New York Can Easily Get Ready for a Rigorous New York Bar Exam: Just Say Go

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New York Can Easily Get Ready for a Rigorous New York Bar Exam: Just Say Go

The Experts From Pieper Bar Review Discuss How To Revive and Prepare Applicants for a Rigorous New York Bar Exam

Pieper Bar Review has been preparing candidates for the bar exam for 50 years. John, Troy, and Damian Pieper have helped generations of students pass the bar exam and become practicing attorneys. A vast majority of their work has been with candidates taking the bar exam and ultimately practicing in New York State.

John, Troy, and Damian Pieper, agreed to spend an hour discussing the “New York Law Day” component of the former New York Bar Exam – which was an entire day testing on New York-specific law – with the co-chairs of NYSBA’s Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, David R. Marshall and Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus.

Decades of experience teaching New York law in New York law schools and in their New York-based bar review course to soon-to-be New York lawyers gives the Piepers a unique perspective on how New York’s adoption of the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) in 2016 dramatically changed bar exam candidates’ knowledge of local law. They witnessed firsthand how the UBE impacted the curriculums in New York law schools where enrollment in New York practice courses declined dramatically, and teaching New York’s unique rules and statutes in doctrinal courses was relegated from megaphone to footnote. The 2016 changes and “teaching to the bar exam” simply left New York law schools without the incentive to teach the CPLR, DRL, BCL, CPL, EPTL, etc.

A transcript of the Piepers’ recent interview with CLEAB has been reproduced here to share their observations with New York State Bar Association members and Bar News readers. The transcript has been edited for length, continuity, and clarity.

Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus: Welcome to our meeting of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. It is an honor to have the Piepers of Pieper Bar Review with us today. Thank you, John, Troy, and Damian, for being our guests at this virtual webinar about the New York State Bar Exam. I think that your name alone is a sufficient introduction to our listeners since it has been part of the New York Bar Exam landscape for over 50 years. Indeed, many of us can thank Pieper Bar Review for our success on the bar exam.

The Negative Consequences Caused by Discounting the Importance of Teaching New York Law

SDK: Would you please begin with your thoughts on what you’ve noticed as the consequences of replacing the traditional New York Day of the bar exam with the Uniform Bar Exam and the New York Law Exam?

Piepers: We have some perspective on the loss of New York law on the exam as a result of substituting the UBE in 2016 because we have personally witnessed the shift in bar prep focus, the overhaul of what now is taught in law school, and what we’ve heard from New York practitioners.

I [Troy] remember when I went to St. John’s, well before the UBE entered the discussion, there was a huge incentive to take the classes that were on the bar exam like New York practice and evidence. Vince Alexander taught those classes, and he was revered, but also feared. His exams were long and hard, but we took his classes because we knew it was going to help us immensely on the bar exam – and later in practice. When we got to bar review, as our predecessors had told us, it was like, wow, we know a lot of this stuff already because we did the work in law school. We also knew we had a leg up on all the candidates coming from out of state. Our first employers also expected us to be up to speed on New York law and procedure.

On the practitioner front, everyone has a bar exam story. When we meet practicing lawyers, that’s what they want to talk to us about. It doesn’t have to be a Pieper story, but just what happened to them preparing for and taking the exam and what happened immediately afterwards when they passed or failed. In the past decade, we have met so many practicing attorneys who told us that they didn’t realize that the bar exam even changed. They had no idea there was no New York practice on the bar exam because they remember learning it for the bar. They also seem to be shocked that there’s no New York law on the exam. Today, we still need to explain to practicing attorneys what changed almost 10 years ago with the UBE because, almost to a person, it’s a surprise. Those in academia knew all about the changes, but the practicing bar itself really didn’t.

