A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Ebert & Roeper and the reviewer that was filling in for Ebert had as his video pick of the week a documentary called “A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…“. He said it’s been making the rounds at the film festivals and getting really good reviews. I found it on Amazon and ordered it (when I ordered it, it was $14.99. Now, it’s $21.95. Must have gotten popular). Amy and I just watched it last night. It’s really interesting. It follows 6 law school grads as they study for the California bar exam. It’s also interspersed with interviews of well-known lawyers and commentators (Alan Dershowitz, Nancy Grace, Scott Turow, John Stossel) talking about lawyers and the craziness of the legal system. I posted a couple of short clips from it below.

It brought back a lot of memories from my time studying for the California bar. It was by far the hardest, most stressful thing I’ve gone through so far. I basically had no life other than studying for the bar for the 3 1/2 months between graduating from law school and taking the bar. For me, the main source of stress wasn’t that it was just a hard test, but that it was pass/fail. I couldn’t just stop studying and say “I’ll just accept a lower grade on this one” (something I’d done on plenty of other tests in the past). It was all or nothing, and if I didn’t pass, that pretty much erased the degree I’d just worked three years for; not to mention that it would put in jeopardy the job offer I had, the reason I was taking the California bar in the first place. It was a lot of stress. I’ll have to get Amy to post about how it was on her end. I know it was pretty brutal for her too. We stayed with Amy’s parents that summer, I don’t know how Amy could have managed with the kids if we hadn’t stayed with them. Amy was a “bar widow” that whole summer.

One of my best memories though, was coming back home after taking the bar up in Sacramento (it was the closest testing site and an hour and a half from Amy’s parents’ house so I stayed in a hotel up there for the 3 days of the test). When I walked in the door, I was greeted with balloons and a cake and a big banner that Hunter, who was 7 at the time, had written on in big letters, “Lawyer or not, you’re still our Daddy”. That was pretty great.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm3eZamdVnw

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEMBsS4VZD4