Recently I read through an engaging thread on LinkedIn that asks: “What’s one piece of advice you’d give yourself upon entering law school this year?”
I was impressed by how many Queen’s alumni reached out with candid and honest advice. Many commenters focus on tried and true advice for law school success: Students who listen, prepare for class, and work hard will often be rewarded with good grades. Demonstrating mastery with good grades in law school has and always will be impressive.
I think that students entering the class of 2019 should also question whether good grades should be their goal. If I could, I’d ask my 1L self to challenge the timeless advice for success in law school. What the law needs now are big thinkers, dreamers, and risk takers.
What the law needs now are big thinkers, dreamers and risk takers
Being an expert at grinding the grist of daily readings and lecture will not help us move forward or create new ways of delivering legal services. Specifically, the legal services that most Canadians need but can’t afford.
After leaving the hallways of law school, I recognize the many ways we’re reinforcing the myth that lawyers can do it all on our own. Law school rewards students, for example, who contribute modestly, dedicate themselves to individual study, and perform better than the competition.
When applied to client service, that model creates capable practitioners who’ve learned to treat every problem as unique. That time-intensive method promotes high quality, but comes at a high cost.
Why are we focused on graduating students with skills that helped 20th century lawyers succeed, when skills like systems-thinking, project management, and IT leadership will help 21st century lawyers succeed?
Instead of teaching students to challenge, question, and evolve methods we’re sending the message that evolution isn’t necessary. Our last major innovation was inspired by Socrates: asking students questions in class rather than lecturing. We’re not even measuring our learning outcomes: are we getting better at preparing students for practice, or worse?
I say this all in hindsight. I entered law school after the 2008 financial crisis and hoped that things would go back to the way they were. Like many students, I liked how timeless law seemed. I naively thought law was a sure and steady path to success.
After seeing so many capable classmates graduate and struggle to find employment, my perspective has changed. Hardworking people who will make great lawyers can’t find work, because the old ways are no longer affordable. I see now that the only way to success is to stray from that well-worn path, to explore other avenues, and to embrace change.
I wish all the students accepting offers at law school this year the best of success. Please comment or reach out through my contact form if you have questions or want to talk about law school.
During law school I didn’t really think about writing the Ontario bar exams. There always seemed to be a more urgent exam or paper on the horizon. Eventually, the last year of law school came and went. Soon after the bar exams became the most important event on my calendar, I realized I had no idea what to expect. I wrote this article because there isn’t too much information online about the actual experience. If you also find yourself wondering, “What is it like to write a bar exam in Ontario?” then read on.
Signs point the way to the bar exam entrance
The latest sitting of an Ontario bar exam in Toronto was this past Tuesday, March 24th, 2015. For anyone unfamiliar with Ontario’s lawyer licensing process, there are two exams every domestic law school graduate needs to pass to become a lawyer here: the barrister’s and solicitor’s exam.
The Barrister and Solicitor Exams
The distinction between “barrister” and “solicitor” material is a tradition from Ontario’s English legal heritage. In England, barristers traditionally had exclusive rights to make oral argument in court. They were the original “trial lawyers” we know today as litigators and criminal lawyers. Solicitors were responsible for paper-based legal work like real estate conveyancing, corporate structuring and transactions. Modern Ontario lawyers are all licensed to do both, although most practitioners tend to specialize in one area.
Ontario’s barrister competencies include civil litigation, criminal law, administrative and family law; while the solicitor competencies survey business law, real property and estates. Both exams include scattered questions on professional responsibility and ethics.
Each test is seven hours long, broken up into two 3.5 hour blocks. Each 3.5 hour block goes by quickly, but both are physically and mentally demanding. One block is in the morning and the other in the afternoon, separated by a one-hour lunch break. The barrister exam sitting usually comes two weeks before the solicitor exam sitting.
After registering for the exams, Ontario law students pay for the required study materials. The barristers materials for the 2014-2015 exams total 843 pages while the solicitors are a hefty 1,086. Anything in the materials is testable, but the exams are open book. While the actual exams are open book, the questions are timed to provide one minute and forty-five seconds per answer. Since that’s generally not enough time to look up every answer, law students do need to know the basics.
