Hell Week

Yes, studying for the bar is actually harder than law school itself. At least at first.

I know you're all dying to learn about the ins and outs of bar preparation, so here it goes. Essentially, there are two complimentary and oligopolistic bar review programs. One is PMBR, which focuses exclusively on the multistate exam (but repeatedly reminds you that studying for the multistate helps you prepare for the essays), and meets for six days at the beginning of summer and three days at the end. The other is BarBri (founded by a Boalt alum who assuredly made more money with his price-gouged review course than he could have hoped to make as an attorney), a 10-week comprehensive jive that prepares you for the multistate, essay, and performance sections.

The two programs are complimentary, even to the extent that PMBR schedules around BarBri, though both take every opportunity to confuse you by criticizing each other. The funny man on the PMBR video assures you that the multistate is the most important thing, that you can bullshit the essays, and that you absolutely must do 50 multiple choice questions every night. The nice lady at the BarBri lecture says that wasting three hours a night on multiple choice questions is a bad move, that you really need to read the Conviser Mini Reviews, and that the essays are much more important than the multistate (in the case of California, at least, this is true - the multistate accounts for only 35% of your scaled score).

Anyway, most students who take both courses take PMBR the week before BarBri starts, meaning that a good chunk of my friends graduated on May 14th and started PMBR on May 16th. Me, I took a week off to spend time with Meli, pushing PMBR back a week. Which means that I've been going to BarBri (in Berkeley) in the morning and PMBR (at various ghetto-fabulous hotels on Van Ness) at night. My life has been a constant sine wave of caffeine crests and sugar-crash troughs, with the occasional penisy blog post thrown in as I try to lull myself to sleep.

As lousy as this week has been, I'm comforted by the fact that PMBR ends on Saturday, I have Monday off, I have my first golf lesson on Tuesday (hooray! golf!), and this week's spirit-crushing miasma of wrong answers, stimulants, and videotapes is a small price to pay for having spent last week with the wife. Really. Last week rocked.