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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

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gnicholas wrote: post #41
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task (e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section by section, bodies of California's commercial code everyone was agreeing to ignore.

Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.

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

#52

Post by gnicholas »

Gargoyle wrote: post #50
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.

Yeah, my general advice is do not go to law school unless (1) you get into a top 3 school; (2) you get a half-scholarship to a top 10 school; or (3) you get a full scholarship to a top 20 school. And even then — don't go unless you want to be a lawyer for at least 5 years.

Starting salaries are basically the same as they were a decade ago, but tuition, cost of living, and interest rates have kept growing. As a result, the payback period has gone from ~3 years to ~6 years.

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

#53

Post by thaumasiotes »

JadeNB wrote: post #47
rhino369 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Read the sentences around that one:

> I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.

> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.

To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.

The fact that this process is incredibly wasteful seems relevant to the argument, no? If you took the bar exam after spending twenty minutes and fifty bucks, it wouldn't really matter that it didn't provide any more information on the testees than their LSAT scores had already provided.

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

#54

Post by gnicholas »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51
gnicholas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task ( e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section b…

Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding.

There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.

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

#55

Post by JadeNB »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #53
JadeNB wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Read the sentences around that one: > I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars. > If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred. To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high a…

> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.

That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted:

> But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut.

If there is a bar exam, then when it is taken is, I think, exactly the right time to make the cut.

Even with those sentences quoted as context, I still think that the time and money spent in the study of law is irrelevant to whether someone should be accredited, by whatever process. (That doesn't mean that I think that it is irrelevant full stop; I agree that it is deeply relevant to the student, and probably to society as a whole.) Nonetheless, I meant in my original post to argue literally only with the one sentence that I quoted, which is why I did not give the context, and not to argue with the rest of the post, which seemed eminently sound and which I agree should probably be interpreted as you have done.

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

#56

Post by thaumasiotes »

JadeNB wrote: post #55
thaumasiotes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the sentences around that one: > I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars. > If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred. To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high a…

> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother. That seems like an argument for not having the b…

> That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted

It is the position of the sentence I quoted, as you can see by following my quotation all the way through to:

>> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.

It seems like there might be a confusion over the concepts "bar exam", meaning "any exam that allows or prohibits the practice of law by a testee", and "bar exam", meaning "the test given to law school graduates who wish to practice law, under the American legal education system".

A bar exam in the first sense makes the cut by definition -- it is the cut, and therefore the cut cannot be made at any other time. But the bar exam in the first sense does not occur at any particular time. rhino369 has made a perfectly coherent argument that the bar exam in the second sense, the real bar exam as it occurs in American practice, which is given at a particular time, is given at the wrong time, that it should be given before students go to law school and in fact should really just be replaced by the LSAT (already given at the appropriate time) because it isn't informative taken in addition to the LSAT anyway.

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

#57

Post by JumpCrisscross »

stmaarten wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Employment and consumer law tends to frown upon changing the body of law by contract. I'm referring to business formation, contracting, merging, fundraising, et cetera. If you sign under California law for many of these agreements, you will often find at least 3 pages listing out specific sections of California civil procedure and commercial code that both parties will, almost every time, find it beneficial to exempt themselves from. You can't do it in a single, blanket paragraph. You have to write out custom paragraphs for each and every section.

California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).

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

#58

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gnicholas wrote: post #54
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task ( e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section b…

Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding. There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms di…

Discounts are a huge part of it. That said, I typically try to box legal bills in advance for everything except litigation. For the avoidance of doubt, I give both coasts the same budget. Guess which side's lawyers love running right through it (or approaching it to within 5¢).

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

#60

Post by IncRnd »

burkaman wrote: post #19
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…

Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized. I'd rather hire one that spends their time studying cases and strategies, and has to look up the details of statutes once in a while.

> Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized.

That isn't what I wrote. In any case it's not what I meant.

I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are various kinds of practitioners of law. I have had tax attorneys and business attorneys on the stand in mediation where they looked foolish in front of the mediation panel due to not knowing off the top of their heads the subjects they purported to be expert. There are no reference materials for them to look anything up at that point.

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