Arriving on Test Day
If you’re writing the bar exam in Toronto like I did, chances are you’ll be attending the Toronto Congress Centre near Pearson Airport. (For a full list of Ontario bar exam dates, times and locations, click here.) The Congress Centre is actually a sprawling campus with multiple buildings. Navigating it isn’t difficult–there are staff and signs posted along the entranceway directing drivers where to go. My exam was in the North building, which faces a massive parking lot. There should be no parking shortages on test day, but keep in mind that a late arrival may mean a long walk to the front doors. Parking is free. Nice.
All test-takers are supposed to arrive, get registered, pass security screening and be seated by 8:30 a.m. in advance of the 9:00 a.m. start. Registration opens at 7:00 a.m. The total entry process took 15 minutes for me, although it could have taken much longer. The March exam sitting is reputed to have only 500-600 test-takers. The June sitting is much more popular, with closer to 1,600. With that many attendees, I’d expect the process to take more than 15 minutes.
Everybody entering the Ontario bar exams has at least two things: a freezer bag containing any items allowed inside the exam and a pile of indexes and materials they can use to look up answers in the exam. No bags are allowed inside the testing area, so many people used disposable paper gift bags to carry their materials. Since no coats, hooded sweaters, or bags of any kind are allowed inside the testing area, those articles need to be checked. I left my coat in my car because I didn’t want to be bothered with coat check. It was cash only, which I imagine was a hassle.
When you walk into the first room, the registration desks are separated alphabetically in a massive airplane-hanger sized building. It’s a convention centre, so picture the auto show with zero displays. The only things set up are signs and desks with law society personnel. Most lines are marked out with red concession ropes, but the law society folks wearing green smocks direct the traffic. After you present your bar exam ID card and your registration is confirmed, you get tagged with a brightly-coloured wristband identifying your seat number, and then you proceed to the security line.
Security
Although I’d like to describe what the security process was like at the bar exam, I’m not allowed. After communicating with Law Society personnel on the matter, they made it clear that I can’t share any details about the security protocols in place. All I can say is that the LSUC explains online what items are prohibited and allowed inside the testing area. The rule list is posted here.
One comment I will add (based on the public rules) is about the paper cost to the exam. Test writers can bring in any paper assistance materials they want into the exam, but can’t bring any paper out. While it may save the Law Society the expense of writing new questions in the event a test is copied, the “no paper” rule creates a lot of waste. I estimate I printed roughly 2,200 pages to have on hand during the exams. Assuming there were 500-600 people writing the March bar exam in Toronto, roughly 600,000 double-sided sheets of paper were consumed that day.
An electronic test (like the GMAT and MCAT) would make all that paper unnecessary. Surely it wouldn’t be any more expensive to the law society than printing those 600-1,500 tests every three months and renting out the Toronto Congress Centre, would it?
The Actual Test
After you make it to your desk, you thump down your material stack and sit down. Depending on how early you checked in, you might have a long wait until the test starts up.
Most students take the first few minutes to set up their test shrine: the semi-circle spread of books, paper, water bottles, snacks and tissues surrounding their seat. If you’re curious, yes there will be enough surface area for all your stuff. Each test-writer gets a Costco-style fold-out table to his or herself (if 72″ x 30″isn’t enough room for your stuff, well… wow).
The tables are set up in square clusters with two law society personnel assigned to each one. These folks will be wearing blue smocks. They are there to help you—their role is to make sure you don’t do anything dumb that disqualifies your test (e.g. fill in your Scantron test sheet with the wrong ID number). Both teams I had were super friendly, so be nice to them.
Looking up, you’ll see three huge timers displayed across the front wall of the air plane hanger-sized testing area. I brought a plain-faced watch into the test, but didn’t need it. The chairs are comfortable, but tilted a little too far back for a test-writing session. They’re the padded chairs you might lay out at a banquet-style conference.
If you checked in on time, you should have between 8:30 a.m. and 8:45 a.m. to go to the testing-area washroom and try to calm down after all the entrance procedures. Around 8:45 a.m. someone at the front of the room on a stage starts talking about the test and the rules. Ideally you haven’t already popped in your earplugs. Even if you did, the microphone is so loud you can probably still hear what’s being said.
Not long after, the tests are handed out. The stage tells you what to do. When to open the package, what to write, when to write it, and when to turn it over. Listen up and don’t do anything dumb. If you’re like me, you might not have written a paper exam since you graduated from your undergraduate program. It’ll come back to you.