One of the things that practitioners tell me is that they’re disappointed in new lawyers and very surprised at how they’re not practice-ready. It’s a bit different from the “practice-ready” we typically mean in law school and more about the nuts-and-bolts foundation of what the students know now, which doesn’t seem to be the same as it used to be. The complaints we hear are not random. It’s a consistent pattern where we are being told by practitioners that the students coming out of law school today do not know New York law and are not practice-ready, period. For example, we’re good friends with a judge who is now a county attorney who said to us, “Could you come in and teach my new lawyers something about New York practice? We’re so used to graduates coming out of the local schools – Brooklyn, CUNY, Hofstra, St. John’s, Touro – bringing with them a good working understanding of New York practice and procedure; instead, they’ve never heard of McKinney’s.” We believe this is a direct result of the change to the UBE.

Adopting the UBE Reduced Students’ Incentive To Learn New York Law

SDK: When New York State Bar Association Immediate Past President Domenick Napoletano presented testimony to the Advisory Committee on the New York State Bar Examination, he was asked by one of the committee members whether it was important for students to take courses in New York law to prepare for the bar exam when what they study is forgotten shortly after the bar exam, if not right away, then within months. He did not hesitate and answered, “I took Pieper Bar Review and I remember the mnemonics to this day.”

David Marshall: On that point, could you comment on the often repeated belief that what is taught for the bar exam is quickly forgotten? Is it true in your experience that students forget 75% of what they learned for the bar exam within a week of taking the bar exam so it’s ultimately of no value to the public that we’re supposed to protect by licensing lawyers?

Piepers: Domenick Napoletano didn’t believe that, did he? Retention of what’s studied has always been questioned to some extent, but I know there are people here today who remember some of what they learned when studying for the bar exam that they would say is worth knowing, even in areas they never pursued. There used to be more of an incentive to remember the law because it was relevant to your career or even to sounding well-rounded and intelligent when meeting a prospective client, whereas today, if I’m practicing in New York, little of what’s on the UBE, whether it’s the Uniform Probate Code that New York doesn’t follow or the Model Penal Code instead of the Criminal Procedure Law, is useful to me. I feel that students are thinking, “I’m going to practice in New York and none of this is relevant, so I’m only dedicating this to short-term memory.”

We know that students are very much incentivized to do well on the bar exam. It’s true that some will forget some things, but a very important role of the bar exam is to ensure that even the candidate who thinks they’re going to work in their aunt’s immigration law firm is going to remember a little something about Labor Law 240 and 241 or is going to remember a little something about workers’ comp or that there’s a no-fault insurance rule in New York, at least enough to direct people in the right way. When I [Troy] graduated from law school, I didn’t end up practicing what I thought I was going to practice. My first job was in environmental insurance coverage. I had no intention of doing that, but that was the strongest department in my firm. That’s where they put me and it worked out very well. I enjoyed a general breadth of knowledge right out of school and fresh out of the bar exam that helped me even there. When I go to my foot doctor, I want him to know enough to send me to the cardiologist if something doesn’t look quite right in my swollen calf. Lawyers should have a similar, general base of knowledge that there may be tax, immigration, civil/criminal or other implications or consequences that should be looked into even if it is beyond their area of practice.

The consequences of adopting the UBE were real. Before the UBE, the Multistate Bar Exam was only 40% of the score and the New York portion was 60% until this was decreased to 50% with the introduction of the Multistate Performance Test in 2001. So at least half of what you were studying to pass the bar was actual New York law. Now none of it is. Today’s students seem to have less incentive for deep learning of the law they are taught. Comparing these students to how we used to be, it’s fair to say that it’s harder to keep their attention when teaching the “law of nowhere.” When the New York Bar Exam was 50% New York law, there was a real drive for students to know that law. In those days, they questioned why they needed to know MBE law, but it made sense to them to know New York law.

If we are concerned about whether our new lawyers know New York law, and we are, where we can do something about that concern is when and where students are most motivated to learn that New York law – on their bar exam. New York law schools should add back New York Practice and cover New York law in doctrinal classes. Students are invested in learning what they will be tested on, so make New York law something they need to know by testing it in a meaningful way.

SDK: Was teaching different when you prepared students for the prior New York Bar Exam?

