Five Years Past the Bar Exam
I did pass.
Ten years ago, I spent a summer in Moscow, Idaho. It was my first off campus apartment, and my job was only in the evenings, so I spent a lot of time sweating in my un-air conditioned apartment. It was at some point over this hot, slow summer that I decided I wanted to go to law school.
My dad is a lawyer, and when I called to tell him my decision, there was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then he chuckled and said, “You’ll never be rid of me.”
I did indeed become a lawyer, but nothing about being a lawyer has turned out how I thought it would nine years ago.
The law school years: 2017-2020
I sat for the LSAT the spring of my junior year. I applied to the only law school I was interested in the fall of my senior year, because it was attached to my undergrad university and had a campus in Boise. My now-husband had a job lined up in Boise, our families live here, and so I was only interested in going to the Boise campus. I got in and after graduation we settled into our first apartment.
As I’ve alluded to, I was a very Type A honors student. I graduated college with a 4.0, double-majoring in English, with a creative writing emphasis, and psychology. I liked high school, I loved college. I expected law school to be difficult, and it was, but I also wildly underestimated how much work I had to do.
You don’t hand in assignments in law school. You might have a midterm, but most of your grade comes down to your performance on the final, which is graded on an absolutely merciless curve. However, the motivation to read for each class comes in the form of being prepared if the professor calls on you.
This is known as the Socratic method. Each professor had a different approach, but it more or less was random in the first year as to who would get called. As you might imagine, there were a lot of Type A honors students whose worst fear was to be scolded by a teacher, so I was not alone in always completing the reading…at least in the first year.
Each class required reading between 40-60 pages of case law for each class, most classes were held twice a week, and most students took 5 classes a semester. I was no stranger to a large amount of reading, having been an English major, but this was on a whole new level. I came up with a very complex highlighting system to be able to quickly recall critical information from each case when called on in class.
Finals were something else. Spread out over two weeks, rather than one, each final was slated for a four hour time block. You could only apply to have one rescheduled if you had three finals scheduled back to back: morning, afternoon, morning. One semester, I had the following finals schedule:
Monday morning: Constitutional Law (mercifully the shortest final, about an hour)
Wednesday morning: Criminal Law (4 hours)
Thursday afternoon: Education Law (4 hours, and I actually ran out of time)
Friday morning: Business Associations (3 hours, 45 minutes, when I simply gave up because my brain was fried)
Monday morning: Intellectual Property Law (4 hours)
The point of this ramble: law school was incredibly difficult. There were plenty of times I hated it, when I cried from the stress of finals. There was also plenty I loved about it, as someone who enjoys school and enjoys learning.
My last year I did an externship for the family law judges in town, and loved every minute of it. I finished that fall semester determined to become the best family law attorney I could, and had aspirations of one day becoming a judge.
That was fall 2019.
Not to be cliche, but that was the spring everything changed.
The bar exam, but make it pandemic
After spring break in 2020, all of my classes were by Zoom. They were converted to pass/fail rather than A/B/C/D grades. We didn’t have a graduation ceremony, or any sort of commencement. We simply started studying for the bar exam right after we took our last finals (remotely).
Quick facts about the bar exam:
It is held twice a year, once in July and once in February
Each state gets to decide what exam to give
Idaho is one of the states that administers the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE)
It is held over two days, six hours each
The first day is essays: 6 short essays in the morning, 2 long essays in the afternoon
The second day is 200 multiple choice questions
You study pretty much from graduation in mid-May until the exam at the end of July, and you can’t work as a lawyer without passing it
In 2020, there was a great deal of uncertainty about how they would hold the exam in the midst of a global pandemic. For weeks, there was uncertainty about whether we would be able to sit for it but we were told to study as if we would get to take it. That uncertainty made an already difficult task that much harder.
They did hold the bar exam. I did sit for it, in a mask, six feet away from everyone else. I remember at one point I took a bathroom break and just stared at my reflection, fighting to keep my breathing under control. Wearing a mask, coupled with anxiety around the biggest test I’d ever taken, made it feel like I could not fully catch my breath.
I finished the second day, went home, and ate most of a pint of ice cream. Two months later, I found out that I had in fact passed.
The profession of law changed seemingly overnight.
Before I even decided to go to law school, I had worked for my dad’s law firm in high school doing the filing and the court run—you know, back before everything was filed electronically and you still had to take physical pleadings to the courthouse to file them. I read everything interesting and tagged along to court to see my dad argue pleadings or help him with documents during trials.
