"I'm a 3L at Drexel university in Philadelphia, concentrating in health law and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduation. I will be taking the July 21 bar exam. What is the best time to start applications? Is it too early to apply now?"You can start applying to things right now, but the San Francisco Bay Area is an extremely - unless you have contacts in San Francisco, it can be a very difficult market to break into because there's so many attorneys there. But if you have a health law background, I think that's a good market to work in. I think that health law is a great practice area and it's a very niche practice area. Especially, if you've done anything to do with healthcare law before. I would be careful about making sure that San Francisco is the only place you wanna work.
I think you can definitely get a job there, but it is very expensive and it's a very large and sophisticated legal market. You wanna make sure that you're prepared to compete with a lot of other attorneys there. I see people coming out of schools all the time with LLM degrees, and you're not an LLM, but with health law and education and other types of specialties. And they actually do very well. They get jobs because there's not a lot of people there experienced. I would love it also, if you got an LLM in health law, I think that would be very helpful for you. But I don't think it's wrong to start the applications now, but law firms are always nervous about hiring people in California without the bar, unless they've been summer associates there and that sort of thing. Because it's just, it's a tough exam. Anybody can pass it. You just need to study a lot. And that's the big caveat with that exam.
You need to really make sure you do nothing, but from the second you get out of school and your classes start, just make studying for that like a 12 hour a day job, and then you'll pass. But most people don't do that, and that's why the majority of people or a good percentage don't pass it, because they don't study a lot. But I would start applications probably right after taking the bar. But you could certainly start them now. You could send out a bunch of applications now, and then do it again after the bar and even apply to the same places. They may not respond right now, and they won't reject you. They won't remember getting your application there.
