Does It Matter If Candidates Have Failed The Bar Exams In The Past
[00:00:00] Do law firms or other legal employers ever ask candidates if they failed the bar exam in the past?
No, I don't think so. I don't see why they would, but they may.
The only way they would know is if people will get out of school and they'll work at a firm for a year, and then there'll be admitted to the bar in that state where they were working six months later or something, and people will realize that they were fired for not passing the bar. Then they'll have a period of unemployment.
That's really the only way that employers would ever figure that out. If you were working in the firm for at least a year and then suddenly weren't working there. We're a few decades now, I haven't heard of law firms that ever ask that question, but they will be able to tell if you've been on a ploy because you haven't passed the bar or you've been fired.
Some markets are a little stiffer than others, but in California, since so many people failed the bar, most law firms will give people at least two chances. Sometimes we hadn't given three, but I've heard of people failed the bar twice. And then the firm given the third chance, even AmLaw 100 firms, but that's rare most of the time, if you fail twice, you lose your [00:01:00] job.
And it's like that on other states too. So the example would be if you started. September of 2021. And then, and you worked in a firm until November, 2020 to the law firm, and you never admitted to the bar. And then you're suddenly admitted to the bar and may of 2023, and then you're applying for jobs as you're unemployed, they could tell, but most firms won't ever ask. Their biggest concern is if you can do the job, if you want the job, you'll do the job longer term and if they like you and different people have different explanations for not passing the bar or even taking it. There was an instance, that's funny, actually, but the first firm I worked at had someone working there for five or six years that never took the bar and said they didn't take the bar because they were too busy working on cases and so forth.
And they were so bad. That the law firm was actually fine. They were just writing briefs and stuff and they weren't signing anything. And their love for wasn't doing anything illegal, where they kept paying them as a first year, second year, third year, fourth year, fifth year associate. And then eventually they were like, you've got to take the bar.
This is ridiculous. And the person's no, I just have all this stuff to do. And [00:02:00] they were still billing all these hours. So the firm wasn't that concerned. And then they found out that the person, he graduated from Columbia law school, but then they hadn't finished their last semester or something.
You hear about that kind of stuff all the time.
