Welcome back to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. Today, we have an exciting guest - Kelsey Lee, one of our tutors on the Bar Exam Toolbox team. And we are talking about some of the most common mistakes, and also our best tips for bar exam essays. Your Bar Exam Toolbox hosts are Alison Monahan and Lee Burgess, that's me. We're here to demystify the bar exam experience, so you can study effectively, stay sane, and hopefully pass and move on with your life.
We're the co-creators of the Law School Toolbox, the Bar Exam Toolbox, and the career-related website CareerDicta. Alison also runs The Girl's Guide to Law School. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review or rating on your favorite listening app, and check out our sister podcast, the Law School Toolbox podcast. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us via the contact form on BarExamToolbox.com, and we'd love to hear from you.
And with that, let's get started. Welcome back to the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast. Today we have an exciting guest - Kelsey Lee, one of our tutors on the Bar Exam Toolbox team, and today we are talking about some of the most common mistakes and our best tips for conquering bar essays. So thank you, Kelsey, for taking time out of your day to speak with us and track some of the lessons you've learned with working with our students.
No, thanks, Lee. I'm happy to be here.
Before we get started, for folks who aren't aware of your background, could you share a little bit about what you do outside of your fabulous role of working with bar students and law students?
Yeah, absolutely. I was a practicing attorney, for a number of years at a non-profit in New Jersey, but now I am actually in Dublin, Ireland, and I'm a PhD student at the Trinity Law School. So, my research focuses on the definition of marital consent, which is basically looking at forced marriage in the U. S. and around the world, and trying to change the way that we think about that.
So, I really love that I get to still work on real kind of law stuff with my students, rather than just academic land that I'm doing over here in Ireland.
Awesome. Super interesting, the research you're doing. I always enjoy hearing about it. Let's dive in to talk about everybody's favorite topic, the bar exam. It is what we call here "bar exam season". People have gotten results all over the country. Folks are starting to study again for the upcoming administration. So I thought we would start with five common mistakes we see that students make when studying for or executing the writing portion of the exam.
So, number one on my list of mistakes was failing to follow instructions. So, this is not addressing the issues that were presented in the call of the question; just really not doing what is asked of you. So, when you work with students, do you find that this is something that happens with them, that sometimes they just forget to follow the instructions?
Absolutely. I think it's one of the top things that I see for students coming out of law school exams, is they're used to these super open-ended issue spotters: "Spot all of the Torts issues in this essay." And what you'll find on the bar is that's generally not what the question's asking you to do. They, luckily, are giving you a little bit of help in telling you to identify the potential negligence claim, or a potential battery claim.
Please use those instructions; they're trying to give you some direction. You don't need to make this like a law exam essay, and I promise there's not time for that. So, I definitely try to get my students on the MEEs to focus in on that, and especially on the MPTs, where they're telling you exactly what they want. Follow the instructions.
I think that's totally right. And we're going to talk about issue spotting in a few minutes, but I really think with bar questions... And this is specific especially to the MEE because they're 30 minutes; they're so tight. If you're talking about the California bar, those are an hour, which are much longer and may have a little more flexibility; not really about what you need to cover. But you don't have time for the kitchen sink for the MEE.
I mean, it is 30 minutes; you have to be very precise. They're asking for precision. So I think one of the things that I like to keep in mind when I look at an MEE question or an MPT question is really, they want precision. So, where am I seeing their request for precision? Are they putting it in the call of the question? Is it coming from the facts? Is it coming from the test memo?
But that word "precision" is something that just rings for me when I think about reading these questions and following any instructions or call of the questions that they have included.
Yeah, absolutely. If you can figure out exactly what they want from you, you've got a much easier task set out. Particularly when I have students who come in who have a hard time identifying it, the number one thing I recommend doing is write out the question in your own words on the head of your outline, so that you cannot deviate from what you have written the question is. It might seem simple, but it's a way to train your brain to focus in on what they're actually asking you to do.
Totally. And it may seem really simple, like you said, it may seem very obvious, but when you study a lot of these questions, you'll find that sometimes it's not so obvious. If something says, for instance, "Discuss all possible causes of action" that means that you have to take a much more broad approach than just discuss negligence, or just discuss intentional torts. And so, learning what these words mean in these instructions and these calls of the question, I think are also really critical.
And that can be done with practice.
Yeah, Absolutely. And yeah, as I said, the best thing to do is learn what those words mean in your own words, so that you are not starting from scratch with every question.
