But after a couple months of using it every day, I realized I didn’t use any of the little goodies that are all built in. The only one I occasionally used was the del.icio.us integration, but I never liked how it didn’t show you your existing tags when you wanted to tag a link, so I ended up using the regular javascript tagging method anyway. Conclusion: Firefox is just fine for me.

So I boot up Firefox for the first time in, oh, probably two months. As it’s starting up, it asks me if I’d like to resume my last session, so I say sure, why not? Well, I quickly discovered why not when this dastardly image of haunting evil popped up on my screen:

We’re talking scary stuff here people, scare-ee! And just when I was sort of getting to the point where I wasn’t so worried about it, too. The uncertainty will be over soon…. like, in a week. Yay? [tags]barbri[/tags]

People keep asking me why it takes so long to get results from the bar exam. Good question. My only answer is that the Bar wants to torture those who take the test. The whole experience is a hazing ritual; the wait is an integral part of the hazing.

haze
tr.v. hazed, haz·ing, haz·es

1. To persecute or harass with meaningless, difficult, or humiliating tasks.
2. To initiate, as into a college fraternity, by exacting humiliating performances from or playing rough practical jokes upon.

The test was not quite meaningless, it was difficult, and it was definitely humiliating in the sense that I just went through all the hoops of law school and still I had to subject myself to this? But I think the real humiliation is now, during these waiting weeks, when you have to introduce yourself as “not quite a lawyer, but really hoping you will be as soon as you get your bar results.” People look at you like you’re some kind of alien. Perhaps you are.

Monica says it’s time to move on and she’s right. For the next six weeks I’ll try to endure the hazing without comment, but no promises.

* Name that movie! Hint: If you were in high school in the late 80s or early 90s, you should have loved this movie.

Over at Jeremy Richey’s Blawg there’s a long thread about people’s reactions to the bar exam. I linked to it before but it has grown since and it remains somewhat reassuring to know that most everyone felt the MBE was a killer.

The bar exam ended two weeks ago today for most of us. Two weeks. It seems like the exam was about a decade ago. Studying for and taking it was like living in a 6-week twilight zone.

Anwyay, if you’re getting nervous about your results you might, like me, find some reassurance by reminding yourself again that everyone thought it was hard and felt awful.

It’s over. After the MBE today I raced to the restroom along with lots of other people and one of my comrades at the pissoir said something like “I feel like that Grateful Dead song, ‘Comfortably Numb…’”

That’s about it.¹ Those quoted in the sidebar at right pretty much sum up my feeling about the MBE. It blew. It was hard. I have no clue how I did.

So it’s over. Scores are out September 18. Until then, I will talk about other things. I hope.

Congratulations to all who have just completed their bar exam. And if you still have a day left, may your last day go better for you than mine did for me!!!

1. Although the Dar Williams version—which I learned about from my sister—is also highly recommended.↩

I’m taking the bar exam so I can do the job I really want to do. The job I really want to do asked me to go to training a couple of weeks ago. To attend training, I had to miss a lecture on a subject called “secured transactions”—something I knew absolutely zero about. But I went to training and tried to study that secured transactions thing on my own. Yesterday I got an MEE question about secured transactions and had no clue. If I got one point it will be a miracle.

Is there some irony in there somewhere?

Running self-score: 33-51/65. Obviously there’s quite a range there, and I’m totally just guessing, but if I’m in the ballpark and I do as well on the MBE as I did in practice, I just might make it. I wish you all happy bubbling….