Make This Your Last Time | Bar Exam Preparation

February 6, 2026February 6, 2026 - No Comments

How a Foreign Attorney Passed New York (First Try) When MORE Practice Made Her Feel Worse

Louise did everything bar takers are told to do.

She started with a commercial bar prep program. She tried over a thousand MBE questions. She tracked her mistakes.

On paper, she was doing enough. But she felt like she was plateauing.

💬 “I’m an LLM student, and I’ve already completed over a thousand questions on AdaptiBar, but I keep stagnating around 54%. I scored 62% on a past NCBE exam, but despite that, I feel like I’m going backward.”

💬 “The more questions I do, the more lost I feel. I always take the time to review my mistakes and write down what went wrong, yet each new batch of questions seems to introduce rules I’ve never seen, and I struggle to identify them in the fact patterns.”

This sounds incredibly frustrating when you’re a foreign-trained attorney trying to make sense of American law.

💬 “I was starting from zero doctrinal familiarity. I’m a French-trained attorney and genuinely did not know American law at the outset, so everything had to be built from the ground up.”

Louise went from zero to passing the July 2025 New York UBE on her first attempt.

💬 “I just wanted to let you know that I received a passing score on every UBE section.”

January 31, 2026February 4, 2026 - No Comments

The Uncomfortable Truth That Most Bar Exam Advice Ignores

My parents were right… I voluntarily picked up the piano again, more than two decades after my last lesson.

Teaching yourself to play a piece on a piano is the epitome of meta-learning (learning how to learn).

Preparing for the bar exam is no different because all of it is actually self-study, even with a course.

Maybe this is happening: You study for weeks. Nothing seems to improve. It still feels hard. You still feel slow. You still feel anxious. You can’t shake the feeling, “This should be working, but it isn’t.”

The learning techniques I’ve been sharing with you for bar prep are what I use personally, like learning to play a piece well enough. I practice what I preach.

I’m not a genius. I’m not a prodigy. I don’t “know any songs.”

But this is what works for me to this day to teach myself anything. You too can teach yourself how to fish instead of waiting for that program to feed you.

Let me share the raw, inconvenient truth about what it means to “get good enough” at bar prep:

Why “effortless” is misleading
How to use model answers
The difference between learning and performance
When the right time to feel ready is
How to distribute your focus
Where memorization shows up
What plateaus mean
Why time away from the work is part of the work
How to deal with performance anxiety
Why play with the process
A secret but ugly source of motivation

January 30, 2026February 6, 2026 - 1 Comment

How Michelle Passed the California Bar Exam from Scratch (Years After Graduating)

Michelle wrote me randomly after passing the California Bar Exam months ago.

💬 “I woke up feeling grateful for the circumstances of my life yesterday and realized that so many of those things came to pass because I passed the CBX in Feb 2025. It was my first time in CA. I went to law school in AL and graduated in 2018. The material wasn’t fresh or familiar.”

That’s why it’s best to pass the bar exam and escape limbo as soon as you can. Opportunities and doors fling open once you have your license in hand.

Michelle passed California on her first try despite being YEARS removed from law school (outside California) and from the last bar exam she attempted.

💬 “I sat for NC July 2019, failed. We moved to CA in 2021 and I decided to sit for CA in February 2025, first attempt and passed.”

💬 “I did not go to law school in CA. It had been years since I graduated law school. It had been years since I needed to do deep study. The CA bar exam tragically low pass rate intimidated me.”

It’s possible to prepare for the bar exam from scratch. Even without a bar review course. Even with family. Even with an illness.

💬 “I had a family and young children, a chronic illness, and a mother that was going through chemotherapy.”

💬 “I used Barbri previously. I was a Barbri rep, and my course was free, but I knew that Barbri’s schedule was too overwhelming for me. I did not feel in control of my bar prep that time.”

💬 “I knew that I would need to do something different considering that I failed it in NC.”

January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 - No Comments

What Finally Helped a 64-Year-Old Retaker Pass the Minnesota UBE

I love nontraditional success stories, especially when they’re from younger or older folks.

Richard passed the 2025 July Minnesota UBE at age 64.

💬 “I passed in Minnesota. I had 7 previous attempts in Arizona and Texas, this was my first attempt in Minnesota.”

💬 “My written score went up 13 points and my MBE up 6 points, and now they call me esquire at 64 years young.”

I love nontraditional success stories because they pull the rug of expectations from under you.

Someone could look at success stories from foreign attorneys (from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Turkey, the UK, etc.), people who are 60+ years old, people who worked full-time (including a busy biglaw partner), people who went to unaccredited or no-longer-existing law schools, someone with a 9% chance of passing, someone who was in prison for 32 years, people who studied for a few weeks (or even just 1 week), people who closed 150- and 180-point gaps on the California Bar Exam while literally dying from health issues…

(You can find these actual stories on my blog.)

And they might still say, “But I’m a left-handed Capricorn with a water allergy! Aha, gotcha! I knew everything happened for a reason! You can’t just cherry pick 50 case studies!!!”

Do you want reasons it won’t work out, or reasons it could work out?

January 16, 2026January 24, 2026 - No Comments

How an Australian Lawyer Passed the Illinois UBE (After Passing in California)

I featured James in a previous case study back in 2022. He passed the California Bar Exam as an Australian lawyer back then. Then he passed the July 2025 Illinois UBE.

💬 “Brian, just a heads-up: I passed the July UBE! Thanks for all that you do.”

I didn’t even know James was taking another bar exam. What a masochist.

💬 “After passing the CA Bar exam in 2022, in late 2024 I ended up in the mid-west! Fortunately, given my decade+ experience as an attorney in Australia, I was able to become eligible to sit the Illinois Uniform Bar Exam (UBE).”

Here’s a follow-up to his 2022 case study because I run into folks taking both exams fairly often.

Whether you’re taking the UBE or the CA Bar Exam (or a masochist looking to take both at some point), James compares and contrasts his successful strategies from both exams.

He recommends tailoring your approach to each exam given the differences.

💬 “You might think that passing the UBE would be easy enough (after passing the CA Bar). However, speaking from experience I can advise that it isn’t that simple. In important ways (content tested, timing, structure and scoring), the first day of both bar exams are completely different. This means that if you don’t adapt your strategy accordingly, you could end up failing the UBE!”

💬 “I do not recommend the strategy I used to pass the California Bar be used to attempt to pass the UBE.

These differences dictate the need for a change in strategy!”