Piepers: It’s been a joy to teach my [John’s] whole life, but there is a difference teaching today compared to even 10 years ago. Today, students can watch a recording if they don’t attend class or don’t feel like focusing at the moment. Things also have changed with Zoom because students can watch the lectures at home, pausing and taking numerous breaks, which is not the best setup for less disciplined candidates. The bar exam has a built-in hourglass that should keep them focused on that last Tuesday and Wednesday in July or February when their bar exam inevitably will arrive, but students taking the bar exam for the first time often don’t know and fully appreciate what they are facing. They have never prepared 10 weeks for a two-day exam covering so much substance, much of which can be completely new. A big part of what we do as bar review providers is set up a schedule and pace. Today, students have myriad distractions and opportunities to slow things down and put things off, which for many is the kiss of death as the hourglass empties.

SDK: It’s been suggested that making the New York Law Course and New York Law Exam more rigorous by raising the pass score or increasing the number of multiple-choice questions would provide greater incentive for students to learn the law. In your opinion, do you think this change would effectively motivate students?

Piepers: No. Our information about the NYLE is hearsay because it is an online exam and accessible only to the candidates taking the exam. What we know comes from the students who talk to us or when we speak with practitioners. Uniformly, there’s been criticism of the NYLE, from practitioners, from judges, and from students, many of whom say it’s a joke.

When I [Troy] was teaching this past semester, I asked my students about the current NYLE and many of those with whom I spoke said that there is a huge disconnect between the content on the now dated NYLC lectures that they are required to watch and what’s tested on the NYLE. The students were very dependent on the handout provided, which they used for the open book exam, and they felt that what they were tested on wasn’t sufficiently emphasized or highlighted for them. If we’re really interested in having students know New York law, then we ought to figure out what is truly important for them to know, teach it in a way that they will remember, and test it in a reliable and valid way that shows this is serious and they need to know it.

Making the open book NYLE pass score higher or increasing the number of questions from 50 to 100 will not accomplish this. We need a sea change. Strong consideration should be given to adding a New York component to the bar exam itself because that’s going to make students study and learn. Many older practitioners tell us they never worked as hard as they did when they prepared for their bar exam. They remember the process – and more than a few remember some of what they learned, just like Domenick Napoletano, even if it is just enough to have an awareness that they should proceed with caution.

Adding a New York Law Component Would Not Create Mental Overload

SDK: You’ve made an excellent point. But at the same time, it raises the concern expressed by some that requiring candidates to study general principles of law for the NextGen UBE and, at the same time, learn New York law would be overwhelming and confusing so that they would not retain what they studied and then the objective for having a New York-specific component would not be achieved.

In your experience preparing students for the prior New York Bar Exam, did you find that having to learn New York law for one day of the exam and multistate law for the other was so challenging and overwhelming that students could not learn both?

Piepers: No, and there were so many more subjects tested back then. During the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the New York State Bar Exam tested a broad range of subjects. I [John] went to my library this morning and took down a book called Pieper New York Law. I looked at the table of contents and it listed Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, insurance law, and surety law, among other subjects that are no longer tested. More law was tested then, plus the Multistate Bar Exam, which covered six subjects when it was first adopted and now seven with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

When New York adopted the MBE in 1979, New York was also testing New York law in the same areas, so we had to cover the multistate law and the New York distinctions. Students learned both and clearly, upon graduating from law school, they could grasp two different sets of rules and work with those. They did it for decades in New York.

I [John] have taken 33 bar exams around the country from Hawaii to Alaska to California to Maine to Florida. There were only four states that really tested local law. New York, California, Texas, and Florida. If you were going to take the bar exam in those states, you’d better study. In California, for example, I learned community property law. I knew that it was tested so I learned it. Florida had so much local law and administrative law to learn but I learned it to pass that bar exam. My take is that if someone wants to practice in New York, they will (and ought to want to) learn some general rules that set New York apart.

SDK: For all those decades, then, the New York Bar Exam wasn’t so challenging and overwhelming that candidates preparing for the bar couldn’t juggle learning both New York law and MBE law.

