Bar Prep + MPRE + NYLE + Bar Application, etc.: Next Steps to Becoming an Esquire

Just when you thought you'd be done with school/tests...

Throwback to me studying for the MPRE in March 2020

Another year flew by. With the last set of law school finals and graduation season coming up, J.D.’s-to-be will be celebrating the completion of law school (yay!). Awaiting the attorneys-in-waiting, however, is not exactly a relaxing summer (yet!), but around 2 months of (near-?) full-time study.

MPRE

New York, for example, also requires the completion of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE) and New York Law Exam (NYLE) on the testing front. I will include a few short tips for the MPRE, which I thankfully took pretty early, right around when the COVID-19 pandemic started in the U.S. in March 2020, when I was a 2L (Harvard became the first school in the country to go remote on March 10, and my MPRE was March 12; I spent the last couple of in-person HLS at my favorite Langdell Library, studying away while worrying about the pandemic).

One might think that the content of the MPRE would be very intuitive — after all, it’s an exam about professional ethics, so wouldn’t you just pick the most ethical option? I was lucky to be advised by some senpai friends early in law school that the MPRE is not that intuitive/common-sensical, and they suggested actually spending time studying for it.

I think right before winter break started, I picked up the free MPRE books from the HLS campus representatives for the major bar prep companies. I spent a bit of time during winter break to skim through the relatively thin Kaplan booklet as an overview. I started to really study for the exam actually pretty shortly before it, mostly with the Barbri full review course videos, together with the practice questions within the online course. I also found a JD Advising cheatsheet document that a friend shared with me very helpful. I did 1 Barbri full-length MPRE test and scored pretty well, and identified about 6 chapters I was weaker at, then brushed up on those accordingly. I reviewed all Barbri online course practice questions (some didn’t auto-save, so I redid them and got near-perfect scores). I also checked out the Barbri MPRE maximizer and did some additional practice Qs. There wasn’t much time left at that point, so I just hard-core skimmed Kaplan and Themis’ prep books. Throughout the process, I was pretty much comfortably above the passing score for every practice I did, and was able to pass the MPRE on my first try. The above strategy was a bit overstudying for the test, so if you want to be right at the passing line, you probably don’t need to do too much work and select materials according to your personal learning style.

NYLE

I took the NYLE right after law school graduation, in early June. In retrospect, I’m not sure if that was the best decision, since the Barbri bar prep schedule started earlier than that and I was splitting my focus between the NYLE, an academic paper that I just started working on with a team of health law researchers, and clerkship applications/interviews concurrently, and didn't really focus on bar prep until a later point in the summer. The NYLE itself wasn’t too bad — it’s the state law exam for New York, and you are required to finish the NYLC (the online course they prescribe) before registering. One advice here is that if you know the date you want to take the exam, check the registration deadline for that test date and make sure to spend enough time finishing the NYLC (and the associated knowledge check questions for each module) comfortably on-time. A mistake I made there is that for some reason, I didn’t realize that the NYLC had to be completed before registration until the day before, thanks to law school finals. I was determined to take the NYLE before the Bar Exam, and sped through the NYLC without any rest or much sleep; trust me, it was NOT fun… It became stressful at one point when I kept answering a question wrong for one of the modules and had to re-watch parts of the module’s videos again and again until I got the right answers, and the clock was ticking. I ultimately signed up for the NYLE a few minutes before the deadline and was incredibly relieved.

The Bar Exam

Once I started bar prep, I kind of regretted starting it late and was constantly stressed. One factor was that I was used to over-studying and over-preparing, so this was not something I was used to. BUT bar prep was a positive learning experience overall and many of the lectures were pretty engaging/almost fun (spoiler: a professor sang passionately), as it forced me both to review black-letter law that I did learn in law school (mostly from 1L core classes like contracts, property, criminal law, civil procedure, a lot of which I forgot quite a bit, as well as electives such as evidence, corporations, etc.) and to study materials that I didn’t learn during law school (e.g. conflict of laws, trusts and estates, and the much-dreaded secured transactions, etc. :) It felt kind of like an Asian-style exam with correct answers. I won't spend much time addressing the specific subject areas in this article, as any test prep would have much greater detail and it could vary for some states, e.g. California’s essay portion. In short, even the essay portions felt a bit like they had pretty clear right answers at times, with a mark scheme resembling some of the International Baccalaureate (IB) exams I took in high school, for subjects like maths or physics. It was a bit of a surprise to me as someone who gradually became more comfortable about “living in the grey” in the world of law.

I absolutely hated playing catch-up. Barbri’s schedule is truly action-packed, including work on most weekends. I checked off some low-hanging fruits like mental preparedness videos and subject overviews pretty early and ran out of easy things to check off, but still vowed that I wanted to complete close to all of the online course content. Because of my late start, I had to calculate how many extra hours I needed per day in order to get closer to being on schedule, and tried to persevere through long hours as much as possible. This process challenges everyone to identify our personal strengths and weaknesses in learning and memorizing. For example, I personally find it easier to memorize fresh content in the morning, and sometimes also review critical content before bedtime and find it more easily digested. After all, there was a lot of content, even though some of the content was covered at some point earlier in law school. I was pretty much Barbri-ing from morning to past-sunset (which happens pretty late in the summer in my geographical area), and would try to squeeze in a bit of strolling or Zumba, eating, chatting with people, etc. I joked with people that I was binging Barbri instead of Netflix. My conversations with my boyfriend during that period (and even after the exam was done, cuz he is such a nerd lol) consisted of a lot of legal hypos and black-letter rules.

