Why?

Because twice each year the State Bar hands them a gift in the form of an immensely powerful marketing tool. This marketing tool is easily adapted by each Bar Prep program to fit its own unique style and teaching method, and it comes with an iron-clad, time-tested, guarantee of effectiveness.

What is this Most Powerful Marketing Tool, you ask? Well, rather than tell you, I’ll show you. Click here for the answer.

Yes friends, the answer is the means by which the State Bar inflicted great mental anguish on most of the students just two short weeks ago. Two Weeks Ago! That has to be a record for the quickest release of test questions ever. I wonder if they’re going to publish the “released� high scoring student answers on the same accelerated schedule. I seem to recall that they didn’t post the released answers for the February 2007 exam until after the July exam was over.

But I digress…

The Bar Prep folks must be very happy to see these questions so soon. I can imagine that at this very moment they’re parsing every word and sentence, finding all of the issues ranging from large to small to imaginary, assigning each and every fact or part thereof to one or more of the issues, then building the most comprehensive outline they possibly can.

Or, perhaps they’re just reading the released questions once to get a good feel for the problem, then again for the issues, and then one more time to make sure they’ve found all the pertinent facts. I wonder which it is. Hmmm… probably the former.

The gift part of this equation, computed twice each year, is that after having checked all of the blogs and discussion groups to see which parts of each of the essays freaked out the students, they can sit down in a calm and peaceful environment, with their favorite legal resource open in front of them, and with an adult beverage to the side, with none of the pressures related to time limits, and not tormented by the myriad faces of financial doom with which many bar takers are haunted, and knock out a masterpiece of an answer. They can then offer up this very competent rendering to potential students as an example of the way the students might write if they would only submit to their will and adopt their study methods and writing style.

…and, of course, after letting them swipe the student’s credit card.

For the bar prep course providers, it’s like opening the newspaper to the sports section to see when and where the Department of Fish and Game will be stocking the local lakes, creeks, and reservoirs. All one has to do is to go down to one of those locations at the designated place and time, wait for the fish to be released from the truck, then scoop them up. Of course, the Department of Fish and Game frowns on scooping or netting the fish right away because they add a sedative to the water so the fish stay mellow during the transfer to the tank on the truck then to the water, not to mention the ride to and fro. Netting the slow moving fish would be unsportsmanlike. It would…it would…it would! It would be like always aiming for the grannies with the walkers in a game of Death Race 2000.

But, again, I digress …

Back to my point … the calm, logical, organized answer that the Bar tutors write seems quite amazing compared to whatever it is we passers and losers (or losers then passers) can remember from our mad dash through the problem during the exam. This provides the prep courses with a huge fulcrum with which they can leverage the already angst ridden, insecurity laden non-passers into their programs.

These “sample� or “model� answers are the net with which the Bar Prep programs scoop us up. There’s no rod and reel and fumbling with the proper bait for them. The Bar hands them the net and the students jump in. They go willingly; gratefully, even.

Like in the movie “Field of Dreams�; we’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money we have and peace (and a license) we lack.

Yes, the State Bar has given the tutors quite a gift. And while I’m sure that the best tutors would continue to do quite well even if the Bar didn’t supply this valuable resource, there are others who would see their enrollment drop, in varying degrees, if the Bar didn’t make this twice-yearly gift to the industry. And make no mistake, it is an industry. It’s a very big industry. Based on my limited exposure as an “applicant�, and by simply counting heads in the classes in which I’ve sat, it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see that there are a few individuals who easily earn seven figures in what is essentially a part-time job. Nationwide, I can easily see it as a billion dollar industry.

This is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

_____________________________________________
Brian Johnston contributed to this article