Swearing in

For California - unlike New York - you don't have to go to a ceremony for your admission.

You'll get a card in the mail once you meet all the requirements (i.e. passing moral character, MPRE, CA bar exam), into which you have to fill in some details (more on this later) - but the primary importance of which, is that you have to swear an oath before someone qualified to attest to it, who will then acknowledge this on the card, which must then be posted to the California State Bar. You can apparently do this anywhere (you don't even need to be in the U.S.A., much less California itself).

Re: the details on the card - be aware that EVERYTHING you put on the card will be put online, and will be put online without any "gate" to prevent the automated harvesting of, say, your email, phone number and address (this is not like New York, where the information they have is mostly not publicly posted, and what they do put up needs someone to go through a captcha hurdle at least). So be very careful as to the information you put up (particularly if you're not currently in a firm, so what you have is a home address and number - I don't actually know if you can omit any of this information). Someone I know was really unhappy about the information that was put up (she has had a stalker problem).

Further, while this information can be edited online subsequently, you need an "access code" that will be printed on the first dues payment statement that is sent to you - so in the time period in-between (which could be a long time?) you're apparently out of luck.

Anyways -

Even though I live on the other side of the planet from the U.S., because I only got around to doing my moral character determination after I took the exams (note: they weren't kidding about the determination taking several months to complete) the schedule worked out such that I could, and decided to, fly over for one of the ceremonies. They're held throughout multiple locations throughout CA each time (example). This is the one I went for (held in a hotel ballroom - most of them are, though a few are in cooler places) -

I do think that it was nicer to be admitted like this, instead of "just posting a letter" (as my friend who did do that said - after having gone through all the hassle and exams etc., it's kind of anticlimactic). If your schedule allows for it (and if you've friends!), you definitely should.

... aaaaand that's it.

It's done.

Paperwork and communications

When I was undergoing the process to be called to the New York Bar, I found myself thinking the documentary requirements to be rather a pain - not that it was unnecessary (I mean, they DO need to know if you have a criminal record etc. :-), but that, well, "paperwork is a pain".

California wants more paper than New York.

You'll be doing a lot of online submissions (everything's linked off the main California State Bar website), but you can't escape paper - e.g. for the Moral Character Determination Application, the preparation and "submission" is online - but then you still have to print it out and post it in :-)

For foreign applicants, there's a requirement to send in your fingerprints on special cards. You need to write in for them to send you the cards - it's possible to find PDFs of the cards online, but it's not acceptable to print them out yourself on any random piece of paper and put your fingerprints on them. Further, you can't just do it on your own, you must find local law enforcement to fingerprint you, and attest to doing so, on the cards.

Basically, all of the above Needs A Lot Of Time.

Be aware that all "communications" from the state bar will be in writing, via snail mail.

Not email, not text messaging, not website announcements.

Every single step of the way will be acknowledged by a letter. You applied? You get a letter. They are proceeding to consider your eligibility? You'll get a letter. They've decided on your eligibility? You'll get a letter. They've decided the requirements are unmet? You'll get a letter. They've received anything from, or about you? You'll get a letter. They're going to do X with your requirement Y? You'll get a letter. And then they did X with your requirement Y as they said they were going to do? You'll get a letter.

This is important.

I've a friend (no names here :-) who decided he/she didn't actually need to prep for the MPRE, and presumably this Certain Someone spent all the time (that I was promised would be spent reading the one, single, thin, can-be-completed-in-half-a-day,one-day-tops MPRE book) ... in the University Ave Starbucks frolicking with cute/hunky Stanford swim-team members ... and as a result, fell a few points short of the CA requirements for the MPRE score the first time round.

Well, a letter saying that the MPRE needs to be retaken was duly received - and said MPRE was retaken, successfully this time.

There was no letter received about the successful MPRE

It had been assumed that All Was Right In The World ... but it was not. The Office of Admissions had no record of the successful exam, and this was only found out when the Calbar itself was taken successfully - and a letter saying that all requirements were met except the MPRE one. This threatened to delay Certain Someone's call to the bar. Not good.

So: if anything involving your "status" has changed, and you don't get written acknowledgement within a week or so - check the website, and if that doesn't indicate anything, then Something Has Gone Wrong.

