Recently in Bar Exam Category

Becoming a New York lawyer just got a little tougher. Aspiring attorneys will now be required to do pro bono work in order to pass the NY bar, Reuters reports.

This is on top of the state's already tough two-day exam. Applicants will have to volunteer at least 50 hours of free legal services as part of admission to the bar. The initiative will take effect in 2013, so 2012 examinees can breathe a sigh of relief. The requirement's goal is to provide more legal services to the growing number of poor people.

New York's requirement is the first of its kind in the nation. But could it also be the beginning of sweeping pro bono reform for the rest of the country?

Besides the obvious reasons -- avoiding real life, student loans and the terrible job market -- why would anyone want to spend a seventh semester in law school?

They wouldn't, right? Even so, administrators at City University of New York Law School think some of their graduating 3Ls should. Those students are being offered an additional semester of "intensive, structured, Bar-oriented coursework" -- for free!

As long as they skip the July 2012 bar exam, that is.

A woman accused of cheating on the New York bar exam has lost the battle to overturn her misconduct charges.

Rose DeWitt sat for the bar exam in July 2009. The New York State Board of Law Examiners charged her with misconduct. They claimed she tried to copy other student's answers on the multiple choice portion of the test.

Specifically, a proctor saw her "craning her neck," according to Thomson Reuters News & Insight. They saw her make this strange neck movement more than once. They saw her do it on both days of the exam.

Bar results are in -- for most states, anyway -- and some proud new attorneys who passed the exam are sharing their success on YouTube.

The experience, of course, is quite personal -- and insanely nerve-wracking. That's why some examinees surround themselves with a support group of relatives or friends when they get their results.

Others opt to face their fate in pro per. Or perhaps with a bottle of their favorite libation.

We found more than a dozen multistate YouTube clips of people's reactions to passing the bar. (Perhaps not surprisingly, we couldn't find any clips that show what it's like to fail.)

Three of the most recent "passing the bar" clips are embedded below, and we've linked to a few more as well.

For one blind law student, the MPRE was going to be a tough challenge. Until now.

Vermont Law School student Deanna Jones, 44, will today be able to use a screenreader software that will read the text aloud while enlarging the font.

Jones is legally blind and has also been diagnosed with an auditory learning disability. In order for her to fully comprehend the exam, she needs to have the exam text read out loud, according to WCAX-TV.

Most law grads who take a bar review course tend to hear the requisite bar exam horror stories. Your computer might crash in the middle of the exam, forcing you to handwrite pages of essays.

On the day of the exam, a huge traffic accident may occur on the freeway that you're meant to take, meaning that what was once a half an hour drive to the testing center is now a two-hour long bumper-to-bumper road-rage fueled horror.

How about if you're pregnant, and you go into labor during the exam? Well, for one woman taking the Illinois bar that's exactly what happened.

While you recover from your post-bar hangover, you have some important decisions to make about the next few months of your life.

Besides applying for permanent positions, should you go on a post-bar trip? Should you volunteer? Should you find a paying non-legal job? Should you sit on your butt eating pizza and drinking beer until November?

While this last one is especially appealing, it's probably not the best option.

But which one is?

If a law school got sued every time a student failed a final exam or was subject to the anguish of not passing the bar, there'd be a lot fewer law schools in this country.

Wait. That might be a good thing.

A woman is suing Oxford Brookes University (not to be confused with the Oxford) for failing to teach her how to answer basic legal questions. In other words, they didn't teach her how to take legal exams and now her career is ruined, according to her complaint.

A new paper published in the Journal of Legal Education announces the interesting but ultimately unsurprising news that law grads who fail the bar never quite catch up in earnings to their classmates who pass. Soon-to-be grads can take this as just one more bit of motivation to stay awake in BarBri courses, or they can just pause and ask some further questions about the relevance of this new study to their lives.

As described in The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, the statistics used in the paper were difficult to come by, but too important to continue not to seek out. Initially, those that fail the bar "lag far behind their [passing] peers in areas such as earnings, job stability and marriage and divorce rates." However, by their mid-30's, those not passing the bar narrow the gap in earnings, but never close it entirely. The last statistical punch: between the ages of 30 and 39, non-passers surpass college grads who did not attend law school in earnings, but never do catch up to the passers.

For most states the July Bar exam is this week.

That means show time for the thousands of hopefuls who have been in study mode for the summer.

If that is you then the past few months may have meant long nights of studying, strategically camping out at different study spots day after day, and building expertise on effective forms of caffeine.  Whether you feel like you've studied too much or not enough, it's time to fight with what you've got.

And every Bar exam warrior needs a battle cry.

Whether you have one or not, here are a few quotes from some high achievers of the non-Bar kind to get you through the 1, 2, or 3 day ordeal ahead.

Inspirational, funny, random...take away from them what you like and leave the rest. Most of all, good luck Bar exam takers!