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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

#61

Post by IncRnd »

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…

Your post is somewhat of a strawman. I never wrote that someone should know all of the law, but that I believe they should know the law in the area they will be practicing.

I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are multiple kinds of practitioners of law. I have had various 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.

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

#62

Post by stmaarten »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #57
stmaarten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exemp…

Ah, yep. I agree with all of that, except I'm not sure if there's a linear relationship between case lifespan and fees. The delay in California really comes from overburdened courts and distant trial dates. Anecdatally, I haven't found that this encourages lawyers to churn any more work than the case "naturally" supports (i.e., the amount they can get away with billing given the claim size, complexity, insurance pot, fee clauses, etc.).

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

#63

Post by stmaarten »

gamblor956 wrote: post #24
faccacta wrote: post #14

Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what…

That doesn't describe law school at all. In fact, what you claim would violate ABA curriculum requirements. The bar exam tests what you learn in law school. However, that is only the bare minimum for what you actually need to know to practice law.

No, that's not right. The bar exam tests what you learned during BARBRI.

Law school is for learning how to do good legal research, analysis, and writing, with some exposure to a selection of substantive areas of law thrown in for good measure. At the top schools, there's also a strong focus on understanding the law through historical, philosophical, and policy-oriented contexts. Memorizing "black letter law" is not an objective. In fact, at most final exams, you can bring in a stack of study guides and reference books to look up what you don't know.

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

#65

Post by brianwawok »

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…

I fail to see why listing out a larger legal document should be 30-45% premium.

That is like saying

"Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)"

Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).

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

#66

Post by brianwawok »

gnicholas wrote: post #46
matt4077 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contin…

Reminds me of the joke "what do you call the guy who got LAST PLACE in medical school"

Doctor

If you set a standard, the last place guy is just as much a part of it as the first place guy. Now it might not look so good on resumes, but he is legal.

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

#67

Post by Merad »

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…

> At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major.

That was definitely true in the 90s, but I don't think it's been the case for years now. Most schools have degrees like Information Systems where most of the people end up who are just generally interested in computers and/or find CS too difficult. Hell I work with a guy right now whose degree (from a state university) is in "computing" whatever that means.

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

#68

Post by teslaberry »

you don't need to waste any more money altering tests. you need to strip the aba of tens of milllions of dollars of revenue by letting lawyers from the east coast and texas have reciprocity.

there are at least 5 to 10 thousand lawyers in the u.s. who would motion into the california bar and pay reciprocity fees if they didn't have to take any more totally stupid and utterly useless exams for existing practicing attorneys.

it costs existing attorney in other states 400 more dollars to take the california bar exam than it does california law students. and guess what, the bar exam is 1 day of time for existing lawyers, who are allowed to skip the mbe which is a second day of time required for california law students.

so , 400 dollars more for half the time spent accomodating .

absurd. https://www.calbarxap.com/applications/CalBar/info/fees.html

.

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

#69

Post by 0xbear »

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.

Except after you're done, you get paid like $500 per hour

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

#70

Post by kfhoeihfy38h »

ABA Standard 501(b) states that "A law school shall not admit an applicant who does not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar."

If passing %s are falling while the cutoff is unchanged, the solution is not to change the cutoff. Also, the school for "disadvantaged students" being singled out in the article is hilarious.

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