Piepers: Exactly. And juggling is what students who are taking the UBE do now when it comes to wills and corporations, among other subjects. For example, these candidates will be looking at the Uniform Probate Code, majority and minority positions, and common law rules while trying to figure out what law to apply on a particular essay. Sometimes they will be given a statute that will dictate what law to apply, but not always. For example, essays have presented what may or may not be a holographic will without telling the candidate if this jurisdiction even recognizes such wills. The candidate will need to determine if it is holographic and, if so, note that the validity depends on the jurisdiction. That part of the UBE is confusing to students, but they have to work through it and they certainly can, just like anyone who took the exam more than 10 years ago in New York was able to work through it and identify not only what the distinctions were on MBE day, but also what the actual law was in New York.

SDK: What you’re saying is that it’s not a matter that students can’t do the work or be motivated to do the same work that generations of New York bar candidates before them were asked to do. Nor would they be confused or overwhelmed by a somewhat more vigorous exam asking them to learn New York law. To understand whether it would be too demanding for candidates to learn both New York and multistate law, it would be helpful to consider what a bar review course was like before New York adopted the UBE. Was the Pieper Bar Review course longer when you taught for the New York law exam as compared to the current UBE?

Piepers: If we were to add back a New York portion to the bar exam, then we would need to cover New York law once again. For example, we would need to discuss New York’s Business Corporations Law (BCL) for business organizations because New York law is different from the general principles tested on the UBE (or the NextGen). But there are synergies in the law. We would not have to teach New York corporations and then separately teach NextGen or UBE corporations. Instead, we would teach them at the same time, side-by-side, as we did when the National Conference of Bar Examiners added the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to the MBE. There, we taught the CPLR and FRCP simultaneously. A lot of the other bar courses didn’t do it this way because that meant asking the lecturer in one subject to bone up on the other to teach both at the same time. They would have separate lectures and lecturers, but we integrated the two and it worked well. We found that there were a lot of synergies between the rules and it was efficient.

Accounting for New York law and its distinctions added some time to our bar review course, but if we again were to teach, for example, New York’s Business Corporations and the Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), we would already be teaching corporations and criminal procedure under the UBE rules. It would add some teaching time, highlighting the points where laws differ or diverge, but not any more than an extra 20-25% and only in select topics. In the end, this might add two or three extra days to our bar review course.

A Rigorous New York Law Exam Provides a Greater Incentive To Learn New York Law Than a Law School Course or CLE Class

SDK: Since we’re talking about the need for students to know New York law, I’d like your opinion on two options the Advisory Committee to the New York Court of Appeals is considering to replace the current NYLC and NYLE. One is to require students to take a New York Law course in law school and the other is to require CLE classes after licensure. Would either approach ensure that students are motivated to learn New York law?

Piepers: One reason why a dedicated law school course won’t ensure that the required base of knowledge is absorbed by the candidate is that we have a wide range of who is teaching these classes and how they are grading them. Law school faculty have academic freedom so it’s difficult to legislate a course that they must teach according to a state-provided syllabus, exam, and scoring criteria. That’s why we have a bar exam – for the consistency, validity and reliability in content, grading, and scoring that you wouldn’t have across the 15 New York law schools and certainly not over the nearly 200 American Bar Association accredited law schools in the United States (we have a lot of candidates coming in from schools outside the state that would push back on the need to offer a New York law bar class to their New York-bound graduates). To say the answer is to take another course in law school doesn’t make sense when we currently have so many graduates demonstrating that they are not prepared to pass the current bar exam upon graduation, even after another 10 weeks of study.

As for CLE classes taking on the New York law component, we don’t see that working at all. There may be some truth to what’s said about students doing a “brain dump” after taking the bar exam, but I can assure you they’re not even going to absorb enough New York law to dump it if all we do is ask them to take a CLE sometime in October or November when they’re, hopefully, already licensed and working long hours. I’ve noticed that some attendees in any given CLE invariably ask, “Are these slides going to be available?” Why do they ask? Is it so they can go home and study them? No. They’re not even going to look at them. They just want to ensure it is okay not to pay attention now – they will have the slides if they ever need to refer back to them.