UPDATE - WARNING:

there's a further complication in that I have had mail from the CA bar (as well as office of admissions) never arrive, I presume due to the vagaries of international mail delivery. This really tripped me up in one respect - after my admission, they sent out a letter requiring payment of my dues. I never received it. The only letter I received was the letter admonishing me for late payment of dues - and tacking on an extra $50 fee. It was not possible to have this waived (it was also kind of teeth-grinding to have them respond to my query with phrases like "which you claim not to have received" :-/ ), even though the original, physical letter is necessary to pay the dues, even for online payment - there is an "access code" printed on the letter, without which you would be unable to get on to the restricted part of the website.

I find calling CA offices difficult, because being in the GMT +8 time zone, office hours in CA correspond to approximately midnight to 8 am locally, which limits my ability to keep redialling; and the apparently "preferred" method of voice communications ("leave a number in voicemail and we'll call back") does not work because they will not call back for international numbers. I suspect the numbers of "foreign" applicants/state bar members are small enough (as compared to New York) that they've not really considered any difficulties we may face.

My venue - San Mateo County Event Center

So. California.

Unlike NY, there's no restriction on out-of-staters' choice of venue for the exam - you basically have your pick of doing it anywhere in California where it's on offer. Even more good news, unlike my experience in NY, you get to determine your venue well beforehand, so you're able to set up your accommodations without guesstimation.

This blog being for the non-Californian: your "obvious" option may be to choose a venue that is a hotel - perhaps one not too far from the airport you're coming in by - and then live in that hotel. There aren't too many of those (unlike for NY), though. You could stay some place close to the venue and walk over - but you're likely gonna find that all you can find are not-quite-fantastic motel-style accommodations (by which I am not saying that I'm too good for motels, but that there are good motels and then there are not so good motels), when it comes to being close to particular exam venues. For some cities, there is the additional joy of being in high-crime areas).

All that is because - this being California - what you're really expected to do is to drive to your venue.

And I'm going to say you're going to feel much better for staying in a nice place than in some cheap dive with lighting so poor you can't even do any last-minute-swotting, getting woken up in the middle of the night when trains pass by, heavy vehicles beeping their way around the street outside, etc.

So - put up in a nice place, and rent a car (I mean, if you're coming in from the airport, you may as well just pick up the car from there - you'll be returning there anyway?).

Where I took the exam: the San Mateo County Event Center


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There's a wide range of chain hotels etc. within 10-15 minutes of driving from here (I stayed at a Holiday Inn - check tripadvisor for noise ratings, though I must say I find the signal-to-noise ratio of tripadvisor not that great), and of course you could stay even further.

Parking at San Mateo is (was?) $10 a day. Key thing to note - arrive early if you can, so that you can park close to, and facing toward the exits - it'll be a mad crush getting out of the car park (it does not bode well for future collegiality in the legal profession, considering the kind of line-cutting and aggressive driving I saw). You don't need the additional hassle. If you need to do any significant reorienting of your car in order to get out of the place, you may as well walk out and get dinner first, because you ain't driving anywhere:

Just behind the place is a street with quite a lot of small restaurants that were pretty good (I particularly liked the Chinese place :-) - you might want to pack your lunch though, because of the crowds (again, you want to avoid hassle during the exam right?).

New York vs California

In my "NY blog" I basically summed up the "content" side of things -as opposed to the logistics of taking the bar exam- via just one word ("study!"). I'm gonna put a bit more in for California:

I've heard people talk about how the Calbar is more gruelling etc. than NY - so, alright, at 3 days instead of 2, it's 50% more examination, but it's just one more day, right? No big deal ... or maybe it is - maybe I'm just getting old, but I found the extra day quite a burden. YMMV.

Also - academically, I found CA much harder than NY. I don't think it's so much that the topics in the CA syllabus that differ from NY's are harder (and there's still substantial overlap); I feel it's the grading scheme. I recall that for my NY prep, they kept emphasizing "all you need to do is pass" (i.e. you don't need a perfect essay). Well, for CA too "all you need to do is pass": but, to pass you need a score of 1440 out of 2000. That's 72% - an "A" in most grading schemes.

