Member-only story
Failing the Bar Exam
It’s been 23 years and it still hurts
I’ve been practicing law since 1999, but twenty three years ago, it wasn’t clear that I’d ever become an attorney. It’s painful for me to even write about this.
I took the bar in July of 1998. It was like the SAT on sextuple steroids. If the scholastic aptitude test is half a day of testing, the California bar exam is three days of essays and multiple choice. With trick-questions deliberately meant to keep people out of the profession.
Back in the 90s, bar results came out around Thanksgiving. I borrowed my friend’s America Online account to access the world wide web and clicked on the state bar’s webpage the day that results were set to be “released.” I think official results were posted at 5:00 p.m. on the day before Thanksgiving. At 5:00, and three seconds after 5:00, I refreshed the page, unsure if the full list had been properly uploaded. My name didn’t come up after thirty refreshes. I reluctantly confirmed my failure with a classmate that had passed (using my mom’s landline to make the toll-call to my successful classmate). It was an uncomfortable phone call to say the least. I was devastated.
A few friends called to ask if I had passed and I had to announce my failure over and over again. I don’t even remember Thanksgiving that year. I’m sure that I felt like a failure and probably…
