Law Coaching Program

Cost: $3,000

Bar Made Easy offers a unique program for law students who require an additional edge to get them through each year of law school. The program is custom tailored to the law students needs. Each student will receive Bar Made Easy Checklist/Outlines for their courses along with personal critiques of assigned bar essays. All outlines include a checklist, inner checklist, and the rules of law.

How This Course Works

The program includes sixteen (16) – 1 hour sessions either in person or by phone to go over the substantive law, teaching the theories, and addressing the student’s questions in order to enable them to have a thorough understanding of the law. In addition, the program provides essay questions per subject for the student to write and submit for feedback. This will enable students to use the tools that have been taught and to determine the weaknesses the student will need to work on prior to their final exams.

Since most of our students are scattered throughout CA and the United States, we offer this law coaching program to you on a one-on-one basis in our Aliso Viejo, CA office or by telephone conferences and e-mails. We provide constant support and encouragement to help you develop proper test-taking techniques in order for you to become an accomplished test-taker.

Why Take This Course?

Reading the casebooks all year and briefing all of the assignments is not enough preparation to pass your finals and ultimately the bar exam. A better use of time is to obtain a handle on the law early on and then start applying it to as many practice examinations as possible.

Knowing the law is important but being able to apply it to examinations is everything. Issue spotting, writing good analysis and being organized on examinations only comes from practicing with other tested examinations. While you may receive high scores for assignments and participation, failing the final examination usually means failure of the course.

Our program allows you to have your legal questions answered, and to have your practice, written examinations personally critiqued by one of our attorneys. If you learn from your mistakes on the essays, you will learn to write superior exam answers. More importantly, you will become a good test taker in the process.

Welcome To Law School

We welcome you to law school. The decision to go to law school was an accomplishment in itself. Now, here comes the cold hard truth about the study of law; aside from being time consuming, it is not enough in your preparation to reading the case law books all year, briefing all the assignments and, then, expect to pass your finals and, ultimately, the Bar Examination. A better use of your time is to obtain a handle on the law early on and then start applying the law to as many practice examinations as possible. Knowing the law is important, but being able to apply the law to examinations is everything. Being able to issue spot and write good analysis in your exam is imperative to your success in law school.

What Your Professors Are Looking For

Professors and bar examiners are looking for three very specific things when grading essay examination answers. In order of importance, they are looking to see if you spotted all the issues the examination is testing, is your analysis supported with facts from the examination and is your answer organized. This is the secret formula to doing well in law school and on the bar. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s better to know the rules of the game before beginning to play the game.

Biggest Mistake Law Students Make

Students make the mistake of believing they have to know every piece of relevant law in order to do well. They read well over 500 pages of assigned reading each week along with preparing supportive briefs for each case read. This abundance of work could give students false hopes that since they are keeping up with the requirements in the syllabus they must be on the right track. In fact, the opposite is true.

Are these committed students working hard? Of course they are. Will this study method provide students the grades they are striving for? The answer is probably not. Professors and bar examiners assume students know the law but will only reward those students who recognize the tested issues by applying the law to the examination, writing an organized and responsive answer to the question for solid analysis and finishing within the time allotted to show they are organized.

Are Case Briefs Necessary?

There exists a misnomer among law students that if one reads all assigned cases in the syllabus and briefs those cases, she will achieve high grades and successfully pass her law school and bar examinations. While it is true that knowledge of the black letter law is important, what is most crucial is knowing how to apply the law to essay examinations.

Reading the case book and briefing each case is intended to teach students how to analyze a case and how to break down the case in order to learn the court’s ruling and why the court decided the way it did. Students can apply the IEFC or IRAC outlining method when briefing in order to understand the case. However, it is very time consuming.

The predicament with briefing is at the end of the year students will have well over a three-inch stack of briefs filled with great rules. How can these miscellaneous rules then be organized and applied to examinations? It is an almost impossible and overwhelming task. With the time constraints placed on law students today, including employment, families and other responsibilities, students must learn to work smarter not harder.

What You Must Develop To Succeed

Success in law school, on the California First Year Law School Exam (Baby Bar) and on the Bar Exam greatly depends upon your test-taking abilities. Students applying learned knowledge to actual exams and multistate questions develop these necessary skills. It is assumed that all students sitting for an examination know the law. With essay examinations, it is the student who can apply the law to the hypothetical, spot the issues, use the facts in their analysis, be organized and finish on time who will enjoy success. With multistates, it is the student who recognizes the issue(s) being tested who will score the higher grade. And how does one do that? The answer: the student needs to practice, practice and practice exam writing and multiple choice questions.

Essay Examinations

A better use of a student’s time is to obtain a handle on the law and then start applying it to as many practice examinations as possible. Practice examinations can be found on file in most law school libraries, available from state bar organizations, in bookstores and on the internet. The best way to prepare for essay examinations is to PRACTICE, PRACTICE and PRACTICE with as many actual essay examinations as possible.

