The other day I was driving my kid home when I was confronted by a dilemma that basically every driver (at least in the U.S.!) has dealt with. I was on a fairly clear stretch of road and the upcoming traffic light turned yellow. Immediate onslaught of questions. Do I have time to make it through the intersection before it turns red? Do I have time to brake before I get to the intersection? What kind of example am I setting for my kid, who will be driving sooner than I’d like to think? Why did I think about my kid driving? Now I can’t think of anything else! Where did my baby go?
In the end, the intersection was just a little too far to go, so I stopped. But it was also close enough that the stop wasn’t an easy one. Right decision? Absolutely. Will I make the same one next time? Who can say. The factors will all be different.
Bar study is a little like that. There are seven months from the end of the July exam until the February exam. But that means there are only five months from the end of the February exam until the July exam. Bar examiners usually take 6-12 weeks to finish grading bar exams, depending on the jurisdiction. If we think of those unwelcome bar results as your yellow light, they could come as little as two months before your exam. Ideally, you will think about this even before you get your results, but a lot of people understandably really don’t want to think about what will happen if they fail the bar exam. So, you’ve gotten your yellow light. What do you do?
[Read more…] about You Failed the Bar. Hit the Gas? Or Foot on the Brake?
So, the other day, my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:
I’ve talked before about 
Through our 
So, I confess. I’m a murder-mystery junkie. And when I was thinking about writing this, all I could think of was Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot telling one of his clients that she should never lie to her confessor, her hairdresser, or her private detective (expanded version of the short story The Baghdad Chest, if you’re curious – I know you have tons of time to read, right?). Well, I’m going to add to the list: never lie to your bar tutor. In fact, I’ll go further than that. You should be really, really forthcoming.
When the pandemic was causing bar examiners to push off the bar exam (over and over again), it caused a lot of problems for people who were trying to