A question that comes up sometimes is whether one should get a bar tutor. Since I have no experience with that, I had to find out how others have dealt with this issue.
On your behalf (because no one else did), I asked three people who took the bar the second time with a tutor and passed. There is a lot of great information here for those on the fence, so pay attention!
Since I usually talk too much, I’ll let L, D and E handle it from here.
You waited months. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, you slowly lost your ability to focus on anything. Blood knocking against all corners of your body. You suffered those few seconds of pure agony as you searched for your name on the pass list of truth.
You didn’t even care about celebrating. You would have spent your lifetime of luck to get this hurdle over with.
But then…nothing to show for all your damn effort…
It could’ve been anything. Maybe your proctor kept walking by with a weird cough. Maybe you were distracted by your table mate who kept snorting his nose. Maybe you were running around trying to secure lunch and got lost.
The bar shows NO mercy, NO sense. It seems like there is at least a quasi-objective determination of your aptitude, but how did they get your final score? It’s like graders sit on their toilet and give your essays whatever score they feel like (this isn’t too far from the truth actually).
But this is the game we’re playing.
It’s not your fault, but you can always make preparations to prevent it. They say prevention is the cure.
The very fact that you’re reading this shows me you are determined to change things around. If so, read on to see how you can reposition your inner mindset today for success next time.
If you’re going to pretend that reading this and going “yeah, that’s what I should do” before forgetting everything I said will miraculously change anything, then please get off my site and go back to Upworthy to continue slacktivism there.
Read on if you are retaking the bar and want to learn how to tweak your attitude before getting back into the game.
Essays: Get the “I” and “R” right, and the rest should flow relatively naturally. So these “I” and “R” would be good place to focus on throughout your essay preparation.
Even if you had just a few weeks to prepare for the bar, there’s still time to learn the “A” part of IRAC—applying the rules. Once you learn how to work facts into your answer, you may not need to practice the “A” part as repetitively as you would for issue checking and rule recitation or memorization.
I’ll demonstrate a simple and clean rule application, based on this question I got:
I was browsing the July 2014 CBX topic at top-law-schools dot com slash forums. It’s what I do as I look around my room deciding where to put the portrait of myself holding my own portrait. Of course, I never end up hanging it anywhere because it’s the journey, not the destination.
But then I came across these little . . . nuggets.