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California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

nytimes.com

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Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#41

Post by gnicholas »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
unstatusthequo wrote: post #12

Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus stud…

> California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their procee…

> given all this and the difficulty of the exam, [CA lawyers] are a time and a half as expensive as New York's.

Former big firm lawyer here. This is definitely not true across the board. In the firm I worked at, we had three "rates": reduced, normal, and New York. The NY rate was only charged by NY lawyers, or by other lawyers working on matters for NY lawyers (typically for NY clients, who would put up with it).

It may be that small-firm lawyers are much less expensive in NY, but I would doubt that this is the case. If you're comparing upstate NY to SF, you'll see a big difference, due to cost of living. But compare upstate NY to Sacramento, and the difference would not be anywhere close to 1.5x.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#42

Post by gnicholas »

blatherard wrote: post #8

I was surprised that this article doesn't mention that California is one of the few states that allow graduates of unaccredited law schools to sit for the bar exam. My understanding is that the bar passage rate for graduates of these programs was much lower than that of ABA-accredited institutions. Edit: I found an article with some numbers: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/californias-bar-exam-passage-... The breakout…

In fact, you don't even have to go to a law school to sit for the bar in California, which is not the case elsewhere. Not surprisingly, these students have much lower pass rates, and drag down the overall numbers.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#43

Post by larrik »

ghaff wrote: post #29
ende wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting down-voted, you're absoluteley right.

Probably because it's pedantic. At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major. In some universities, it's in the engineering school. In others, it's associated with other science programs, math in particular. There are various historic reasons for this. People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying at least some engineering pri…

Is it pedantic? I think Computer Science should be taught by Computer Scientists, which is a different set of people than Software Engineers. I say this AS a Software Engineer.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#44

Post by stmaarten »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
unstatusthequo wrote: post #12

Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus stud…

> California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their procee…

Delaware is a good forum to litigate internal corporate affairs because forming and regulating corporate entities is a major industry and revenue driver for that state. The Chancery Court is specialized in an arcane and technical area of the law, which makes Delaware better than other states for this one purpose.

Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need.

I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#45

Post by gnicholas »

> Only 51 percent of the graduates of the University of California Hastings College of the Law passed the state’s exam in July 2016.

As a former lawyer, I was shocked by this number. Hastings is a pretty good school, and I would have guessed that the rate would be around 70%.

But it makes sense in the current economic climate. After the bust of 2008, tons of people went to law school, thinking they'd ride out the recession. But that didn't work because (1) the recession lasted too long (in the legal field, at least); (2) many people had the same idea, so there was a glut of new lawyers; and (3) big legal clients realized they had been paying too much for young associate labor. The legal market has been permanently altered in a way that makes young associates much less attractive to firms (they were previously cash cows).

Add to this the fact that tuition has skyrocketed at the UC law schools, and it's no surprise they can't attract the same quality student as before. When I attended UCLA Law a decade ago, tuition was around $20k. It has doubled since then, and interest rates are much higher. As a fellow UC, Hastings has seen similarly sharp increases.

So while my knee-jerk reaction was that this was "too low" a pass rate for Hastings, it may be that in the current economic climate this is just the new normal for Hastings. They are, I believe, the lowest-rated UC law school, having been surpassed by the new UC Irvine.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#46

Post by gnicholas »

matt4077 wrote: post #18
blatherard wrote: post #8

I was surprised that this article doesn't mention that California is one of the few states that allow graduates of unaccredited law schools to sit for the bar exam. My understanding is that the bar passage rate for graduates of these programs was much lower than that of ABA-accredited institutions. Edit: I found an article with some numbers: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/californias-bar-exam-passage-... The breakout…

The article itself says: "Last year, just 62 percent of first-time test takers passed the California bar exam, compared with 83 percent in New York." The 83% are also in your data if you focus on the ABA schools only. That means failure rates are 17% and 38%, respectively, or a factor of 2.2x. The student populations of NY and CA are probably comparable, and in any case, as the article points out, the tests are large…

In NY, you can only take 3x. In CA, you can take it as many times as you want. This is one of the reasons that the "repeat taker rate" and the "aggregate rate" in CA are much worse than in NY. CA simply has a different proportion of first-time takers, since repeat takers are not cut off at any point.

When I took the bar in 2007, there was a guy who blogged about taking the bar. After learning he had failed, he continued blogging [1] about his repeat-taking experience. In all, he took the bar 11 times over 6 years before finally passing. It struck me that by the time he was a newly-minted attorney, I was a senior associate. I can't imagine how much time and money he spent on that process, and I do wonder whether the system should allow people to do this. On the other hand, he obviously really wanted it, and there's something to be said for that.

1: http://californiagbx0707.blogspot.com/

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#47

Post by JadeNB »

rhino369 wrote: post #39
IncRnd wrote: post #11

> The move follows a sometimes furious debate in California legal circles over whether the state’s passing score, or “cut score” — 144 — was unrealistic. If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable. I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence and knowledge in the field. Why s…

My calc 3 professor once said that he could make a test where everyone got a 100% or where everyone got a 0%, but neither test would tell him anything about the classes skill. The bar exam isn't designed for people to get 100%. They pick 10-20 different topics and test you on them. Virtually nobody knows all the answers. And nobody needs to know all the answers. Most attorneys will use maybe 1-3 of those topics on a…

> The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just for effort, or financial expenditure.

(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-off is too high, giving many false negatives, and that is an argument that appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#48

Post by logfromblammo »

NTDF9 wrote: post #37
unstatusthequo wrote: post #12

Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus stud…

Sounds like tech coding interview process.

Exactly what I thought. A bunch of technical, academic questions that have very little relation to the actual work being done? Yes, I am very familiar with that.

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#49

Post by ghaff »

larrik wrote: post #43
ghaff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's pedantic. At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major. In some universities, it's in the engineering school. In others, it's associated with other science programs, math in particular. There are various historic reasons for this. People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying at least some engineering pri…

Is it pedantic? I think Computer Science should be taught by Computer Scientists, which is a different set of people than Software Engineers. I say this AS a Software Engineer.

Every branch of engineering and science has more theoretical and more practical aspects. Look at physics. The people who do the theory and those who design the detectors have pretty different jobs.

And universities, at least the more elite ones, always tend toward the theoretical side in all fields. Which is mostly a good thing so long as it doesn't over-rotate. Whatever language you learn is probably going to be yesterday's news in 10 years. (Unless it's COBOL :-))

[And I say this as an engineer with degrees in non-SW fields.]

Re: California Supreme Court Moves to Make Bar Exam Easier to Pass

#50

Post by Gargoyle »

gnicholas wrote: post #45

> Only 51 percent of the graduates of the University of California Hastings College of the Law passed the state’s exam in July 2016. As a former lawyer, I was shocked by this number. Hastings is a pretty good school, and I would have guessed that the rate would be around 70%. But it makes sense in the current economic climate. After the bust of 2008, tons of people went to law school, thinking they'd ride out the rec…

I just can't see going to law school without have a very clear career plan starting immediately on graduation. If you can do well at one of the top 5 schools or have family connections that definitely lead somewhere, that kind of thing. The risk/reward is just out of whack otherwise.
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