For foreign-trained attorneys, the keys to success on the New York bar exam are setting aside the time to prepare for the exam, understanding the nature of the exam, and ruthlessly prioritizing and strategizing.
The New York bar exam is challenging. In July 2007, the pass rate for first-time takers who had graduated from ABA-approved law schools in New York State was 88.2 per cent, an all-time high. The pass rate for first-time takers who qualified to take the New York bar based on foreign legal credentials was 46 per cent. Studying for the exam while working is inadvisable. Not taking a full bar-review course like BarBri or Pieper virtually guarantees failure.
Here are five tips for success.
1. Recognize that the New York bar exam has a limited objective. It tests whether lawyers know basic law and possess basic analytic skills. Its first aim is to provide evidence that, faced with novel factual situations, candidates can apply legal principles quickly and in the way a practicing lawyer might. The New York bar exam is not a test of legal talent or general background. It is a licensing exam for legal practitioners.
2. The greatest challenge of the New York bar exam is not the huge amount of material to learn, although the exam does test on 23 subjects, the greatest challenge is that the time for actually writing each segment of the exam, the time in the exam room for demonstrating that one knows the law, is so short. This is especially hard on foreign-trained attorneys whose first language is not English. Because all the basic rules of law must be top-of-mind during the exam, and because there is so much law to learn, the best tactic is memorizing as many of the most-tested basic legal principles as possible.
3. The New York Day of the New York Bar Exam. Tuesday is the New York day. It features 50 New York multiple-choice questions, five essays, and one Multistate Performance Test (MPT) task. No one can master the 23 subjects tested. Ruthless prioritizing is necessary to learn the key rules from those subjects. The subjects are as follows:
1) Contracts,
2) Constitutional Law,
3) Criminal Law,
4) Evidence,
5) Real Property,
6) Torts,
7) No-fault Insurance,
8) Corporations,
9) Partnership,
10) Conflict of Laws,
11) New York Constitutional Law,
12) Criminal Procedure,
13) Family Law,
14) Remedies,
15) New York Civil Jurisdiction and Procedure,
16) Federal Civil Jurisdiction and Procedure,
17) Professional Responsibility,
18) Trusts,
19) Wills and Estates,
20) Workers Compensation,
21) UCC Article 2, Sales of Goods,
22) UCC Article 3, Negotiable Instruments, and
23) UCC Article 9, Secured Transactions.
Using the tight time limits on the exam strategically requires practice, but those time limits can in fact help bar candidates by giving structure to their work products. See Mary Campbell Gallagher, "How to Manage Time on the New York Day of the New York Bar Exam." My teaching assistants use a stopwatch to train bar candidates to write five and six-minute paragraphs. Bar candidates who can write a paragraph in five or six minutes can also learn to write a five-paragraph essay in 30 minutes. They can learn to read and outline a question in 15 minutes. That's what it takes to manage the time on the New York essays.
4. The Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). The MBE, developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, is administered on Wednesday. It consists of 200 multiple-choice questions, and it takes six hours. The subjects tested on the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) are Contracts, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Evidence, Real Property, and Torts.
Again, prioritizing and strategizing are key. The topics students usually want to spend the most time studying are the things they have trouble with, like third-party beneficiaries. Often, however, those topics are not intensively tested. The right strategy is to focus ruthlessly on learning the most heavily-tested rules of law. The areas I recommend concentrating on for the MBE include contract formation, negligence, exceptions to hearsay, and witness impeachment.
5. The Multistate Performance Test (MPT). Like the MBE, the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) comes from the National Conference of Bar Examiners. It is administered in New York as part of the New York day, on Tuesday. This test is designed to test bar candidates on their ability to perform an ordinary law office task in accordance with a supervising attorney's written directions. In addition to the memo from the supervising attorney that describes the assignment, the test materials include both a File, which is a set of papers such as transcripts of client interviews that might be found in a law office, and a Library of cases and other legal materials.
Time is one challenge. None of us who has practiced law has ever done what the MPT requires and completed a memorandum, including both research and writing, in 90 minutes. The key is to follow the supervising attorney's instructions meticulously and to divide the task into time-limited sections. The strategy I suggest is to spend 30 minutes analyzing the supervising attorney's instructions and reading briskly through the File and Library materials, briefly noting useful material. Then to divide the writing task into time-limited sections, and to spend 60 minutes writing, making sure to hit every issue the supervising attorney assigned. Foreign-trained attorneys should familiarize themselves with American law office formats, especially those for briefs and memos, before the exam.
Foreign-trained attorneys can succeed on the New York bar exam. They need to set aside two months to prepare for the exam, they need to understand the nature of the exam, and they need to prioritize and strategize.
Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D., President,
BarWrite® and BarWrite Press
http://www.BarWrite.com
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