Look, ma! I’m a real lawyer!

Years of intense studying and grueling tests paid off today, as I represented my first client in court! Well, almost. Let me rephrase: Years of intense studying and grueling tests paid off today, as I went down to the local clerk’s office with one task in mind: try to get my mom out of a traffic ticket! Here’s how it all went down.

Apparently, back in June, my mom got a traffic ticket for turning in the wrong direction at the wrong time. My first knowledge of this occurred yesterday morning, when my dad told me I would be representing my mom. My reaction? SHOCK AND PANIC. I know I graduated from a Big Ticket law school, and I know I passed the bar, and I know I took a little oath and was sworn in, but I’m not a real lawyer… I mean, I know there’s a bar card in my pocket with an official P-number and everything, but, come on, me? Defending a traffic ticket? They never taught us how to do that at Georgetown! I learned about due process and equal protection and theories of punishment and the legal frontier that is Cyberspace! I never learned how to drive down to the courthouse and file an appearance – I don’t even know what an “appearance” is, let alone how to file one, or what filing one actually signifies! I don’t know how to argue a traffic ticket!

But my dad told me I had to file an appearance – and not knowing anything about a subject has never stopped me before. I was worried that the clerks would be surly and gruff like the ones at the D.C. court, but these two clerks were actually quite pleasant. They looked to be in their 50s and 60s, and had a very motherly air about them. So I did what I always do when I don’t know how to do something: I played the Naiveté Card.

“Can I help you?” a clerk asked when she saw me wandering around aimlessly.
“Uh, yes. I am here to” – I paused to recall the exact words my father told me – “file an appearance for my client.” I smiled, pleased with myself for remembering all those words.
“Oh, okay.”
At this point, I realized that I had no idea what came next. I decided it was time to come clean.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m not really sure what to do. This is my first case ever since I passed the bar.”
The two women smiled. The bailiff, hanging around near the filing cabinets, applauded. “Congratulations!” they all said.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” I said. I decided to come even more clean. “And, actually, the client… is my mother.”
They laughed, and the bailiff said, “I hope you got paid up front!”
“Actually, she’s taking me to Panera.” I am in love with Panera iced chai teas. It’s a good deal.
So the clerks, seeing that I was new, led me through the whole process. They gave me the right forms and walked me through everything and that was that. I didn’t even need to show them my license or bar card. And there’s more:
“Are you interested in doing some criminal defense work?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Would you like to be added to the court-appointed attorneys list?”
“Absolutely!”
She handed me a notepad. “Just write a love letter to the judge, and I’ll make sure he puts you on the list.”
Wow! Visions of me arguing forcefully before a jury danced in my head. For the first time, it sunk in that maybe I really am a real lawyer – or at least, I could be if I wanted to. (I decided to hold off on the “love letter” because I’m not sure when I’ll be in Michigan again, and I would hate to get a letter telling me to appear in court two weeks from now on Tuesday, when two weeks from now on Tuesday I’ll be rehearsing with the Choral Arts Society of Washington at the church by my apartment in DC!)
I finished filling out the form letting me “file” the “appearance,” thanked them for their help, and walked out the door to my mommy’s waiting car. I still didn’t know what an appearance was, but I had just filed one! I am a real attorney! Time to buy a new suit.

Epilogue: According to my dad, “filing an appearance” means just what it sounds like. If someone wants to hire a lawyer to contest a traffic ticket, the lawyer goes down to the court and signs a form stating that he is representing his client in the matter. As I understand it, this simple act of showing up at the clerk’s office is the appearance, and filling out the form is “filing” part. Thus, “filing an appearance.” Now, the clerk gives me whatever paperwork there is on the ticket, and a pre-hearing date will be scheduled for sometime next month where I can meet with a city attorney to discuss this little matter of turning left during rush hour. Come on, 3 points? Really? For my mom, who is so nice and sweet and has a perfectly clean driving record? Surely we can work out a deal. Maybe instead of “improper turn” for 3 points, we can knock it down to “impeding traffic” for 1 point. Eh? Eh? Sound good? Whaddya say?

(Oh, also according to my dad, if you tell the clerks you are representing a family member, they always say they hope you got paid up front!)

This lawyering stuff ain’t so hard once you get the hang of it. But I still don’t see why they didn’t teach me any of this in school. Sure, studying constitutional history is fun and all, but it doesn't actually lead to many practical skills.....

Fast Facts About My Bar Exam Study Habits

A good friend sent me a brief note the other day indicating his frustration with bar review: "Bar studying is tedious. I missed a couple of lectures and I made one of them up today... 4 hours of evidence, what a drag."