Before a student ever takes a final examination, the student should review ten (10) examination essays from each law course. A student must become familiar with the hypothetical fact pattern, be able to spot its’ issues, create a workable outline and write a solid answer. The more exams a student is exposed to the more familiar the fact patterns will become which will help the student to recognize issues more quickly. On the whole, students do poorly because they miss key issues.

Practicing examination writing will also improve one’s speed in completing these exams as well as improving the organization of their answer. Only from doing practice examinations will a student improve issue spotting, outlining, organization, analysis and time management in completing the exam.

Multistate Questions

A student must also practice, practice and practice many multiple choice questions. A student should minimally review 500 multiple choice questions per subject. Only from the act of doing is a student going to recognize their weaknesses in areas of the law. Please note, it will take a student practicing a few hundred multistate questions before feeling somewhat comfortable with the subject that is being tested.

For multistate review, students should make their own flash cards. Whenever a student answers a question wrong, they are to make a flash card for the rule of law that was missed. On the front of the card write the issue and on the back write the rule of law. Although this is somewhat time consuming, a review of these homemade cards throughout the semester greatly increases their chance of knowing the issue being tested and getting the correct answer on the final, baby bar or bar.

When To Start Working With Essay Questions

When beginning a law school program, a student must follow the course syllabus. Once the student has a somewhat handle on a particular area of law (i.e. Negligence in Torts, Formation in Contracts and Murder in Criminal Law), the student should then take out a practice exam that they may have received from either their professor, library reserve section or downloaded from their state bar. The student should read the exam, attempt to spot the issues, create an outline and write an answer. Remember, since the student is just beginning, it is impossible to know all the issues being tested. This is completely normal and acceptable.

A student should have a handle on the issues being tested but does not have to know it all. One will learn more from writing exams using the IEFC or IRAC method and then comparing their answer to the provided answer. Remember, the provided answer may not necessarily be the best answer but it can be used as a guideline for learning purposes.

“But I Don’t Know Enough Law”

The fear of not knowing enough law should not prevent students from working with practice examinations. Practice examinations will enable students to start applying the legal theories that have been studying. If an issue is missed in an examination, the student can go back, review the facts of the question, review the model answer and determine at that point why the issue was missed.

Practice, Practice, Practice

There is an old joke that fits this premise. A tourist stopped an old man on the road in New York and asked the old man, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The old man replied, “Practice, Practice, Practice.” The practice of writing essay examinations is similar to that of learning how to ride a bicycle in that the required skills are not inherent but have to be learned. A child begins learning to ride on a big wheel or some low riding plastic bike that allows small feet to touch the ground. In time, a tricycle is introduced and soon after a two-wheel big bike with training wheels comes out of the garage. After many, many afternoons of patience and practice, the training wheels are removed only to allow the child the greatest feeling of freedom riding the two-wheel bicycle with confidence and style.

Law students will also falter the first few times practicing with essay examinations. Many issues will be missed, rules of law will be unknown and frustrations will run high. Consistency is the key. In the beginning, it is expected that performance will be below average if not poor. In time, students will begin to see the light when with each examination taken their test taking abilities improve. Soon thereafter, students will approach essay examinations with confidence and vitality.

Take Open Book Tests

In the beginning, it is acceptable to have all books opened for easy reference. As time passes and the student’s confidence increases, exams may then be taken under timed conditions. The student’s issue spotting and writing abilities will improve with time and practice. Keep in mind; issue spotting is critical to a student’s success. The student who sees the most issues will always score the higher grade. Note, a student does not have to know everything but is required at a minimum to spot the key issues, identify and analyze those issues in the time permitted.

Eventually, students will work their way through many exams. After learning a new subject of law, a student should go back to the examination hypotheticals previously reviewed and try to issue spot those new issues. By the time students are done with that subject they will have completely worked through many exams, read numerous fact patterns which will allow them to spot issues more quickly and assist them on how to write a solid answer. When the time comes, the students can take their exams with confidence knowing they have already written ten (10) or more exams with all the key testable issues. All that a student would have to do is to plug in the facts to their developed answer approach.

Best To Learn From Your Own Mistakes

The benefits of practicing essay examinations are numerous. Students will become better issue spotters. Being familiar with many fact patterns will allow students the ability to easily recognize often tested issues. Students will learn that facts in the examination can either be used to raise a new issue or used for analysis reasoning for an already identified issue. They will learn how to outline examinations, how to apply the facts to each element of the rule and be able to put it all together to write organized responsive answers within the time allotted. Before long, answers will be written in a lawyer-like manner. More importantly, students will learn from their own mistakes. Chances are when issues are missed in practice, students learn from their mistakes and will rarely repeat the same errors during the actual examinations.