I had a pretty good idea of what it would be like to be a lawyer in the day to day, far more than I would have had if I had gone into law school with no prior experience. That, coupled with my externship working for the judges, had convinced me that while it would be hard, a lot of it would be enjoyable.
The law is not something that changes quickly. But COVID fundamentally altered the practice of law, at least in terms of litigation, in a matter of weeks.
In the jurisdiction where I practiced, all hearings and trials were held via Zoom for the first two years. Then it became dependent on each judge, so it was a hopscotch mix of Zoom and in person.
On the surface, that doesn’t seem like a huge shift. But all the hearings being by Zoom meant that there was no chance to meet other lawyers in the hallway, to negotiate waiting for your motion to be called, or to simply form any sort of professional relationship. Sitting in a Zoom waiting room, sometimes for upwards of an hour, meant that I could see new emails hitting my inbox but could not feasibly address them since my motion could be called at any moment.
People also changed. When your only form of communication is by email, with the occasional voicemail, you tend to be more aggressive. Writing also leaves more room for interpretation when it comes to the tone of the words, so even emails that weren’t meant to be aggressive and demanding came across as such. Clients also became more demanding, furious that they did not receive a response within minutes and absolutely appalled that the court system had slowed down in response to COVID.
I knew I would spend a lot of my professional life arguing, but I was under the impression, based on what I saw pre-COVID, that those arguments would be legal or factual ones. I did not imagine I would be arguing with my own client about whether or not they had to comply with a discovery request, or explaining to them how community property applied to their circumstances. I certainly didn’t expect to conduct barbed arguments, laced with personal attacks, over email with other attorneys when I had seen firsthand how well attorneys could get along, even when they were on opposing sides.
In short, this was not the profession I signed up to do for thirty years of my one and only life.
I struggled for a long time with the realization that I did not want to litigate.
When I first realized I could not bring myself to litigate family law cases as I had once thought, I was ashamed. I had gone to law school, gone into debt with student loans to do it, my dad had built up his practice in anticipation of handing it over to me, and my husband and I had built a life on the presumption that I would be a lawyer. Now I didn’t want to do any of that?
I felt like a failure.
Around the same time, I had my second chemical pregnancy. I decided that even if stress wasn’t the cause, I knew it wasn’t helping. With my dad’s blessing, I stopped doing any in court work. I became the person who drafted, who worked with clients on document collection, and nothing else. That continued through my pregnancy. Ironically, the same month I went on maternity leave (early, because the twins did try to come at 34 weeks) was the same month court went back to mostly in person.
When I came back from maternity leave, I knew I needed to pivot to a different way of practicing law.
This opportunity came in the form of my younger brother. He started a small investment firm, and my dad enlisted me to help with the legal side. I am able to work part time right now learning this new area of law while also staying home three days a week with my kids.
I am very fortunate to have a close relationship with my family to be able to make this change at a pace that suits me. That is not lost on me, and I am very grateful for it. I also don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with going into a profession one of your parents practices, or going to work for a family business. Was it easier than striking out on my own? Yes, but I don’t believe doing something the hard way simply to be able to say you did it on your own is inherently better than doing something the easier way.
And make no mistake, while it is definitely easier to work with my dad and brother than it would be to work in a big firm, I still had to do the work of law school and passing the bar exam. It’s also not an area of law that comes easily to me, so I have to really work to learn and retain all the new information.
Did I ever think I would do corporate law? Hell no. Is it boring? Sometimes yes, but it is also far less stressful than family law. It also allows me to stay home with the twins, still bring in some income, and not incur the costs of childcare thanks to the two grandmas who each take the twins one day a week.
This is what works now. I anticipate I will work more once the twins are old enough to go to preschool and then of course once they are in school full time. I don’t feel trapped into a stressful career by my own desire not to quit. It’s okay that I quit/am quitting the stressful role that isn’t at all what I thought it would be. I don’t need to suffer simply because of a decision I made when I was younger and had less knowledge than I do now.
Ultimately, I would not change my decision to go to law school.
There was a time when I would not have said that. I kept quiet, but for maybe a year, I regretted going to law school. I couldn’t reconcile the profession as it actually was with the life I wanted to live. These days, I am glad I chose a profession that allows me to work for my brother’s company and actually add value. I am glad that eventually I will be able to take over my dad’s role and let him retire, if he ever is so inclined. But I am also glad that I have been able to untether my identity and self worth from my career.
I’m curious how many other people, particularly women who were high achieving students, find themselves questioning their chosen career as they enter their late twenties/early thirties. If you are one, or were one, I’d be interested to know what you want to change or what changes you did make. If you’re willing, share in the comments.
Until next time,
Elizabeth
