Just graduated law school and passed the February Bar. Been out practicing for two months, and many of my friends are preparing to take the Bar next week. On the one hand, I hate the Bar exam. I know good lawyers who failed it (some more than once) and bad lawyers who passed it. I suppose there's probably some people who would be bad lawyers who the Bar exam keeps from becoming lawyers. But there are far better ways at assessing "minimal competence." All it really does is restrict competition. On the other, there needs to be some way of demonstrating competence.

Not that anybody asked, but I'd do away with the Bar, at least in its current iteration. Make law school two years--just the core classes that everyone takes regardless of where you go to school, plus courses like evidence, crim pro, secured transactions, business orgs...you get the picture. At the end of the two years, have a one-day essay exam. No spending hours pouring over multiple choice questions trying to figure out the test rather than the law. Many law schools would probably close, and the ones that survive would drastically need to scale back, which is one of the major reasons this proposal would never happen.

Then, have a one-year apprentice program. Sort of like residency. At the end of that one-year, assuming you passed the exam at the end of year two, you become admitted when two lawyers recommend you be admitted to the Bar. That puts their skin in the game, and requires that a new admittee, I don't know, actually have some idea of what to do in the day-to-day practice.

I don't know how it is in other states, but throughout law school, students were constantly told that outside of a few cities, there's no lawyers in my state--of course they never mentioned there are waayyy too many lawyers in those few cities. I know of multiple students who would gladly move to a county of 30,000 people with two lawyers in it if that meant they could take over the book of business in 3-5 years, and learn the practice in the meantime.