We have had this office in Birmingham, Michigan for a while and figured it was time to give our readers a virtual tour (…and partly because we got a new lens for our camera and thought we would put it to use!)
Our office suite is located at 999 Haynes, Suite 260, Birmingham, MI 48009. Parking is free and easy (there is a parking lot as well as street parking available). We have two office rooms, a conference room, and a classroom.
Here is the entrance to our office:
How Long Does It Take to Receive Michigan Bar Exam Appeal Results?
There are no guidelines given by the Michigan Board of Law Examiners as to when you will receive Michigan bar exam appeal results (except for the fact that you will find out prior to sitting for the next bar exam!) However, historically letters have been sent to applicants approximately three weeks after bar exam appeals are due. The exact due dates that letters were mailed in the last year are as follows: Read more
Are you a visual person? Do you prefer colors, pictures, and diagrams over black-and-white words? It might be worth it to try incorporating some diagrams into your law school outlines.
For example, contract formation can be broken down using words. This can help you memorize the elements of contract formation and become familiar with the words. However, you can put the same exact outline into picture format, as is pictured to the left.
Even if you are not a “visual” person, sometimes it helps to break things up and use a visual method to memorize a concept. This can be especially helpful with trickier concepts, for example, UCC 2-207. Most students struggle with UCC 2-207 quite a bit. If you put it into a picture format (as pictured below) it can really help you memorize it. Read more
Thanksgiving break is a nice time to study for your law school classes but it may also be a very busy time. You may either be traveling or you may have relatives or friends coming into town who expect you to spend time with them. You also probably certainly crave a break since (most of you have your legal writing memos turned in!) and you finally have a second to breathe!
The temptation to take time off is usually countered with a feeling that you should be studying, outlining, or practicing exam questions. Indeed, most law students feel a very real tension between relaxing/spending time with family and outlining or studying for their law school final exams. Family and friends who are not in law school can make this worse since they will wonder why you are not partaking in every activity. Read more
The Michigan Board of Law Examiner’s recently posted the pre-appeals Michigan bar exam results statistics from the July 2015 Michigan bar exam on their website.
According to those Michigan bar exam results statistics, the overall passage rate was 61%. First-time takers had a passage rate of 71% and repeat-takers had a passage rate of 22%.
The schools, ranked from highest-to-lowest passage rate are as follows: Read more
Many students ask us, “What are the best MBE questions?” The best MBE questions do not necessarily come from Kaplan or Barbri. In fact, we think that the best MBE questions come from other sources.
We strongly believe that the best MBE questions are actual released bar exam questions. Why complete questions that are made up by a course when you can get actual questions? We always recommend that students focus on the actual bar exam multiple-choice questions then use their course’s multiple-choice questions as a back-up resource. Read more
Failing the bar exam is a terrible feeling. It is hard to recover at first. However, once you have a plan, you will feel better! (Read this Note to those who Failed the Bar Exam if you haven’t already!)
One thing that students tend to do after they find out they failed the bar exam is to cling to just one reason that they failed. “I need to practice more MBEs!” they’ll say. And they’ll make that their focus. Their only focus. Soon, they’ll find their knowledge of the substantive law is fading, their essay score is sliding, and they still don’t get the score they need to pass! Read more
Many people have been contacting us and asking us if it is worth it to appeal their bar exam scores. Many clients are very curious about their prospects of passing the Michigan bar exam on appeal. We wrote a post about this last administration but given the high influx of calls, we figured it would be worth it to quickly update the post for this time.
A big factor in making the decision to appeal is to figure out how many points you need to pass the Michigan bar exam on appeal. Since the Board of Law Examiner’s uses an undisclosed scoring method, it is difficult to discern based on scores alone. We found a better way to accurately determine what you need. Read more
1L Final Exam Tip: Print Law School Exams with Model Answers This Weekend!With all of the other assignments you have, the last thing you probably feel like doing is answering mock final exam questions. It is just another thing to add to your to-do list.
Not only is it more work but it is scary to see what a law school final exam actually looks like. So many students never look at exams because they are afraid. They don’t know what is awaiting them so they purposely bury themselves in case-reading, case-briefing, and outlining and never pick up an exam. This is unfortunate because many of these students do work very hard – they are simply inefficient.
The first step to getting over this is to get your resources together and print a bunch of practice exams so you can have them at your disposal. If you have a pile of practice exams sitting on your desk, it will be easier for you to make it a habit to regularly look at law school final exams. It will also be less intimidating because they are sitting right there! (On the contrary, if you don’t have any exams readily available, you are even less likely to practice answering one for not only is it more work, and kind of scary, but it is also a hassle to search for every time you build up the courage to try one!) Read more
The best way to prepare for law school final exams is to learn the law, then figure out how to apply it.
We are huge proponents of the idea that the best law school outlines you can acquire are the ones you write yourself. Outlining will help you internalize, organize, and become familiar with the concepts in a way that simply looking at someone else’s outline will not. Read more