You might be reluctant to trust your preparation for the bar exam to an iPhone app, but there are many other great apps out there for law school and lawyers. iPhoneJ.D. has reviewed many of them; in fact, it appears Jeff has reviewed 163 apps and counting. Some of the best I’ve found are Fastcase and Lawstack, two legal research apps, and the FRE on your phone. Recently I also found Illinois Statutes, which is exactly what it suggests — IL law in your pocket. It’s awesome to have the whole code at your fingertips, except, well, judges and bailiffs often don’t like it when you’re playing with your phone in court. Also, my phone is just too slow for “quick” searches. It’s great to have it there if you get in a pinch, but its actual utility value is kind of low.

What we all need is fast access to legal databases in the courtroom. Will it ever happen?

I took the IL bar exam last week and one reason it seemed more difficult this time than the first time was exactly this. Having practiced a bit the bar exam seems even more absurd and even more like a hazing ritual than it did when I was fresh out of law school.

Why don’t lawyers get together and make this madness stop? Oh, I know: Because once you’ve passed and started working you really don’t have time to think about stupid crap like the bar exam. At that point it’s just not your problem anymore so the stupid thing continues, becoming more and more irrelevant every year.

Lawyers are masochists.

Get. Freaking. Real.

Again: Lawyers are idiots. Absolute idiots. Aaaaargggh!

List every job (other than those listed in response to preceding questions 23A and 24), including without limitation all temporary, part-time, full-time, and self employment, paid or unpaid, you have held for the ten year period immediately prior to the date of the filing of this application. List jobs in reverse date order so that your current or most recent (non-judicial and non-legal) employment is listed first.

Lawyers are the biggest idiots on the planet. I want to pull my hair out!!!!

Also not helping: This blog is somehow broken. The RSS feed’s not working, which it never really has in any way that was satisfactory, and I can’t post through the xml-rpc interface. So sadness all around. The dearth of posting here means fewer people follow anyway, and the hassle associated w/keeping the damned thing running, updating software, troubleshooting, etc., is beginning to outweigh the benefits. Hmph. Changes to come. Suggestions always welcome.

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….

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]

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?

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]