Bar prep was a pretty solitary exercise for me (partly due to the pandemic and partly because I was on the West Coast, away from most law school friends who were studying for the same exam), which helped me focus a lot, but I also missed social connections. One thing that helped, other than keeping in touch with family and friends, was having study buddies; even virtual ones help a lot in my view. I had some friends from HLS whom I often called up or texted to exchange bar strategy questions and substantive topics or issues or specific practice questions. They were encouraging and kind, and sometimes gave me the extra push to finish X task by the end of the day. I also asked a lot of senpai friends for bar advice and they were very generous and kind with specific and general tips alike. Some of the law school student organizations also sent around exam advice documents that I skimmed. It was a bit too much content at that point, as Barbri was already quite comprehensive, so I picked and chose the relevant portions of each source and saved the rest in a laptop folder just in case.

I did manage to also squeeze in a ~5-day trip in a neighboring state to see some friends. During those days, although I tried to study as much as possible, I also wanted to spend a decent amount of time with friends and do some sports/music stuff, so it was more like 4 hours of studying per day. I did study on the plane both ways and resumed studying the moment I got home and showered on an especially sweltering day. I’m grateful that I got to travel for a bit, as the trip was amazing and I got to temporarily de-stress.

I also discovered that Barbri has a service where some of the lecturers and some practicing attorneys answer individual questions students submit to the system. It’s like an IT department ticket system. Ultimately, regarding how helpful that actually was, I can’t say too much, but one caveat is that over-utilizing this feature could be counterproductive, as I might have focused a bit too much on questions that might not be the ones tested on bar exams.

I didn’t get Adaptibar, which some of my friends found extremely helpful, because of my shortened prep time, so can’t comment much here. I did use the Multistate Edge feature of Barbri, which I heard is similar to Adaptibar, and found it somewhat helpful, although I probably made a mistake by focusing too much on subjects I especially like (e.g. criminal law and torts) and didn’t spend a proportionate amount of time on subjects like property.

The actual two days of the bar exam were pretty action-packed. The schedule is pretty back-to-back. In the virtual setting, I typed frantically on my laptop for the essays, grateful that there wasn’t sounds of other frantic typers that could be distracting. There was an essay that I didn't quite finish on time — I got too excited on the first points I had and elaborated a lot on those points and didn’t quite write out every point I had in mind. I felt like I could be passing, but I also worried what would happen if I got something totally wrong. Because of the time difference with NY, it was a pretty early-morning start for me and I felt like despite trying to adjust before the exam, I was still a bit sleepy at times, especially in some afternoon multiple-choice rounds on the second day. That slowed me down a bit and made the last few questions especially rushed, even though I was doing pretty well on timing in my practice exams, and then it felt a bit like a vicious cycle of rushing and stressing over whether I got the previous question right, etc. Not sure if there’s a really good solution around that, but I agree with the general test prep tips that planning to eat and sleep well is very important. I probably should’ve planned the meals better too, as it felt weird to have a super early lunch on the West Coast on NY time.

Post-Exam

It was a relief to find out that I passed the exam. The suspense was quite something (aka brutal) and I had to routinely check the NY Bar Exam website; they talked about postponing the result release date (COVID and the on-line exam format made grading/making sure people didn’t cheat difficult in a way; heard dystopian stories like how the software tracks your eyeball movement) and eventually released it at the end of October. Because of my shortened prep timeline and the big deviation from Barbri’s official schedule, especially the first few weeks, I was not extremely confident about passing the exam. Truth be told, throughout the prep and waiting period, I kept comforting myself that very talented people like Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton failed the bar and it clearly wouldn’t be the end of the world. Not to mention Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan (if you’re thinking about the firm Quinn Emanuel, yep, that’s the Sullivan). Apparently, President JFK failed the exam twice.

Apart from the bar exam, the NYLE, and MPRE exams, NY also requires applicants to the Bar to file a bunch of application materials, such as asking every single one of your past law-related employer to fill out forms testifying that you are of good moral character. You also need to ask a couple of friends to write a few paragraphs to vouch for your good moral character (grateful for mine!). If you really hope to be done with the process asap, I suggest filing them some time shortly after finishing the Bar Exam — I didn’t realize one could start filing as early as that and personally filed everything after learning that I passed the July Bar on October 28, and it took until late-April for me to formally become an Esquire because of all the administrative process that happened in between, including the swearing-in ceremony.

Once you’re done with the admission process, you will be considered a newly-admitted attorney. There are still some obligations each year, e.g. Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credits are required each year as long as you’re an attorney. I guess it’s good to know that our profession is big on “活到老，學到老” (literal translation = learn as long as you live). As I type up this article, I’ve started doing a number of CLEs on PLI and Hot Shot.

All in all, hope you found this piece helpful! My goal was just to share my own Bar journey and also to cathartically write everything out while I still somewhat remember some level of detail. Feel free to leave any questions/comments below, or share your own experience with the Bar. :)

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported me through the Bar adventures. You know who you are.

Most importantly, good luck to all bar exam takers! Hopefully you’ll get to spend some quality vacation time before embarking on the next stage of your professional journey!