I sent him a reassuring note, which I think will be helpful to others in his situation:

• I skipped the last hour of almost every Bar/Bri lecture.
• During the first 5 weeks, I skipped perhaps 1/6 lectures in their entirety and did not make any up.
• I skipped the entire last week of class.
• I overslept on the day of the practice MBE.
• I never did any of the "practice" essays to send to BarBri for scoring.
• I did MAYBE 20 practice MBE questions per day, and that was on a good day.
• I often did the MBE questions while recumbent biking at the gym. I think that conditioned my brain to be able to concentrate under physical pressure. Made testing day seem like a peaceful beach in comparison.
• I split the rest of my time between class, skimming the short outlines (didn't read the long outlines), and watching TV.
• Didn't even attempt the essays until about 3 weeks before the test, once I had a basic grounding of knowledge.
• Oh, and I always TOTALLY BOMBED them in practice. Missed half the things they talked about in the Perfect Essay samples.

• On the MBE, I passed by 11 points, almost "multistating out."
• On the essays, I ended up getting two perfect 10s, a 9 and four 8s.
• I passed with flying colors.

In other words: You'll be fine.

I am Officially* an Attorney!

A photo of me and my family just after the swearing-in ceremony, originally uploaded by CaseWriter21.

A long journey has finally come to a close.

"Or is it just the beginning?"
Who the hell is that?
"This is your Narrator."
We're not in Stranger than Fiction, I am not Will Ferrell, and I can narrate for myself just fine, thank you.
(poof)

Sorry. Anyway, what I mean is that my long formal educational journey -- which began with my first day of kindergarten and continued all the way through college and law school -- is finally done. On Thursday I went to my Swearing-In, which is the surest sign yet that my passing the bar was NOT a mistake, my successful character and fitness evaluation was NOT mistaken, my actually doing okay at Georgetown was NOT just a dream, etc. The swearing-in is kind of like high school graduation. Your family is there, and people give speeches and talk about how much Good you can do in the world.

There are some differences though:
1. I didn't have to take an oath to graduate from high school, and
2. I didn't have to wear a green cape and silly tassels this time. (Picture forthcoming.)

The oath was actually pretty neat. It was the first set of vows (professional or otherwise) I have ever taken in my life. It was actually somewhat uplifting, in that the words reminded me that lawyers are *supposed* to only do good for society, represent people in need for free, not mislead the court, etc. (Nevermind that these standards are rarely lived up to; it was a nice sentiment.) The only bad part about having to take an oath is that I had to hold my right hand up for two minutes! And, Star Trek Nerd that I am, it took all my willpower to not break out into the V-shaped Vulcan salute. I seriously wanted to (doing the Vulcan salute is far more natural to me than just holding my hand up straight). However, in the name of justice and looking professional and not wanting to be laughed at, I didn't. Plus, I wasn't sure if the Vulcan salute would invalidate the oath, or something. Don't want to take any chances when I'm so close to the finish line!

One of the best parts of the day is that my dad got to motion the court to admit me to the bar. It's a ceremonial thing, just a formality, and if you don't have a family member in the Michigan bar, someone will make a mass-motion for you. But it was still very neat, and my dad did a wonderul job making a short speech with only about three minutes' notice. Go dad! (Video included here.)

After the ceremony, we all went to the casino, where everyone (me, dad, mom, liz) left ahead! My vehicle for lucre was the blackjack tables; everyone else used the slots (which I refuse to use because a monkey can do it, and I am better than a monkey). After the casino, we had an amazing steak dinner at the Coach Insignia, which is the fancy-schmancy restaurant at the top of the RenCen in Detroit.

All in all, it was a great day. And now, I am officially* able to represent YOU when you slip and fall!** Hooray!


* Well, not officially. I still have to pay my bar membership dues. THEN I can represent you.
** As long as the accident occurred in Michigan.

I passed the bar exam!!!

By now, most of the three people who read my blog know that I, Matthew S. [Last Name Removed for Google Reasons], passed the February 2007 Michigan Bar Exam! I was one of the lucky ones who passed it on my Very First Try, and I am, frankly, quite shocked about that. You see, the bar exam was hard as hell. It was literally The Most Difficult Test I have ever taken, in my entire life. It was harder than law school exams, by far, because with exams you have the opportunity to study for one particular topic all semester, cram, take the test, and promptly forget what you learned to make room for the next topic. Oh, plus you generally get to use your notes. (Yeah, law school exams are mostly open book.) More importantly, in most instances, you actually took the course you are studying for. NONE of this necessarily applies to the bar exam.

You have to study for everything at once. You start studying two months beforehand. There are so many topics, you have just a few days to focus on each. Everything might be fresh in your mind while you're actually studying it, and maybe even while you're studying the next topic, but several weeks later? You have to review just to keep things fresh -- and by the time you review, you have already forgotten several of details. Everything has to be memorized -- mnemonic devices become your best friend. And, oh yeah by the way, you're going to have to learn several important topics (sales, wills and trusts, worker's compensation and no-fault law, etc.) that you never actually studied in law school. You see, law students mostly take courses that appeal to them. I took several courses in communications law, because that is the kind of law I want to practice. Communications law is NOT tested on the bar. Yet law students forego courses on tested bar subjects, with the throwaway line, "I'll learn it for the bar." It is extremely difficult to learn a new topic, from scratch, in the span of just a few days -- and that is really all the time you have to focus on any given topic.

