Working While Studying for the Bar Exam

I know a lot of people out there want some advice about how to study for and pass the bar exam while they are working.

So, I got in touch with one of my friends who was working full-time as an attorney in one state while she was studying for the New York bar exam.

She was nice enough to prepare a quick summary of how she did it.

Here are her thoughts:

I signed up for the July New York bar exam. I was working at least 40 hours per week. I was not willing to give up every single weekend I had to study for the exam, so I started studying early, in February.

I did not have a fixed schedule until the very end. I just knew that I needed to maintain a steady pace and spend every moment studying where I wasn’t working or didn’t have plans to do something else. Time not scheduled was spent studying.

I had access to New York bar prep materials from someone who had taken the exam two periods prior to mine. He provided me all of the books as well as his outlines.

I started by creating all of my own outlines from scratch. I used my friend’s outlines and the bar prep course outlines and consolidated the information from both to create my own outlines. I found this very important, to create my own rather than just read someone else’s work. I would do practice exams for each subject as I finished each outline.

Once I finished the outlines, I then hand-wrote all of my own flashcards. I also found this very important, as it re-emphasized all of the things I just put in my outline.

I also had access to my first bar exam study buddy. She knew how to go through the flashcards with me. Two weekends before the exam, she sat with me for the entire weekend and we went through every single subject twice, which is what we did prior to the first bar exam.

For each of the weekends during the month before the exam, I took all day multiple choice practice tests, to make sure I remembered what it was like to sit there for all those hours. I did this at the library so I could concentrate.

I only took off 3 days before the exam, I think. Thursday, Friday, and Monday. I couldn’t let people at work know what I was doing and I was already taking off the whole week of the exam itself.

So for me, I think the keys to my success were:

1. Having access to commercial bar prep materials in the state I was taking the exam

2. Starting early, which allowed me to still live my life

3. Creating my own outlines and flashcards

***

I hope you found this summary useful, especially because it was created by someone who has actually studied for the bar exam while working.

Clearly, if you want to / need to work while you are studying for the bar exam, it requires dedication and focus to get enough studying time in.

But, what I think was really important is that my friend started studying five months before the bar exam so that she could still have a somewhat normal life while at the same time working and studying. Without at least some downtime, burnout is a real danger.

[Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blumpy/325853852/.]