The test is Scantron-based, so beyond getting the right answer, there’s also a small (but very important) technical element to making sure your Scantron sheet doesn’t get spoiled. The law society indicated that they do not check the actual paper test, so it sounded like if you filled out the Scantron sheet wrong, you were in deep trouble.
Once the stage says “you may begin,” then a paper thunderstorm erupts. It quickly quiets down, but the accumulated noise of 600 people shuffling and flipping paper is difficult to ignore. I highly recommend earplugs even if you never used them in law school. Besides the paper, when people move their chairs it sounds like little trumpets blasting off in different corners of the room. Coughing fits and sneezes occasionally break out. During the first half I barely noticed. Half-way through the afternoon sitting, my attention span and willpower were waning and it was hard not to.
The Physical Element
To prepare for the test I mostly focused on the mental element: the test content, the prep material, organization and timing. What caught me off-guard was the physical nature of the test. Most of my exams in law school were limited to three hours. I never had more than one law exam in the same day. Before a three-hour exam, you might be able to get away with an all-nighter, no breakfast, or no water—bad habits might not catch up with you until a day later. When you’re writing a test all day, those things matter.
Sitting for seven hours in one day with attention locked was surprisingly taxing. By mid-afternoon, I found myself re-reading questions I would have blown through in the morning. Looking things up in my index, I had to murmur to myself, “L M N O… P” when flipping through. Tiredness made my thoughts sluggish. For that reason alone I recommend having sugar, fat, protein and water on hand to give you a burst when you need it. Depending on how you react to caffeine when you’re tired, coffee might be a great or terrible idea.
Sleep also makes a huge difference. Before the first test, I got a great sleep. Somehow I slept through the entire night, and I’m glad I did. Before the solicitor’s exam I didn’t—for some reason I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and had trouble falling back asleep. I felt noticeably more crappy during the second afternoon. At times my mind started wandering and my focus was more easily broken by the people around me. So, know yourself and what your body needs to stay tuned all day. It will make the experience more humane.
The Aftermath
Test day was physically demanding. What really caught up with me was the intensity leading up to it. Both were more exhausting than I realized.
Like most optimistic scholars, I expected to take the morning off after the first test and be back at the books that afternoon. I was wrong. The seven-hour test knocked me down. The four days before that test I was writing a 2-3 hours of practice questions nearly every day (and reviewing the answers for hours after). Delaying rest and recovery meant I had to do it after test day.
After the barrister’s exam my attention span was shot for two full days. For me, burnout meant I could only look at a page for two or three paragraphs before I found myself looking out the window. That is obviously not where you want to be when you still have material to cover.
To prevent burnout, I highly recommend taking regular breaks and being kind to yourself. Working through burnout is inefficient and demoralizing (e.g., “Sigh… I only read four pages in the last 45 minutes… I’ll never finish at this rate.”) Know yourself so you know the difference between procrastination and real burnout.
No matter what, you’ll still make it through. If you have questions about the bar exam, comment after this post and I’ll answer them if I can. Thanks for reading and good luck!
Before I graduated law school, I asked the admissions coordinator for a copy of my law school admission essay. My request came as a surprise.
“Not many people ask to see those,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I told her not to worry. I was just wondering why I originally applied to law school. The thought came to me after reading an article that compared University of Toronto law school admission essays to what those eventual lawyers really did. The article contrasts high ideals with “the reality” in large corporate law firms.
“Did my motivations change?” I wondered.
When I looked through the cloud for my old application essay, I couldn’t find it. Somewhere in the five years, two laptops, and multiple cloud services I used since applying it had gotten lost. Our administrator was kind enough to give me a copy. Reading my law school application essay was one of the most important things I did before graduating.
For anyone unfamiliar with law school, the admissions essay or “personal statement” is every applicant’s one chance to tell their story. It’s completely unstructured, often with no page limits or guidelines. The blank page stares back and says, “Tell me about yourself. Why do you want to go to law school?”
After half a decade, I didn’t expect my application essay to still ring true. A lot happened in the five years since I had applied. Wikileaks was just unfolding. Snowden. The Boston bombings. China also surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. It’s hard to say how much those events influenced me. In that time I had also completed two graduate-level degrees, made mistakes, and learned a lot about myself.