You have to do everything -- review, relearn and memorize everything you studied several years ago in law school; as well as learn the fundamentals and crucial details and exceptions of topics which you have never studied before -- in the span of approximately two months.

Oh, another thing: No one knows exactly how to study. What is the best way to learn things? Should you read the BarBri outline? Make your own? Make flashcards? How about practice problems? Should you spend your time on multiple-choiced Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) questions, or on state-specific essay questions? How long will you spend on each? Which topics should you focus on? There are NO right answers to this. You just devise a plan of action, and stick to it, and hope that it pays off.

It is a singular task, one unlike any other (except, possibly, the analogous test in other professions -- passing the medical boards, for instance). No one is fully prepared for the amount of studying that awaits them, and no one is fully prepared upon walking into the cavernous testing room. It is impossible to know everything. You just hope that you know enough. You don't know how much is enough. You study 12 hours a day as the exam approaches. And when the Big Day comes, you just try to do the best you can.

The test is designed to make you feel as stupid as possible. The MBE consists of 200 questions, the kind of question that might be known as a "story problem" to elementary schoolers. They give you a scenario -- a few sentences or paragraphs describing a recent encounter someone had with the police, a bit of evidence that an attorney wants to get in at trial, a property transfer gone awry -- and they ask you a question about it. Was the impromptu police investigation constitutional? Can the evidence legally be admitted? Who owns the property? You have three hours to do 100 questions. Break for lunch. Repeat. That's 1.8 minutes per question, on average. Some people finish an hour early, and walk out with a smug look on their face while the rest of us are sweating. Some of us take every last second to re-read and consider the problems. It's usually pretty easy to narrow it down to two possible answers, but choosing between those is usually a coin toss. That's why you only need to get 135 correct out of 200 to pass the MBE -- the examiners know it's hard, and they don't require anywhere near perfection. A "D" will do.

The essay questions are even worse. You have to remember every rule, every test, every crime, every element, and every exception -- whether or not you ever took the course. Of course, you don't have to remember everything, and it is truly impossible. But you have to study everything, and hope that you can remember enough to score 100 points out of a possible 150. Every state does it differently, but in Michigan, there are 15 questions, each worth 10 points. You can handwrite them or you can type them. On a typewriter. I chose to type, and was relegated to a room with 17 other intrepid typers, some of them trying to figure out how to put in their correct tape. (Maybe Michigan will one day join the ranks of states that actually offer their essays on computer.)

The point is, this was a hard goddamn test, and I was positive I had failed. After the first day -- essays -- a friend asked what I plan to do after the bar exam. My response? "Start studying for the July bar." All I could remember from the day were the three essays I completely bombed. I knew I had done okay on the other essays, but I also knew that in order to make up for the three below-average essays, I would have to have at least three above-average essays too -- maybe even get a perfect score on one. Ha! That was impossible! Confident that I had failed the essays, I knew I had to score a 150 on the MBE, which in Michigan means you "multistate out," and the examiners won't even score your essays. The MBE score is scaled (to correct for questions that are unreasonably hard and most people get wrong), so I could conceivably get, say, a 130 raw and maybe have it scaled up to 150. But I knew the odds of my doing that well on the MBE were abysmal, considering I had never scored that highly in practice tests.

So you can imagine my surprise when I learned, early this week, that I had passed! The scores were sent to my uncle's house, which was the address I had registered with the state bar (mail sent to my home in Michigan would almost certainly get lost). He read me the letter over the phone. "Are you kidding me?" I asked when he told me I passed. "You're serious?? I passed???!" I then had him fax me the letter right away, so I could see the scores. I couldn't believe my eyes: I had scored a 146 scaled on the MBE, and a 106 on the essays -- including two perfect essay scores! Übernerd that I am, I arranged the essay topics in a chart, highest to lowest score, and included the grade I received in that class to see if there was any correlation. I present the results below:



As you can see, there was no correlation between how I did on the essays, and how I did in the law school class -- or whether I even took the class. I got perfect scores in CivPro and Worker's Comp, despite my only scraping by with a B+ on an open-book CivPro exam, and never even taking Worker's Comp. Looking back on it, I'm not surprised I scored 8s and 9s in Crim and ConLaw, considering I took several related courses dealing with those topics, and details must have seeped in over the years. But an 8 in Sales? 7 and 8 in Wills and Trusts? I never took those courses! And I never thought I'd do better in those courses than in Corporations and Contracts, courses I actually took and did okay in.

