BRAINS! Ipsa Loquitor

[captainsblog]

I had to file some stuff downtown today, and as I walked from courthouse #1, to the Barely Still Standing Main Place Mall to get an adjustment to my glasses, to the final stop in courthouse #2, I could sense something was amiss. A great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror. Then I saw the zombies walking the streets, glaze in their eyes and BAR-BRI outlines under their laptop-addled arms, and I knew what it was:

A newly-bred crop of lawyers had been let loose to pillage downtown Buffalo.

There was brief mention of this in the paper earlier this month. You know things are going bad when the Convention & Visitors Bureau starts propping the semiannual Bar exam as a tourist attraction, but that is what it has become. It was always offered here (more about that in a moment), but it was on the law school campus, and only for duly registered graduates of UB, Syracuse Law, or other lawful domiciliaries of the Fourth Judicial Department. Other grads had to take it where they went to school or permanently resided, and out-of-staters were automatically assigned to Albany, the least capable location in the state to handle a large crowd of anything but lobbyists, who tend to stay in much nicer hotels.

This year, apparently, we've been assigned the overflow crowd, and the exam's been moved to the downtown convention center. Just what a stressed-out law graduate needs on the two worst days of his or her life: inadequate and expensive parking, noplace to eat, and bums and wacko street preachers accosting them.

I feel their pain. And 25 years ago this month, I was the one feeling it just as palpably.

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For those who care, all but one United State administers a Satanic beast called the Multistate Bar Exam on the Wednesday of Hell Week. It is a full-day multiple choice exam designed by professional torturers to be ambiguous, picayune and lending to plausible but incorrect answers. This scheduling permits states and D.C. to offer their own local components of the exam (also full-day affairs, and equal as implements of torture) on either the day before or the day after, enabling the most masochistic of law grads to take two states' exams over a three-day period, counting the middle Multistate day toward both.

I did not engage in such stupidity. Two days of this shit was more than enough, thanks.

From the day after Memorial Day until the Monday before the madness, we studied. Daily lectures, given live in NYC and videotaped so as to be sent to remote campuses by overnight courier the next day (I had a coveted "live lecture code" on my bar review ID, which allowed me to go to the NY Coliseum on Columbus Circle, demolished when most of you were about two, to see the lecturers do it in person. I never went.) The rest of our days and nights, we reviewed, outlined, outlined the reviews, reviewed the outlines, took practice tests, practiced taking tests, drank, drank, studied and drank. Mostly coffee, but this being Buffalo, a keg and a Bocce pizza were required by law to be present at all times.

The videos were at the law school, 12 miles out from downtown. I was living off of Delaware Avenue, about 9 miles out. Most days, I did the lectures at night, and spent the days recovering from them (and the other odd distraction, such as being imminently unemployed and evicted from my sublet the month after the exam) and doing all the rest of the other crap. Come that Tuesday morning, the 1984 equivalent of this Tuesday morning, I got up at ass crack o'clock, went to the Perkins around the corner from my apartment on Delaware (appropriately enough, the local Perkins chain went Chapter 11 in the 90s and that location was turned into an OTB parlor), and drank from their bottomless cup of coffee for about four hours before heading north.  The rest of the day was a blur. The next, similarly so, except I think I began it at Perkins again, on the premise that since I hadn't died the day before, why tempt fate?  We drowned our post-Bar sorrows at a hole-in-the-wall bar at Main and Transit next to Hills Department Store and the big Bells supermarket. Teh Study was over, but Teh Drank Drank Drank was still at hand, only no coffee would be had.

Then all we had to do was wait more than four full months.  By then, I'd moved from B-lo, back to Long Island and, job finally in hand, 75 percent of the way back to Rochester starting that October 1. Results came out on December 10th. Some days you just remember. There was no Internet, remember, and the Law Examiners were rather testy about accepting phone calls, so you had to wait for either The Envelope or the New York Law Journal's printed publication of The List, which typically showed up later than the envelopes did because, hey, 1984, remember?- no computers to pre-set the list of names.

In a reversal of college admissions mail, this is where thin envelopes were good. Fat envelopes were fat because they contained your application to re-take the exam, and explaining your right to have the test re-scored if you'd fallen within 20 or so points of the passing 600-something score. (More about that in another moment.)  Mine was thin. I even drove back to Buffalo, to intercept the envelope of my back-then girlfriend who moved back to DC but hadn't changed her address with the Bar. (Hers  was thin, too, fat lot of good it ever did me.)  My bosses took me out drinking somewhere in there, and two months later, I swore an oath that subjects me to endless stupid questions (largely from judges), obscene insurance premiums and a far better than average statistical chance of being intentionally killed someday.

Another friend of mine, from college but not law school, graduated from CUNY two years later and took the exam in July of 1986. She got the fattest of envelopes, the one with the right of rescoring. Such applicants were invited to Albany to review their exams and the model answers, and to petition for a do-over on the answers already given. Each of them was entitled to bring one duly admitted New York attorney along to see and counsel. I met her in Albany that winter and, for the only time in my life, saw real and model answers to the exam. We took notes, we made points, and eventually her score was put over the top. The best job of lawyering I never got paid for, nor wanted to. (I say "only time in my life" because a few years later, the Law Examiners sensibly ended that whole rigamarole by automatically re-scoring any test coming within the margin of error, whether you asked them to or not and whether or not you could hire a sharp-ass former copy editor from Rochester to help.)

I could, however, offer moral support before the results came out. A young lawyer in my last pre-solo firm took it a few years ago, in Buffalo. I kidnapped him from his hotel room after the second day, and forced him to eat wings and drink beer at the same hole-in-the-wall bar I'd gone to myself 20-ish years before. The Bells and the Hills were long dead, but Brennan's survived, then as now, and when Brett found out he'd passed, he was eternally grateful to me for the karma and still commends me (and the bar) to mutual clients for the effort when referring clients to me.

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It all seems like it was yesterday, although I know dozens of lives have begun, ended and been fully lived in those 25 years. I also know, and I will leave you with this one thing if none of this has been interesting, that if you are in a major city or college town in any state besides Louisiana, and see an inordinate number of zombies walking the streets on Wednesday the 29th, be kind to them. They only want your brains because they will have none of their own left by 4:30 eastern time.