When I read my law school application essay I learned four things:
Passion is about action. When I wrote that original essay, there were a lot of things I could have talked about. I could have talked about big issues, world events, or the importance of a legal education. My passion really shone through when I talked about action. What I did spoke far louder than anything I could have said. Taking on early roles as a community leader, mediator, researcher, and writer showed I already had a passion for doing what lawyers do–even if I didn’t really know what it was like to be a lawyer.
Vulnerability is as important as strength. Law school admission essays can be awful to read. It can be very difficult to read someone else promote themselves. When all that’s presented is strength, we want to turn away because it’s not real. After reading my essay, I thought the best part was my struggle (and eventual failure) to learn Japanese. Addressing failure helps us stay human. It helps us show our resiliency. And it makes us trustworthy. Nobody is perfect, and I’m glad I didn’t try to be.
The only way to know “what you want to do next” is past experience. Ever heard someone complain that they’re not sure what they want to do for an education, a career, or a next move? That was me before I came to law school. I wasn’t sure if law was really for me, and my uncertainty comes through in my writing. The only information I was proceeding on was from past experiences. Not everyone has known what they want to do since they were born. I certainly didn’t. For most of us, “what to do next” comes from past experience. We need to constantly try new things to learn about ourselves to calibrate our compass for the way forward.
Our most difficult moments define us and refine us. Strangely enough, I was encouraged to become a lawyer by my first tough experience in university. I had to find an apartment off-campus when all my friends were moving into residence; I had forgotten to hand in my housing forms on time. Two things happened after I moved into an apartment off-campus: (a) I became much more social and outgoing on campus. (b) I found out how to break my lease legally by researching the Residential Tenancies Act. That early experience could have made me give up. I could have stayed isolated off campus and stayed put. Instead, the experience forced me to grow.
After reading the essay, I was relieved to learn my motivations for going to law school hadn’t changed. I still want to use law to be a leader in my community.
If you’re in law school, I highly recommend you read your admission essay before you leave. It never hurts to re-calibrate your reasons for pursuing a long-term commitment. If you’re not in law school, but you’re thinking about committing to something or someone or somewhere for years, you should try writing a personal statement.
Leave a comment if you do read your admission essay. What does it say?
Sometimes metaphors reveal themselves in ways you’d never expect. Recently I spent an afternoon outside carrying a truckload of chopped wood across the yard, and stacked it in a neat pile. At the end of it I had two things: a nice pile of wood and the realization that stacking wood is a lot like life. Here’s why.
1. Starting with a plan is a good idea.
A stack of wood without a plan is just another pile of wood. Mine needed to be tall and straight, and located in a key spot next to the fire pit, because that’s what I wanted. We begin a lot of tasks by determining what we want and tracing the steps we need to take to get there. So why don’t we approach life that way?
Determining what we want out of life can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. Visualize what you want your life to look like. Then map out the steps you need to take to get there.
2. Optimism and confidence can only take you so far.
I’m a big believer in optimism. Keeping an open mind allows you to take chances other people might not. You can’t drown in what-ifs when you’re optimistic – you start things – you learn and grow from everything new you try.
However, when you’re building up a stack of wood, optimism doesn’t keep the stack from falling down. You still need to place each piece in a stable position if you expect it to stand up for long. Life is like that. Optimism helps you get started and get over those unavoidable mistakes. It doesn’t keep your life from falling apart, it helps you pick up the pieces when it does. Laying down a strong foundation is what supports your stack, so take the time to do it right.
3. One bad log can’t take down the whole pile.
In my final stack of logs there was more than one that was a little unsteady. But if my pile collapsed it wasn’t because of any one log, it was usually because it wasn’t supported from below.
Work, relationships, health, finances and spirituality– these are all things that play a role in our lives in one way or another. Keeping a balance helps us deal with the odd log that starts to roll out from under us.
4. Things don’t always fit together the way you think they will.
Sometimes it’s tough to tell where to put a piece of wood. You can tell by the shape if it’s going to fit on top of the others, but you never really know until you slap it on to see if it wobbles.
Relationships, jobs and many other parts of your life are like that. You think you have an idea of what’s perfect for you, but you really have no idea until you try it out.
