Coming Back After a Bar Exam Failure — Gearing Up to Study Again

If you sat for the summer bar exam, you now know whether you passed or failed. And if you failed, it is time to decide whether you are going to take the next bar exam offered and how you are going to prepare for it (hopefully, to get a different result). Many students are exploring preparation options or interviewing bar exam tutors. But no matter what preparation approach you take, you still have to decide how you are going to overcome your disappointment and fear of failure and find exam success.

So to support you in getting ready to study again, I want to talk about failure. Most of us hate to fail. Let’s be honest, most of us are used to being high achievers. We aren’t used to failure. It is almost shocking. So since this is a foreign concept to many bar applicants, I want to talk about how you can move past failure and get ready to take on this challenge again.

Prior to starting to study again, you must deal with the sadness around failure. 

Of course, a bar exam failure is a huge disappointment. It can create financial and professional challenges. It can throw a wrench in your future plans. You have every right to be sad, upset, and even devastated. But you must acknowledge this sadness and then choose to move forward. The sadness will get better with time. It need not be permanent. But ignoring it will not help you deal with it or move past it. (You know, some people find meditation helpful in dealing with stress, anxiety, frustration, and sadness. This is just one suggestion on how to acknowledge and cope with these emotions.)

You must take this failure as an opportunity to learn how to perform better. This means you can’t do the same thing that you did the last time. 

Learning how to perform better is a two-step process. First, in order to learn from this experience you need to identify what went wrong. This is a difficult process because it requires you to be very honest with yourself and self-evaluate what happened leading up to and on the bar exam.

Second, you need to determine what you are going to do differently. This can be exploring different study tools or working with a bar exam tutor. The key is that you can’t study in the same way and expect a different result. “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” (Coco Chanel) You must determine the tools you need to help you get where you need to be. This isn’t the same for everyone (so if someone is telling you about a “quick fix” or perfect answer for passing the bar, in my opinion, he/she is lying to you).

If you can learn to deal with failure, you will be a better lawyer (because this isn’t the last time you will have to cope with failure). 

If you are reading this blog, it is likely that you want to open a solo law practice. This means that you are going to try to build something from scratch. You are going to be an entrepreneur. And you know what comes with that? Some failure. It has been about four years since I started working for myself and one of the things I have had to learn is how to cope with failure. Because greatness doesn’t comes without risking failure. And it isn’t the failure itself that prevents you from succeeding; it is the fear of moving forward. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try one more time.” (Thomas Edison)

So try one more time. Get the help that you need to make this attempt a success. Edison also said (turns out he failed a lot and had a lot to say about it!), “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

This bar exam failure doesn’t have to define you; it can actually be something you can learn from.  You can still become a great lawyer. “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” (Maya Angelou, one of my favorite authors)

Good luck with your bar studies.