Okay, let's move on to number two. So we talked about failing to follow instructions, and number two I wanted to highlight was poor time management. We've already been starting about the tight timeframe for those MEEs, and even those 60 minutes in California feels really tight when you're in the moment, and the 90 minutes for the performance test. But what are some of the time management mistakes you see your students make on the exam?
The big thing I see is a total disconnect in the length of your sections. And we're going to talk, I think, about organization and structure in a little bit here, but the total disconnect between what the question is asking and how much time and word count you dedicate to each part of the essay.
I find that it's particularly difficult for students who maybe have some actual real life law experience - which is great - but they are used to dealing with clients with a lot of facts and they want to show the client that they know all of those facts, but there's simply not time to write every fact that they've given you from the hypo. You have to be very selective with the ones that you use, and we'll talk about that more when I give some tips for organizing your structure.
But making sure that if you have a two-part answer, you know exactly how much time you'd like to spend on each part. If you have a 30-minute essay and you've spent more than 15 minutes on one part, you might want to start thinking about moving on to the next, and really being strict with yourself right from the beginning of your bar exam practice, right? Because you want to internalize that timing for yourself way before you get into the actual exam room.
You should not have one section that takes up multiple pages and one that's one paragraph. Obviously, every question is different, but it's good to get into the habit of giving equal time to each part of the question, if you can.
Yeah. Let's get into this, because I've been talking to a lot of people about this as I talk to people who failed the bar, because this idea of stealing time from other questions seems to be...
It must be on Reddit somewhere, because it feels like it's an epidemic with folks that I've been talking to right now, is this idea of, "If I just have really good ideas about what I do for question number one, and question number two is just going to be a dumpster fire, then I'm going to just get all the points possible for question number one, and we'll see what happens with question number two."
And I think that's generally problematic, because statistically, let's say on the scale that the UBE uses, you get a one, and then you get a four or a five on the one that you spent all the extra time on that's great, but if you average those two together, they're not so great. And part of the problem is - and I think this is one of the things that often gets lost - as you get higher up in the scores, you get to more rarefied error.
I think the difference between a five and a six or a four and a five might be one minor issue or a couple minor issues, but to get to a three, I think that just laying the groundwork is going to get you to a two or a three. So, you're fighting with that extra time to get into that rarefied error, which overall, when you average things together, I believe you're better off trying to get to the three than you are trying to get one more point between that four or five.
I don't know, do you agree with me? This is a loaded question: Do you agree with me?
I completely agree with you. And I always say to my students, why is it either/or? Why are you making the decision when you see one question that, "Oh, this is going to be the one that I nail", right? So you're spending all of your time on question number two. I always say with good time management, you can get through your first draft of all of the essays, and then go back and make sure that if, "Oh, you know what?
I have a little bit of extra time and wow, couldn't I add something really spectacular to essay number two?" - fantastic. Great. That might get you that little difference between a four and a five, or even a five or a six. But to make that call in the moment that I've decided to throw all my eggs into one basket, it's just not, in my opinion, going to even out for you, as you said. It's just the difference between a one and a four is massive, in terms of how they average out.
So if you can at least get to a three or a four, why wouldn't you want to do that, if possible? And as I said, if you're really managing your time from the beginning of your bar practice, I've had students who have said, "Actually, Kelsey, I did have time to go back and add a cool counter-argument to an essay that I felt good about, but I didn't do it till the end. You'd be so proud of me", because I kept on them about that the whole time.
Yeah, I know. And I also think another good thing to keep in mind is this idea that the test is really testing what the best possible answer you can write in the time allowed is. And so that is really what you want to keep in mind. They're not asking for a novel for question number one; they're asking for the best possible question that can be written in the time allowed. And I think if you can keep that framework in your mind, I also think that that can help you stay disciplined.
But it is really a question of self-discipline to allocate your time equally, and don't get caught up in all of these schemes. I mean, they sound great, but they almost never work out well.
Yeah, completely agree. I once actually had a student tell me - and it was really nice of him - that I helped gamify the bar for him. I think he just meant that I made it more fun, which is great in feedback, but I pushed back on him and said I don't really think there is a way to gamify the bar to that extent. It's more about being strict with yourself and following your routine that you have down, right?
These Reddit threads - and we've all heard them - it sounds great to game the bar, but I haven't found a way to do it. I don't think that that's the best way to go in. I think you come in with your strategy.
