I survived until graduation! Yeah! And I was elected class speaker by my class, which was a huge honor. Typical me though, I tried to put a little bit of everything in my graduation speech, which meant it was long. And lots of the faculty told me their favorite speech was anything that was short. So, the fact that I was an Air Traffic Controller, and the fact that I knew a lot of people didn’t want a long speech led me to speaking at a rate that makes it hard to actually follow what I’m saying. When I look at the video I cringe a bit at that. I loved doing it though. I also won the Mary Ellen Krug Award for excellence and distinction in Labor and Employment Law given by the King County Bar Association. My last year had many great experiences, but when I look at the pictures of me at the podium at graduation and me with my professors at the award lunch, all I can focus on is how incredibly huge I was.
I spent the last year of school freaking out a bit about how little I knew and how not ready I was to leave the safety of law school and actually move forward into the legal world where I had no idea how to put what I’d learned into practice. First things first, though, I had to pass the bar. It seemed that everyone who went to law school with me had an understanding of what a huge, momentous task it was to pass the bar. I didn’t even start thinking about it until my third year and to me it was just a test off in the future that I’d never really taken into account when embarking on my law school journey. I was graduating in December, so the logical time for me to take the Bar was in February. It is given twice a year on the same days all over the country. February was to be the very last Washington State Bar Exam, before Washington switched to a multi-state exam in July. When I really began thinking about it and looking into it I discovered that it is recommended to study 10-14 hours a day for the bar exam. But I was still working full time.
So, I thought maybe I should skip the February bar and plan on July. That would give me seven months to study, rather than just two. Also, if I passed the multi-state it would give me the opportunity to practice in several different states without retaking the main bar exam, I’d only have to pass the state portion. I brought it up to several people at the law school, and without fail every single one told me that I should definitely take the exam in February, even after learning that I would be working full time during the studying process. They said that the Washington exam was all essay and so it was an easier test, because it would be graded more subjectively than a multiple choice where the answer was either right or wrong with no wiggle room. They said that historically women do a lot better on essay than multiple choice. They said that it was a mistake to wait at all to take the bar because I wanted to study while I was still in the mode for studying and I’d start to forget the stuff. I listened. I registered for the February bar.
I signed up for the bar prep course that was over $3000 and began to make the trek up to Seattle each day for classes. But I was only getting about 3-4 hours of studying done on the days I worked and that was if I was lucky. I realized that I was wasting a couple hours of study time every day driving back and forth to Seattle so I stopped going to the live classes and instead began watching the recorded videos of the classes. Not only did it give me more study time, but I could lounge around in PJs while studying. The more I studied, the more terrified I became. There were so many subjects, some of which I was studying for the first time for the bar. If I were in charge I would definitely change the way the whole bar is administered. It is basically a hazing ritual rather than a test for knowledge.
I was about three weeks through January when I realized that if I didn’t do something drastic I was never going to pass. I couldn’t afford to retire, and I didn’t have enough leave to take the time off from work. But then I realized that I had a bunch of money sitting in my 401k. I knew I’d take a hit on taxes, but how bad could it be? I could take the money out and pay off everything I owed and then live on my retirement until I could find a lawyer job! Well, after talking to a financial specialist I found out that if I took it all out I’d lose over 50% in taxes. But he gave me some strategies for taking a portion out where the hit wouldn’t be as great and I could pay off most of what I owed which would, hopefully, allow me to survive on my retirement long enough to pass the bar and find a job. So I went to see the lady in the regional office and filed my paperwork. Then I got to call the Supervisors and the Union to let them know I would be retiring effective January 31, 2013 and they would have to find a replacement for me for my job at the regional office and for my other union positions.
Most people spend a while getting used to being retired. They sleep in and don’t do a lot at first. Well, I did the sleeping in thing because for the first time in almost thirty years I was on a regular sleep schedule again. But I studied all day long and into the night every day. No matter how much I studied, there was always something I didn’t know. And as the day grew closer to taking the exam I got more and more sure that I was never going to pass. I would read the practice essay questions and jot down the answers that came to my head really quickly, then read the answer. There was always so much in the answer I’d missed. I learned a lot of new stuff with that technique, but I couldn’t learn it quickly enough. Plus my brain just didn’t retain information the way it used to.
When I went to the hotel for the bar exam I roomed with a former classmate. We quizzed each other that first night and I became even more worried. She had taken a different bar prep class and so the way it had been taught was a bit different so I often couldn’t understand what the heck she was talking about. The next morning I showed up at the Convention Center in Tacoma with lots of my former classmates. We were all terrified and exhausted. The exam is two and a half days long with three separate sections each day with three essay questions in each section. I think there were 12 different areas of law that they could ask questions on so some areas would be duplicated. There were horror stories about times when the least favorite areas of law had shown up more than once in an exam. Then there’s the added fear of the exam soft software locking up your computer and having to do the entire test by hand. Or writing the entire test in the computer and then having it disappear before it could be uploaded. In the hotel that morning there had been an exam taker throwing up in the elevator. At the Convention Center there were people crying in the lobby.
My fate was sealed pretty early on. My brain just shut down on the first section and I think my responses sounded like they came from a five year old. I couldn’t remember any terms of art or rules. I got a torts question in the first section and I like torts. But I was trying to simply define assault and battery and my answer was something like, “assault is when you’re afraid someone will hit you, and battery is when they actually do.” While technically true, this is not going to engender a lot of respect in the mind of the person grading the exam. I walked out of that first section and said, “I flunked.” Everyone said, “Oh everyone always feels like that. You probably did better than you think.” I just smiled and nodded, but I knew I was done for. I even thought about leaving, why put myself through the rest of the pain? But I knew that it would be a good experience for the second time around, so I kept going. Some of the later sections were a little better, but not a lot. The next day I felt better about what I did, but overall I was pretty sure that I hadn’t had enough high scoring sections to make a difference.
I think the cruelest thing about the bar exam is the waiting to get the results. In that two month period your mind starts to forget the terror and the knowledge of how badly you messed up. The facts get hazy and you start to convince yourself that maybe you really did do better than you thought you did. After all, there were plenty of law exams that you’d thought you might have failed and yet you did pretty well on them in the end. So, even though there was a part of my brain that still knew there was very little chance I passed, hope had started to burgeon in other parts of my brain when I finally logged on to website to check my status. That big red FAIL was devastating. I had rarely failed at anything in my life, especially after so much preparation. But the most devastating was that I now had to start that insane level of studying again. And normally you could study the same material for the next test, but since the test was changing and it was now based on Federal law, I had to start all over again. It wasn’t completely different. But it was different enough that I had to be sure that I would answer the questions on the next test using the correct law. And I’d lost two months of study time waiting for the results so I had only two and a half months left. I should have gone with my gut and registered for the July exam right from the start. Plus, all of that sitting and hunching over reading and lack of exercise and crazy schedule meant I was now at my highest weight ever and my neck was so sore all the time I had trouble turning my head, and now I had to do it for almost three more months.