Imagine: You’re 20 years out of law school. You’re barely getting half the questions right. You don’t even know American law.
💬 “I have never studied in the US or had any experience with the American legal system (England and Singapore are both common law jurisdictions). So, I knew that before I even started to learn the BLL, I needed to study the exam itself. To me, the bar exam was a game and to play the game well, I needed to know the rules of the game.
This meant starting my bar prep from scratch.”
Lesley graduated from law school in Singapore in 2005. Then she decided to take the February 2025 California Bar Exam and pass on her first attempt.
💬 “I am a first-time taker, foreign attorney applicant (English law and Singapore law qualified). I’m 43 years old and graduated from law school in 2005, so exactly 20 years ago!”
She has never seen a July exam and never will.
How many times do I have to say that bar prep is a learnable, acquirable skill?
How many times do I have to prove that you can pass the bar exam—even if you’re a foreign-trained attorney, 60+ years old, or a left-handed rising water moon sign.
Before I dive into her methods, let’s take a moment to thank Lesley because she sent me a five-page write-up for me to break down just for you.
First lesson: How you do anything is how you do everything. Following through and paying it forward are behaviors of a successful person.
(Yes, I expect a juicy story in my inbox after you pass.)
💬 “In the end, I had to remind myself that I was in my own race and that I had tried my best. And regardless of the outcome, I could be proud of the effort I put in.”
Resources Lesley used to pass the California Bar Exam after 20 years
💬 “My regret was that I didn’t buy Magic sheets and Approsheets earlier, so that I could completely familiarize myself with them! But in the end, they came through and I used them to focus on the California subjects. Glad to be able to put this exam behind me!!”
💬 “Passer’s Playbook was incredibly helpful because it distilled the information I needed as to how to approach the exam. Why reinvent the wheel when the work’s already been done for you?”
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Quimbee
Smart Bar Prep outlines
Mary Basick’s Essay Exam Writing for the California Bar Exam
BarMD Performance Test course
Your desire to get one good result after another causes you to start looking for shortcuts. You become impatient.
Lesley took the counter approach of patience.
💬 “I was going to Shawshank myself and start chipping away at my tunnel to a California bar license one spoon at a time!”
This doesn’t mean it was all sunshine and unicorns and grassy hills for her.
💬 “My scores started at 40% and gradually trended upwards. There wasn’t a massive jump which, to be honest, did frustrate me especially since I knew I was putting in the effort.”
In fact, she was getting scores below 30% at one point.
💬 “I did a mock exam on Adaptibar this morning and clearly, my civil procedure needs work! The thing is that I’ve really been studying the subject and whilst I know it isn’t my strongest, it’s also a bit of a shock to be getting 29%!”
What do you do to overcome this hurdle?
Trust the right process
“Trust the process.”
What process is this?
Consider “trusting the right process” and “trusting yourself.” Tailor the process to your needs and style. The right process for you is whichever one helps you understand and retain the material and answer questions correctly.
💬 “I had originally considered signing up for Barbri but after considering the costs, and from reading your website about being the dean of your own studies and how big bar prep wasn’t necessarily the answer, I decided against it. Whilst Barbri might work for a lot of people, given my limited background in California law, I needed something more tailored to my personal circumstances. After all, who’s going to know the best way for me to study, other than me!”
The flip side of this is that you’re responsible for everything you do. But you’re responsible for your studies regardless of the approach you follow.
Bar prep is still a self-study endeavor at the end of the day. The resources are simply there to support that.
If it’s going to be that way, why not use a bespoke study plan that’s tailored to your situation?
Make your own study schedule
Part of being the dean of your studies is that you make your own curriculum. You can design your own study plan and study schedule based on your own timeline.
Lesley resonated with this sort of conscious approach to preparation.
💬 “The Singaporean education system is predicated on the idea that there is a strategic way to study. When I came across your website and saw that you advocated studying smart for the bar exam, this made a lot of sense to me. I downloaded the Passer’s Playbook first, because I wanted a roadmap to the exam and I wanted to look at some examples of study schedules. I took inspiration from a few to suit my own study patterns and timelines.”
Here’s what I wrote to someone recently:
(Lots more on this here.)
Starting from 40%
Lesley had to start from square one.
💬 “Because I wasn’t familiar with federal or Californian state law, I needed to learn the BLL. I used Mary Basick’s book for this.”
That included setting aside her 20 years of experience and taking on the role of a beginner.
💬 “I also had to unlearn certain things – I’m a corporate attorney by practice, and some of the Contracts model essay answers or MBE answers would not be how I would advise my clients in reality. I had to put all that out of my head and tell myself not to wear my practicing attorney hat, but my bar exam taker hat.”
You’d think practicing attorneys have an advantage over newer law grads, but the bar exam is a separate skill from real-life practice. Attorneys who refuse to adapt because they insist on doing things their way because it’s “right” often find themselves repeating the exam.
So take a cue from their folly. Don’t write like a lawyer. Write like a bar taker.
To learn the material, she created her own notes by retyping what was already written. One subject at a time.