(Which I guess makes sense - if you need a doctor, you don't really want a guy who got half the questions in his/her exam wrong, right? Then again, you're ... unlikely to practice in every field of law simultaneously. But I guess it's a good thing there's a baseline of "everything" that you sort-of-know - I'm finding a surprising level of retention of what I had to read, actually. Although I guess there's no need to get excited about that, who knows how long that will last... :-)

So, basically, you're going to need to know your material quite well; although you could potentially "luck out" and get just the questions for a handful of topics that you prepped for, if you're going to walk in to the exam with just a few subjects under your belt, you're either very much a gambler or really quite desperate. A long list of luminaries have failed the Calbar before. I'd think that if even they have trouble, you should put a little attention into this.

That said, don't forget that it's not enough to "know" stuff, since there'll almost always be something new in the exam that you've not seen anywhere before even if you'd done all your prep work (Honigsberg: "nobody!!!!"); you're gonna need to be able to "wing" a question or two even if you've read "everything" in your prep materials (ha ha ha).

So, while it is possible to pass despite having to "wing" one? a few? questions... I am going to say that if every question looks unfamiliar to you, you'll be seeing the exam again.

In practical terms, because there's just so much to have to go through, unless you're the conscientious type who will follow the study schedule laid out for you, then you're almost certainly going to be surrendering on certain topics.

I will say that you absolutely must know the "big 5" (Contract, Tort, Crim (Law & Pro), Evidence and Consti) because these are useful throughout (both essay and MBE) - if you don't, you're giving yourself a handicap you don't need. And then add to that the major California-unique topics like Community Property and you should have enough to give a decent go of it. You may still fail, but not too embarrassingly :-)

Looking through past exams is very useful but don't rely too much on patterns that you see because if certain intervals between exam questions are obvious to you, they're obvious to the examiners as well:

Even topics that were "spotted" for you by People With More Experience can be wrong - IIRC, when I took my New York exam, every question/topic that was suggested to us by BARBRI as "likely" hot topics failed to show up on the exam :-). I was so far behind my prep for NY that I never got round to doing more than thinking "uh oh" when I saw the "likely topic list", but it turned out that if I'd actually spent time preparing for those, it'd have been time wasted :-)

For my July 2010 CA exam, community property had appeared several times in a row and I decided it wasn't going to be repeated yet again.

Wrong.

Flipped the page - a community property question right there. Fortunately for me, I apparently remembered enough (perhaps because the topic was itself pretty interesting to me, not being the law in my home jurisdiction, and I retained a lot from before?) to wing it successfully.

And I think that's the key thing here - when your course instructors say that knowing the actual law takes a backseat to how you work with the facts as presented, they're not kidding. I suppose if I sign up as a future grader I can confirm whether this is the case or not ... but I don't think I'm so eager to find out as to be prepared to grade exam scripts :-)

So - talk about every issue you see, and talk about everything IRAC-style (this is critical). That said, your essays don't have to be long. Mine certainly weren't. Printed out, they'd be about 3 pages each. Maybe 4 at the very most (and that'd be for one or two of the six essays). There were some people near me who typed and typed and typed (and typed) unceasingly - I'm not sure they were better off.

In order of importance for your preparation - performance tests, essays, then MBE. The way the mathematics works, you'll need to be incredibly, incredibly good at the MBE for it to make any difference if your other sections turn out poorly:

Not worth the effort.

If you can get yourself to a "passing grade" for the MBE, that's all you need, put all the rest of your time on the other two. Especially the performance tests.

Lastly - this is a matter subject to a lot of dispute, but I'm one of those who think the July exam is easier than the February exam. If your scheduling permits, knowing what I know, I'd pick July over Feb. YMMV.

West Coast from East

Alright - after having gone through the process for a state on the east coast, I ... decided to head on west.

(I mean, there's quite a lot of things to do on the west; and, if Led Zeppelin thinks it worthwhile Going to California, who am I to disagree :-)

Anyways, for this one though, I'll talk a little bit about the academic side of things, unlike what I did for NY. The Calbar really is harder - they ain't kidding.

[to answer some questions - yes, all pictures were taken with iPhones (either 3GS or 4)]