In February 2027, I’ll be taking the bar exam again. This is perhaps not an obvious thing to voluntarily sign up for 15 years into a legal career.

I qualified as a lawyer outside the United States and have spent most of my career in private practice and in-house, far from a law school classroom. But in 2023, I found myself studying black-letter law again when I decided to take the California Bar to help support a move to the US.

I made that decision only 10 weeks before the exam. I was working full time, I was foreign-qualified, and there was an enormous amount of material I either hadn’t studied before or hadn’t thought about in years (Rule Against Perpetuities, anyone?).

And I passed. I thought that was the last exam I’d ever have to take. Yet three years later, I’m doing it again - this time for the Uniform Bar Exam.

Why another bar exam?

The short answer is that I moved to my dream location - a small ski town in Colorado. And while I don’t need to be admitted here for my current job, one day I would love to start my own small practice.

What makes this experience interesting to me isn’t so much why I’m taking another bar exam, but how different the preparation looks this time. For California, I had 10 weeks. There wasn't much room for wasted time, and preparation was necessarily intense. This time, I have six months to prepare.

I’m still working full time and have plenty of other commitments and interests to juggle (I’m also currently training for an ultramarathon). I don't want having six months to prepare to mean spending six months with the bar exam taking over my life.

What I’m doing differently

The biggest difference is that I’m starting earlier and studying less intensively. Rather than trying to replicate a conventional full-time bar-prep schedule over a longer period, I want to see whether I can use the extra runway to prepare in a way that is both effective and sustainable.

That means fitting study around the life I actually have, rather than designing an ideal study schedule and trying to force my life around it. It also means being willing to change the plan. What makes sense six months before the exam may not make sense three months later. I want what I actually learn about my strengths, weaknesses and progress to influence what I do next.

So between now and February, I’ll be documenting the process here: what I try, what works, what doesn’t, and what I learn along the way.

I’ll share the decisions I make, how my preparation changes, and some of the data I collect as I get closer to February. I’m not assuming that what works for me will work for everyone, but I’m curious to see what I learn from having the time to approach preparation more deliberately.

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