Exactly. I'm not a gambling person myself; I'm very risk averse, and so I never like all of these tactics that feel like I'm gambling. It's just not really my personality structure. But I do think you can be thoughtful, using statistics, which we do what are the most heavily tested areas of the law, what are the most heavily tested types of questions? We always see certain types of questions very commonly, so you shouldn't be surprised to see civil procedure on the UBE. It's very heavily tested.
I like that kind of gaming. That's just data. Oh
that's preparing.
But beyond that... That's preparing, good point. That's just preparing, not gaming.
Exactly. If you want to call preparing a "game" because it makes it feel more doable, that's awesome. And I love that student felt that way. But I want people to go in to feel prepared with their strategy for the exam, not somebody on Reddit.
100%. 100%. Okay, let's move on to number three. I can't believe we're only on three, I feel like we've had a lot to say. It's almost like we do this for a living. But number three is lack of organization or a structure. We read a lot of failing essays, because folks send us their packets for those jurisdictions that let you read their packets, and oftentimes it is just a complete lack of organization. It is just a vomiting of issues on the page. And that just really makes your score suffer.
It makes it so hard to grade, it makes it hard to read, it makes it hard to write.
Completely. I think if there's anything that I work on the most with my students, it's organization and structure. That tends to fall by the wayside for people mentally, as they're so worried about memorization. And I always say it should be the first thing you care about, because that's the thing that you can control. Yes, you can control how much you study and how much you memorize, and that's all great. But you, at the end of the day, can't control exactly what they decide to test.
But you can control exactly how you're going to attack essays. So, if you could control one thing and feel confident about it before the exam, I would do it. So, I really like my students to have a very defined structure in how they do their headers, how they do their sub-headers, and particularly how they lay out their IRAC structure.
So, I'm pretty strict about it with my students, and I think that even if it's a little frustrating at the beginning to get used to, it makes things a lot easier the whole rest of the time.
I think that's true. I also see this focus on organization and structure to really be scaffolding that provides structure when things aren't maybe going so swimmingly. So, let's say almost everyone who sits for the bar is anxious, right? I'm sure you were anxious for your bar, I was anxious for my bar. There's that anxiety and the good adrenaline, and then there's when it tips over into not so helpful adrenaline, and your brain gets flooded and you have a hard time.
Structure and process help you get through that. It tells you where to start, it tells you what to do next, and then it gives you that framework that you can rely on while your busy mind is trying to get it together. I also think it's doubly important for anyone who has attention deficit issues, which let's be honest, in this modern world, almost all of us have some form of attention deficit issues, whether it's been diagnosed or not.
But it allows you to remain focused and organized, which is so critical under this massive time pressure. So, if you do get accommodations for anything like anxiety or ADHD, I think that this point is even more critical for that population of students, because you need the scaffolding to rely on when it gets hard in the moment. Time is tight, you don't have a lot of time to regroup. Even if you get accommodations or you get extended time, that time is still tight.
It doesn't feel like a luxury in the moment, so you still have to have this organization that you can rely on.
Yeah, absolutely. And I have students who come in and when I tell them how rigid I'd like them to be with their structure, they get a little confused. They're like, "How am I supposed to have my headings be the same every time on different legal issues?" Well, I have a structure I like to use. This is just what I like; obviously it's different for everyone. But one thing I suggest to my students is, "yes, no, because".
You're going to be faced with the question of, "Is this law constitutional?" Your header can be, "Yes, the law is constitutional, because it falls under the Commerce Clause." Whatever it is. And if you can do every one of your headers, "yes, no, because", you'd be shocked how well that works.
And it seems simple because it is, but sometimes it's better to say something simply and clearly than get yourself all turned around and feel like you're making up on the spot, on the fly every header that you want to use for different essay types.
And if you can have those strategies before you go in, about exactly how you want to do your headers, how you want to do your IRAC - you're taking away some decision fatigue on the day of the exam, which is a huge, huge thing that you can do yourself a favor and get rid of some of that decision making.
I love that. I also like to think about the grader and who's grading these questions. I like to imagine my grader with a glass of wine, maybe sparkling water, sitting at their desk, and then realizing they have a giant stack of questions. Put yourself in their position of having to read a giant stack of bar questions. You and I grade bar questions. I prefer not to grade a giant stack of them, because it's kind of hard. It's hard, and they're going through them pretty fast.
And so, having this format and having this organization and these clear headers, you're making their job so easy. You're saying, "Hey, bar grader, look at my header. I am so confident in what I am talking about that I made it so easy for you to know that I should pass this question." I mean, it just is a gift, really, so just be very generous. Give the grader this gift of making their job very easy, so they can just pass you and move on to the next one.
