Cracking the California Bar Exam

I took the California Bar Exam from Mumbai when it was offered online on the 5th and 6th of October 2020. It was my third attempt and I was successful.

In 2015-2016, I used to be employed by an Indian company which had a Californian subsidiary that made investments in California and I had dealings with Californian attorneys. I thought it would be useful to be qualified in California and without a clear idea of how difficult the California Bar Exam is, signed up for the July 2016 exam.

I had qualified as an Indian advocate in 1999 and as an English Solicitor in 2004. I obtained a Certificate of Good Standing from the Law Society, England and Wales, and used it to register with CA Bar. I then proceeded to buy a $100 book through Amazon, the California Bar Tutors Total Preparation Book and read it a few times during my work commute by train from Bandra to VT station, around thirty minutes each way, five days a week. As I read, I realised that this was a book meant for those already familiar with US and CA laws, but I ploughed on. The CA Bar’s website has answers written by top scorers in each bar exam for the past ten odd years and I read through most of them once. I learnt as much by reading those old answers as I did from the California Bar TutorsTotal Preparation Book. The past answers ought to have dented my confidence, since they were way superior to anything I could have written, but for strange reason they didn’t. I thought I could pull it off on the exam day.

Business Associations, Civil Procedure, Community Property, Constitutional Law, Contracts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Professional Responsibility, Real Property, Torts, Trusts and Wills. Thirteen topics in all, of which the only topics I was familiar and comfortable with were Business Associations (which included corporate law, law of partnerships, agency principles), Contracts, Torts, Professional Responsibility and Trusts. I was totally out of depth in Civil Procedure, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Evidence. I have studied constitutional law at undergrad law school, but was really rusty and US Constitutional Law differs from Indian constitutional law in many ways. Community Property is the set of principles for dividing up property between the husband and wife in case of a divorce and this was a revelation, to say the least!

The California Bar Tutors Total Preparation Book mentions the importance of IRAC (Issue, Rule, Analysis and Conclusion) in the introduction and this concept (and its importance) went totally above my head. I decided to handwrite the exam (instead of taking it on a laptop) since I though it wouldn’t make a huge difference and I didn’t have the time and energy to get my laptop certified and all that.

In July 2016, the CA Bar exam was a three day affair. I landed in SFO just two days before my exam and took the exam at Sacramento. My body clock was twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific Time. On day one, we had to write three essays in the morning within three hours and a performance test after lunch, also for three hours. On day two, we had the Multistate Bar Exam (“MBE”), two sessions of three hours each, with one hundred multiple choice questions for each session. Day three was a repeat of the first day, with three essays in the morning and a three hour performance test in the afternoon. As may be expected, I flunked. I got a score of 1200 out of 2000, when the required cut off was 1440. I can’t say I was devastated, since I hadn’t invested too much effort or even money, when compared to most other test takers.

I went back to work in Mumbai and kept thinking about doing the CA Bar exam since I had really enjoyed the academic exercise. In the second half of 2018, I decided to take the plunge once more and enrolled for the February 2019 exam, though my job had changed and my work had nothing to do with California. I bought the latest edition of the California Bar Tutors Total Preparation Book and started reading it during my work commute. I also bought a couple of books for the MBE, since I realised that the MBE was a weak spot. I decided to use a laptop this time, since my typing speed is reasonably good and it possibly helped to write more than less.

For the February 2019 administration, the CA Bar exam had been made a two day affair, with a single 90 minute performance test, instead of two performance tests of three hours each, as was the case earlier. Everything else stayed the same. I landed in SFO four days before the exam, which I took in Oakland. My body clock was thirteen and a half hours ahead of Pacific Time. The importance of IRAC still hadn’t sunk in, though I think I did comply with IRAC more than I had in July 2016. I flunked again, scoring 1351 out of 2000, when the required cut off was still 1440.

I forgot about the CA Bar exam and life went back to normal. Until the Covid 19 pandemic hit all of us. I was at home, under lockdown, including three weeks of total quarantine when my neighbour tested positive. For reasons I won’t delve into here, my family was elsewhere and I was alone in my apartment. I had a fair amount of free time on my hands. In April 2020, I decided to give the CA Bar exam my best and final shot, planning to take it in February 2021. 

I subscribed to Adaptibar and started doing around 20 questions every day. When I got a question wrong, I analysed why I had got it wrong and wrote down the explanation. Adaptibar was a revelation and I enjoyed and looked forward to each of my Adaptibar sessions. I understood nuances I had no clue about until then. I re-read the California Bar Tutors Total Preparation Book (which I had saved from my February 2019 attempt, I didn’t buy the latest edition) a few times, as well as all past answers. I bought two outlines from Amazon for around $60 dollars each (word documents emailed to me) purportedly written by US based Ivy League law students, but did not find them to be particularly useful (or better than my California Bar Tutors Total Preparation Book) and ditched them. And finally I hired a tutor based in the US who read two of my old answers from my February 2019 attempt and marked it up for me with his comments. My tutor also marked up a few sample essays I wrote based on old questions. The IRAC penny finally dropped. I spent a lot of time and effort reading up on the black letter law. I relied mainly on the internet for this.

When it was announced that the July 2020 exam would be delayed and offered online, I decided to take it, rather than wait for the February 2021 administration, as I had originally planned. I registered and a month before the exam, began the slow process of switching my body clock to Pacific Standard Time, which would be 12.5 hours behind Indian time. I would stay awake till 3 am Indian time and begin my day at 10 am. I could afford to do this since I was working entirely from home. I upgraded my internet connection. 

CA Bar reduced the cut-off from 1440 to 1390 (out of 2000). I became even more hopeful. However, I had crossed my mid-forties and my biggest weakness was a failing memory. I understood everything I read, but the next day I would struggle to remember what I had read.

The two nights of the exam are a blur at present. From 8:30 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. on day one and till 4:00 a.m. on day two, the essays and multiple choice questions went by in a jiffy as I banged away on my laptop, my webcam recording everything on audio and video. The Facebook groups I had joined had a lot of chatter about how things could go wrong technically, especially the online proctoring, but fortunately, everything went right. On the morning of January 9, 2021, 7:30 a.m. IST, I found out that I had passed. For the October 2020 administration, the pass rate was 60.7%, the highest pass rate in the last 12 years. A search of the pass list published online suggests that only two of the successful candidates logged in from India. There are twenty nine from China though!

I have written this in the hope that my experiences may be of some help to those who take the CA Bar exam in future. I should confess that though I am a foreign attorney and technically not a native English speaker, my education has been entirely in English right from my kindergarten days. I attended one of the best law schools in India and have an LLM from a leading British university. I have worked as a corporate/commercial lawyer since 1998. What worked for me may not work for others.

With the benefit of hindsight, I feel that it makes sense to sign up for a popular crash course like Barbri or Themis or Kaplan. I didn't take any of these, but wish I had done so for my first attempt, in addition to Adaptibar.  The bar exam is not the best time or occasion to reinvent the wheel.