So then it is clear that BarBri works. For the uninitiated, BarBri is the bar prep course that 9 out of 10 law students sign up for. It costs over $2,000 and entails sitting in front of a videotaped lecture for three to four hours a day for about six weeks. Yes, videotape. Apparently one class in the state gets live professors, and the rest of us have to make due with their virtual counterpart. Some of the professors were energetic and hilarious, some were just very good teachers, and some were so God-awfully boring. Truth be told, my BarBri class attendance and study habits were very similar to my law school habits: I generally skipped the last hour of the videotapes ("Enough is enough!"), and I didn't even go to the last week of classes. Instead, I stayed in the library and focused on the topics I thought needed the most reviewing.

And BarBri publishes their suggested study schedule -- a certain number of questions and essays and outline reading per day -- but I never stuck to that. There were long topic outlines (sometimes 80 pages single spaced), and short outlines (less than half that length). I usually did far less homework than was suggested, did very few essay problems, and I don't think I ever read any of the long outlines.

Here's another questionable thing I did -- err, didn't do: I never actually sat down and did a full practice bar exam. I never did 200 MBE questions in one day; the most I could ever manage to do was 100 in three hours, and then I spent the rest of the day going over the answers. I even skipped the BarBri class day where we were supposed to sit there for 6 hours and take a simulated 200-question test. (I was exhausted because I hadn't gotten any sleep, and I rationalized that this diagnostic test would serve absolutely no purpose because I would do far worse than during the actual exam day, when I would be well-rested.) I knew that I should take a full practice test, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I figured I'd get more out of reading outlines and trying to understand general concepts than I would out of playing a few six-hour games of "Let's Stump Matt."

Most of my friends and family weren't concerned about my passing, and considered it more of a given than anything else. But they didn't know about my sordid BarBri experience, and so you can see why I was already planning new study strategies for the next go-around, and why I was extremely surprised that I passed on the first try. (In case you're interested, my new plan was to do 100 MBE questions a day, every day, as opposed to the 10-20 questions per day I did the first time.) I was so convinced I had failed, that it wasn't even a huge load-off when I found out I passed. Had I been banking on passing, and hoping with all my might that I passed, then hearing the results of that letter would have been SO AWESOME! But, as it was, the results were only a very pleasant surprise. Don't get me wrong; I'm very glad I passed. But my hopes weren't riding on it. Mentally, I had been very prepared to start studying again.

That said, I'm glad I don't have to! I will return to Michigan this week, and on Thursday be sworn in. Then the DC bar waiver process can commence. Next stop: Finding a job.

Acceptance?

I am standing here in the lobby of the Kellogg Center on the campus of Michigan State University. My initial trepidation at being surrounded by thousands of green-and-white-clad Spartans has faded, as I realize that I am mostly barricaded from them inside this fine Center.

As the test nears -- it's 9 am tomorrow -- I now feel a sense of calm. I earlier felt a sense of dread, but that was only because I was trying to remember everything, and as the test date approached, I realized that was impossible. Now, however, I have accepted that I will not know everything, I CANNOT know everything, and there is a high likelihood that I will have to do this again in July.

I'm not too horrified at the prospect. I don't have a job lined up yet, so nothing is really riding on this other than a few hundred dollars more fees. I know that in some way I am purposely trying to downplay the importance of the test so that I don't totally freak out, but I also know that I *don't* know important fundamentals of courses I never took. I also know that I am still shaky on elements of torts, or some crimes, that by this point should be down cold.

Don't get me wrong; I have studied my ass off in the past two months. Perhaps I have studied HARD instead of studying SMART. In any case, we'll know in a few months how I did. For the next few days, I will awake and proceed with confidence combined with the knowledge that even the worst is not THAT bad.

Conviser

Matt is sitting at Starbucks, reading through his indecipherable property outline in the "Barbri -- Conviser Mini Review" book. Man comes up to him.

Man: Just out of curiosity, what is Conviser?
Matt (excited because I just looked it up last week because I had the same question): Richard Conviser is the president of Barbri. I think he wrote the review.
Man: Oh. I wasn't sure. I thought conviser was about giving advice to cons.

Not quite, but wouldn't that be an appropriate title for a book of legal outlines!

Gah!!!

The grandchildren's interest can be best described as... D) Nothing??! Rule against perpetuities?? Wha??? But grandfather said he wanted the life estate to his daughter and the remainder to his grandchildren once they reach the age of 25! And his grandchildren are alll alive right now, so how coiuld the..... Oh no you are NOT serious....... Well yes I know in theory his daughter could have more kids but...... So you're saying that because the remainder might vest in theoretical grand kids more than 21 years from now, his current grandkids are screwed?????

Damn tricky law
MBE stands for Matt Be Educated