You definitely don't want them to read too carefully. You just want them to read quickly and have confidence that you did it right.
Exactly, exactly. I know some of our other tutors have taught as well at colleges and law schools. I taught at Kean University as a professor and I now teach here at Trinity as a lecturer. And I can tell you, if I get an essay with nice headers, nice and broken down, not big, long, winding paragraphs, I am more than likely to bump that up a grade. And the same thing applies on the bar. Make your grader's life easier.
Yes. Oh my gosh, I had a professor in law school - my Criminal Law professor - he's retired now, but he used to just do happy faces and sad faces. Those were his comments. You'd get the paper back and he'd be like, happy face. And you're like, "Great." And then it would go, sad face. And I thought that was very honest where he's like, "I'm very disappointed in the direction this has taken."
I don't know if my students would think that was quite enough feedback, but it would get my point across.
It's just a visual representation of the emotional rollercoaster that is grading papers. Very true. Oh, yes. Okay, next up, number four is the common mistake of having insufficient legal analysis, because this really goes back to the whole instructions part. Oftentimes, people forget that in the instructions, they tell you that you're supposed to have legal analysis - that's one of the things you're being graded on. And it gets lost in the shuffle often.
Those are where the points come from, so you have to explain. You were mentioning the "because" in the header, but we need a lot of "because" in each issue to show the grader that we are using law and facts together.
Yeah, definitely. And this is another one where we all come out of law school kind of thinking we know how to do this, and it's awesome if you are already working on this at a firm or at a clerkship. But the amount of legal analysis you need to do on the bar and how quickly you need to do it is a really tough, unique skill.
They're, again, maybe frustrating for my students at the beginning of studying, but what I make my students do, and I highly recommend it, is when you write an essay, you've written your rule - what you think is enough, you've written your facts - what you think are enough, and I make them draw an arrow from every fact to the rule it relates back to. It's a great way to double check, "Have I explained every rule that I laid out?
Have I included a fact that is not relevant because I can't link it back to any rule that I need to explain to the bar examiner?" The way a nice essay should be set up in terms of analysis is that you explain all the rules you need, and no more facts than you need to explain those rules. They should all tie together very succinctly. And drawing those little arrows, it might feel kind of silly, but it really helps get that skill down.
Because I see students come in with either long, rambling rule statements, everything you could want under the sun, and they don't do any analysis; or they have one sentence of a rule, and then they try to pack all the other rules into their application. And we don't want either of that.
Yeah, 100%. I think we call it finding the facts. You've got to find those facts, you've got to draw those lines. It's so important. It feels silly, but there's a lot of silliness to get confidence to pass the bar. So, nobody's going to know that you did exercises with arrows. So just do it, because it helps.
Yeah, definitely.
Number five is a big one, which we've already touched on a few different points in this discussion, is poor issue spotting. If you don't have all the important legal issues down there, you just can't get all the points.
Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that students struggle with on the MEEs, the MPTs, and on the MBE as well, right? This is where you've got it all coming together, and practice on one is going to help with practice on the others, right? I always say that practice for the MBE feels like a pain, but it is actually a tutor's dream, because a big part of our job is just coming up with hypos to explain the rules to you.
Here we go, here are hundreds of mini hypos for you to learn how to spot the rule. So, practicing your MBEs will help you spot your rules in your essays, and vice versa. The more practice you do, the more you're going to be able to see what sort of language they're using to make you pick up on certain legal issues. And the only way to do it is just to do a bunch of problems.
Yeah, 100%. Okay, so we've talked about our five common mistakes. Now let's flip this all on its head and switch to our top five tips for solving these mistakes and finding success on the bar exam essays. So, number one is one of my favorites. We've been talking about it for the decade plus that we have been doing this work - practice, practice, and when you're done with that, do a bit more practice. So, why do you find practice is so important for your students?
I think it's the number one most important thing, I think it's why Bar Exam Toolbox works. And for my students, we emphasize practice over everything. Of course, there's a lot of memorization for the bar - we all know that. But you can have an outline memorized and not know how to apply it, right? That happens all the time. It happens to me, where I will think I know something backwards and forwards and when I go to write about it, I don't know where to start.
And the only way to combat that is to do as many practice problems as you can and be getting feedback about those problems.
And that feedback can come from a tutor like us, it can come from your bar review provider, it can come from yourself. You can compare them to model answers. I think the key really is to evaluate your work, or have it evaluated. But even if you're getting it evaluated, make sure you study that work. Try and rewrite it.