In short, the priority of learning law is lost once it becomes a CLE. It’s a totally different experience from when you’re studying for the bar exam. The bar exam says you’ve got to study and learn the law now and that makes students invest in the process and remember something. The bar exam incentivizes and scares them. There is an urgency and every incentive to learn this basic, foundational law now when it is on the bar exam and essential for the start for their legal career in New York.

Alternative Pathways to Licensure Present Problems

Diploma Privilege

SDK: From what you’ve explained, neither law school courses nor CLE classes would provide the consistency and validity necessary for professional licensure. If that’s the case, what do you think of proposals to adopt a diploma privilege in place of a licensing exam?

Piepers: Earning a law school degree is not a substitute for passing the bar exam in New York because we see so many with a law degree from ABA-accredited schools fail the New York State Bar Exam. While the bar exam has flaws and is not perfect, it’s the best vehicle we have for separating who is ready to practice and who is not. We understand there is evidence of some success or at least little evidence of widespread harm to the public in, for example, Wisconsin, but without major changes to law school curricula and grading standards in New York, diploma privilege currently is not a viable option here.

Work Sample Portfolios and Supervised Practice

SDK: Your point is well taken, especially after reading an article by Professor Healey, a director of clinical programs. She wrote, and I quote, “Legal education’s current methods for the measurement of student achievement in clinics and the measurement of a clinic course’s effectiveness are often unsatisfying, unreliable, and incomplete.” As an example of the challenges faced in grading students involved in various types of clinical experiences, Professor Healey shared this question from a clinical professor: “How can I compare students who won asylum for their client to students whose client was convicted of 14 felonies and who spent the semester going to three prisons just to interview their client?”[1]

If assessments are unreliable in clinics because of the difficulty in measuring performance across different clinical experiences with different professors, do you think that students’ work portfolios created under the supervision of volunteer attorneys would be a reliable replacement for a licensing exam?

Piepers: The bar exam is not perfect, but it’s the most efficient way to get this done. I [Troy] believe there are over 70,000 people taking the bar exam every year.[2] I can’t imagine the manpower it would take from bar examiners to go through 70,000 portfolios of legal work. It’s certainly not possible for New York with close to 15,000 candidates taking the bar exam each year.

It’s also very difficult to put a human being in front of another human being, have them create a portfolio of their work, know how hard they tried, know the personal challenges they may have faced during this time, and remain completely objective. Just look at how few fail law school classes and how fewer fail out of law school. If your job is to help, guide, encourage, and evaluate, it becomes very difficult after all that to say, “you didn’t make the cut.” The connection you’ve made with a student is something bar examiners don’t face in making their determination of who is competent to practice law.

Re-Tooling for a New York Law Component: What’s Old Can Be Made New Again

SDK: Leaving those options aside, if New York were to replace the current NYLE with a new version of the prior New York day, how do you suggest it be done and would bar review companies be able to timely and cost-effectively re-tool their courses?

Piepers: With the NextGen exam and schedule, we have a window on Wednesday afternoon where we could have a three-hour exam, maybe essays and some multiple-choice questions, whatever the psychometricians think is best and most reliable. Candidates in New York would have to really buckle down and study New York law. You couldn’t test it all on each exam, but you could, as was done in the past, direct them to study what the powers that be deem the most critical nuances of New York law and test enough to ensure the passing candidates learned what we want them to know. And without that requirement, that urgency, we’re not going to reach the goal everyone wants.

By adding the New York law component Wednesday afternoon when the NextGen UBE finishes, we could treat the New York component separately, and, if a candidate fails it, they could retake only the New York component on Wednesday afternoon of the next administration. A similar option was available when Damian and Troy took the Maine bar exam, and we had something like this in New York in the past. Before 1970, the New York Bar Exam did not have a multistate component and had two parts: substantive and procedural. The substantive part was doctrinal New York law, and the procedural part was evidence and the CPLR. The CPLR was then known as the CPL. You could pass one part of the bar exam, fail the other, and return to take only the part where you were unsuccessful.

SDK: If the NextGen UBE score is separated from the New York law score, then the portability question is resolved. Candidates will receive a portable score for the NextGen UBE and a separate New York score. The Court of Appeals needs a psychometrician to set the passing score for the NextGen UBE so setting a score for the New York portion can be considered at the same time along with what was just mentioned about having the proper mix of essays and multiple-choice questions.