💬 “I did a rolling pattern of study. So for example, I would read a few sections of the book at a time, and then type out the text verbatim into a Word document. At the end of each chapter, I would basically just have a word document of that entire subject. I found that typing out the text helped me with memorizing, and it was also easier for studying because I could just take my Civ Pro notes with me instead of the entire textbook.”
This is a frictionless way to introduce yourself to the materials, like dipping your feet into the warm, shallow end of the pool.
The issue with a lot of new bar takers is that they stay in the warm end of the pool.
MBE
Lesley knew she had to jump into the cold water at the deep end of the pool, swimming back and forth for each subject.
💬 “Once I was done with Civ Pro, I plunged straight into the questions on Adaptibar. I’ve always prepared for exams by actually working on questions, instead of just trying to memorize. Meanwhile, I would start studying the next subject (Crim) whilst continuing to work on Civ Pro MBE questions on Adaptibar.”
Of course, it’s never smooth sailing. You’re sure to run into other people cutting into your lane, splashing water into your eyes, and creating suspiciously warm spots you want to avoid.
💬 “I then hit my next stumbling block, which is when I realized that the MBE questions tested nuances, which weren’t covered in the Basick book. For each question on Adaptibar, whether I got them right or wrong (and there were A TON I got wrong), I made sure I understood the explanation.”
You could do a ton of work but end up spinning your wheels. The act of practicing with a question isn’t done until you review your work. Understand where you went right and wrong.
And if you can’t understand something during this process, get scrappy.
💬 “My advice would be that if you don’t understand a topic and the answers on Adaptibar/Basick/whatever resource you have don’t make sense, just google. Keep googling until you find a source, article, YouTube video, TikTok (ok maybe not TikTok) that explains it in a way that clicks for you.”
Perfection doesn’t build you
You need a willingness to fail. I know it hurts to be wrong. But it hurts more to fail the bar exam.
💬 “The hardest part for me was getting the same questions wrong. For those, I kept referring back to my notes and hammering them until the explanations really sank in.”
Don’t let your ego stop you from facing the difficult emotions and troubleshooting your work. If you don’t patch up the holes in your hot air balloon, it’s not going to float.
Essays
I hated essays when studying for the bar. In fact, I don’t know any sickos who actually like writing essays.
Unlike multiple choice, you have to know the pain of creation when writing an essay. You have to identify the issues and recall the rules.
You don’t have to like essays, but you don’t have to suffer either. You can learn from square zero if you need to.
💬 “I had no clue what IRAC was, I didn’t know what a PT was and how one would look like.”
It comes down to seeing how fact patterns get resolved, over and over. You develop an intuition of the corresponding issue patterns, and learn what the important rules are because you see them more often.
💬 “I outlined about 100 essays altogether by the end of bar prep, by grouping subjects together.”
Which then becomes second nature even if you’re panicking on the exam.
💬 “I found that when I was doing the essays on the exam, I was in such a panic that I ran on autopilot.”
Memorizing
You still have to memorize the issues and rules for things to become second nature.
You’ll be using different ways to memorize. Rote memorization is one method you’ll have to use.
💬 “So I would have to say, drill down on the rules and have them in a form you can remember. I would spend 2 hours each night just writing out the rules from memory. At the end of the day my brain would be so fried from studying that I couldn’t absorb new stuff, so evenings were a good time for me to just write the rules reflexively because I wasn’t trying to learn new things.”
Most people are asking about how to memorize FIRST. But notice that she left this kind of busy work for the END of her day. This way you can consolidate what you worked on earlier in the day.
All of this prep came through for her even when the subject she hated appeared on the exam! This will probably happen for you too if you try to hope for or predict subjects.
💬 “The only subject I didn’t really practice essays for was Property, because I hated the subject and since it had appeared in July 2025, I assumed it wouldn’t appear again. Ha! When I saw the essay in the exam, my heart sank a little. But then I reminded myself that meant that the rest of the questions would be ones I had practiced rigorously for.”
A state of mind conducive to the ultimate goal of passing the bar exam
Your mind is the most powerful weapon you’ll have in this quest. Lesley found that taking care of this weapon let her use it to its fullest potential.
💬 “My partner would also insist that we take daily study breaks, where we would just walk around the neighborhood for 30 minutes to get some fresh air. At first, I resisted, because that was 30 minutes away from my bar prep! But those walks acted as a brain reset and allowed me to stretch after sitting for hours. I found that I could concentrate much better after the daily walk.”
💬 “To me, confidence was the most important and I would advocate doing anything you can to instill the belief that you got this. Don’t go into the exam feeling defeated. Anxiety is normal, but I would tell myself that I was pissed off with being anxious and I told myself to channel that anger into beating the exam.”
That’s how Lesley’s patience and steady improvement paid off—going from 40% to passing—even through technical difficulties and fake questions that plagued California bar takers in February.
But it’s the fact that you did your best regardless of the outcome. Your best now is enough even if your future best will be better.
💬 “Finally, I stayed off the bar exam social media groups (like Reddit or Facebook) a week before the exam. Reading about what other people were or weren’t doing, or how crap the exam was going to be, just made me more anxious. In the end, I had to remind myself that I was in my own race and that I had tried my best. And regardless of the outcome, I could be proud of the effort I put in.”