Solve the problems you see and use this practice as a learning opportunity, because just doing it and then just checking a box and be like, "I did my practice" - that's good, but it's better if you can say, "And I now have learned how to apply this rule of the Commerce Clause", or whatever it might be. You can use that opportunity for feedback, whether it's feedback to yourself or from somebody else, to really change your writing style or solidify your substantive knowledge.
But that feedback element is really important.
Definitely. I agree.
Okay, number two is to understand the format and expectations. So, you were talking about a great tip for how to format your headers, but what other format expectations do you have to make your grader happy while they're sipping their bubbly water, reading their stack of essays?
I definitely think having that structure ready to go is important, and I'll just give some other ones that have really worked for my students. So I laid out that "yes, no, because". A lot of students don't know what the difference is between a main header, a conclusion header that "yes or no", and your sub-headers. My answer is always, the sub-headers answer the "because". Because why? Because why? Because why?
So if, for example, I have something like I'll come back to my example before, "This law is constitutional, because it falls under the Commerce Clause." Because why? "Because the Commerce Clause controls activities in the aggregate." Explain that rule. Explain how it works. Because this is in the aggregate. So on and so forth, right? So having your headers broken down like that.
Using other techniques like I mentioned about separating your rule and application, making sure you explain the facts that are relevant to that. Knowing when to stop your rule section is important. I always say to my students, once you get to a sentence that's all in plain English, you're probably ready to move on. If you're still using a lot of legalese to explain what you're talking about, you probably haven't explained it fully enough.
So once you hit a sentence where it's all in plain English, you're probably ready to go. But the only way to get a feel for that is if you do a lot of practice problems, write a lot of rule statements, and understand what it means to take something from a word in legalese into something that makes sense and shows that you understand the definition.
Yeah, I think that's a really great tip, and something that folks really need to take into their practice. This is why we do the practice, so you can experiment and see how it's going. So I love that. This all is linked to what we were talking about earlier, which is my tip number three, which is managing your time effectively. You have to not only allocate it between the questions, but also within the question. So, how do you suggest to your students that they manage time within the question?
I think that's the hardest thing for students to do, especially on the day. I'll come back always to setting times for yourself as stringently as possible in the studying process. Our brains learn to do the work we train them to do. So, if you have not trained your brain to work under time pressure before the day of the exam, it's just not going to happen on the day for the exam. When I'm breaking down a question, I like to think about... Let's say I have half an hour for each question.
Obviously, if you're in California, that's going to be different. But let's say we're doing a UBE, 30 minutes. I recognize that I have three parts of this question that I need to answer. I need to make sure that I'm allocating a similar amount of time for every sub-question. It might not end up being exactly equal, because you do need a little bit of time to read over your question, to outline your answer, but no one part should be massively more time than any other.
And you're only going to know how much time you need to break down your essays if you've done a lot of practice and written down for yourself exactly how much time you want to be taking on certain questions. You shouldn't be getting into the bar exam and being surprised by how long anything's taking you. Do a lot of practice, keep a log of how long you're taking, and adjust from there.
I love that. And the same rules apply if you get extended time. You just do it in your extended time.
Absolutely, yeah. I said 30 minutes for
example. That can oftentimes be a point of confusion. Exactly, I love that. Okay, number four really relates to this, is this idea that we need to spot issues quickly. And one of the ways that you do this is not just through your practice, but really learning the law in a way that allows you to have an attack plan in your head, so you can quickly issue spot and know what issues can be raised by facts. One example that I like to always give is thinking about evidence.
So if someone says, "I've been studying evidence for hours and hours and hours", and I say, "Great, give me a list of the hearsay exceptions." And then there's like a pause, a long pause. We won't do that example on this podcast, but there could be a pause and I'm like, "Okay, how about one?" And then they'll be like, "Present sense impression", and I'll be like, "Okay, now what's the rule for present sense impression?" And then there can be another pause.
The reason why I use this example so much is, on one hand, it sounds impossible. Although when you're studying for the bar, you should have that list. You should have a list of hearsay exceptions memorized with simple rule statements for each of them, knowing what's different, let's say, between a present sense impression and an excited utterance. But it's also freeing to know that, because you can then quiz yourself.
And when you've done hours of practice of evidence and you come back and say, "Am I ready to go?" And if you ask yourself, "Can I give myself a list of hearsay exceptions?", and if your answer is "no", then you can say, "Uh-oh, I need to go back and do something different."
Absolutely. For me, when I passed the bar, it was all about flashcards. Back in that day, Pennsylvania had its own essay questions, so we had even more state laws to learn. And so, I just knew I needed different sets of flashcards that I made myself. Not that commercial flashcards can't be helpful for some people, but writing out flashcards can be super helpful for things like the evidence hearsay exceptions, the scrutiny tests for constitutional law.
In each subject, there's probably something that comes to mind of just a bare of a list that you need to tackle. Quick recall like flashcards are super, super helpful. Or writing it out multiple times so it just becomes muscle memory for you. Exactly using those recall techniques is really important for the common issues that come up again and again.
And cognitive science has shown us that forcing yourself to recall is one of the ways that you actually learn, even if you make a mistake. Making a mistake and correcting a mistake is more memorable than just getting it right. So, you want to create these situations for you to make mistakes.
So if you tell yourself, "Write down all the hearsay exceptions" and you get them wrong, and you may feel demoralized - know that by correcting it and doing it again, you're more likely to remember it the next time. So, all of this is in an effort to get more confident in what you're doing. Okay, it's time for number five. Believe it or not, we've come to the last tip.
Not that this is our only tips, because we have hundreds upon hundreds of Bar Exam Toolbox podcast episodes of tips, but I think this was one that is often overlooked, which is to write clearly and concisely. And I think that so often we can get sucked into feeling like we have to sound like a lawyer, which folks sometimes believe that means that you have to be very verbose or use fancy terminology or large words.
This is often why foreign-trained attorneys struggle, because they feel that their writing isn't up to a certain level that it needs to be. But really, they want you to just write in short, simple sentences. They're not reading carefully enough to appreciate crafted language.
Absolutely. My first thing that I say to every student - and if you walk away with nothing else from me in terms of writing advice - is if you can't say something simply, you don't understand it well enough. It's what I tell myself all the time, it's what I tell my students all the time. If you find yourself spinning your wheels, adding in fluff, you don't understand it well enough.
What I said before - to loop back to an advice for the rule statement - you know that you've explained your rule statement enough when you get to a sentence that has no legalese in it. A lot of students freak out because they think, "If there's no legalese, how will they know that I know the law?" They will know the law because you have explained the law so clearly that there are no more fancy legalese terms that you're trying to just throw in that you don't really understand.
So, if you can say it simply, you understand it. And that's where you want to get.
Yeah. I think Alison a long, long time ago wrote a blog post about explaining the law to your grandmother, which I think is a great way to think about it. And not like your lawyer grandmother. My kids have a lawyer grandmother - that's not helpful. You need it to be a layperson grandmother. And if you can explain it to your grandmother or any other adult without any specialized skills in your life, then I think you're on the right track.
Yeah. I think I may have read that, because I'm old enough that I was in law school when we were just doing the blog. But yeah, absolutely. I had a lawyer grandfather, but a non-lawyer grandmother, and I do think about explaining things to her. And you know what? Lean on your support system for that. I can't tell you how much cheesecake I had to buy my mother at the bar exam, just to make her listen to me explain concepts to her. So, use the opportunity.
There is a lot of data showing that saying things out loud helps us remember them. So, explain these concepts to somebody in your support network and see if you can make them understand.
That's right. Or your dog. I mean, we've had people teach their dogs, and I think it can be a really great tool. I did have a cat; he is gone now. But I've been doing this work so long that he used to sit in my office and listen to me do teaching calls. And I joked that he was probably fully qualified to sit for the bar after years and years of listening to my lectures on the law. He could have had really great legal analysis skills that we just never really tapped into.
Yeah, you never know. Whatever works for you.
Exactly. With that, we're about out of time, but Kelsey, thank you for taking some time to join us to share some of your wisdom. Any final pieces of advice for folks who are getting ready for this upcoming administration?
Yeah. I think it might be, at this point, really tempting to feel really frantic. Frantic writing is not how you want to approach things. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. That comes from studying as well. Carve out time for yourself, take a deep breath, make sure you understand it, make sure you can explain it, practice as much as you can, and you'll be fine.
Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Kelsey.
Thanks, Lee!
And with that, we’re out of time. If you enjoyed this episode of the Bar Exam Toolbox podcast, please take a second to leave a review and rating on your favorite listening app. We’d really appreciate it. And be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Lee or Alison at [email protected] or [email protected]. Or you can always contact us via our website contact form at BarExamToolbox.com.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk soon!