Assuming the Court of Appeals adopts a New York law component, would bar review providers be able to retool their courses to provide students with the instruction they need in a timely manner?

Piepers: We’ve done it before and could do it again. We’d begin by identifying the most important areas that a newly licensed New York lawyer should know to begin practice in New York. We’d focus on where the NextGen UBE diverges from New York law. For example, New York doesn’t follow the Uniform Probate Code. New York’s Estates, Powers, and Trusts Law (EPTL) is quite different. We would identify the key differences and that’s what we’d target and what the lectures and materials would cover. Less time would be required if the bar examiners identified these areas for us, but a year or two of advanced notice would be sufficient either way.

We would go through the archives of New York cases to find major shifts in recent years. For example, the New York Court of Appeals issued a landmark decision this past April that’s been 100 years in the making. It’s about the “one bite rule” for dog bite victims in New York. (Flanders v. Goodfellow). We were always an outlier where victims could not bring suit against animal owners in negligence. New York is now joining 36 states in holding that now you can sue in both negligence and strict liability. Decisions like this are where we’d start and it’ll take some time, but it would not take us until 2028 to identify what’s important. Nor should it take the bar examiners too long if they tasked a team to focus solely on this. Within six months, an outline could be fleshed out, covering the law that new practitioners in New York can expect to see in practice. It should consider the types of cases that solo practitioners and small and mid-sized firms typically see day-to-day. This means workers’ compensation, because there are injuries on the job, labor and employment law issues, and joint and several liability and the limitations on Article 16. Small business organization issues, critical early-stage criminal procedure issues, family law rights, wills and trust considerations, some basic contract law, too, because New York has its own rules in these and so many other areas. We tell our students that the bar examiners aren’t worried about the in-house lawyer at Apple who will never get near Tim Cook; they are concerned about the newly licensed attorney who hangs a shingle and starts taking on whatever friends, family, local businesses will give them. What would a family member of the first lawyer in the family be looking for – gratis? They need some baseline knowledge to know what they can handle, and, more important, what they can’t.

SDK: And no-fault insurance?

Piepers: Yes, exactly. What does my family come to me for? They were in a car accident. They need a will. They want to open a business or set up a trust. I don’t have to be an expert, but I should know of a few pitfalls to avoid and where to go to research this and become competent.

David Marshall: There’s been criticism that if we were to go back to an old-style New York law exam that had essays and multiple-choice questions focused on New York practice and substantive law, it would just be impossible for the Board of Law Examiners to start from scratch and write that exam. Would they really have to start from scratch or is it kind of a myth that it would be hard to write such an exam?

SDK: We could go back and look at the past New York Bar Exam essays. They tested these topics repeatedly over the years.

Piepers: Those “old” essays would be a great place to start. We could also create fact patterns from New York cases where the decisions changed the law like the one that changed the dog bite law. That would be a perfect fact pattern to show how the law changes. We would give a case three or four years to be interpreted and applied and then it would be a great exam question. This is what the New York bar examiners always did. Let the decision work its way through law school curriculums and then it’s time to be tested. They’d put the case’s fact pattern into an essay, and candidates would need to know what the law is in New York to answer it.

David, they have the resources. All the questions are there. They just have to bring them up to date and it’s probably the case that the answers haven’t changed in the vast majority of them. It would require work, but it’s not such a huge undertaking when it’s for the good of the public and the good of the bar.

For example, if I [Troy] knew what topics were to be tested, it would be rather straightforward to put together an exam. First, I would find the definitive authority in McKinney’s which would send me right to the case(s). Then I’ll have a couple of fact patterns to work with. It’s important to remember that the prior New York Bar Exam was long. The morning session was three hours and 15 minutes to complete three essays and 50 multiple choice questions, and the afternoon had another two essays with 45 minutes for each essay. Now we’re talking about at most only 3.5 hours. I just gave a three-hour final exam at Fordham. It was not a huge endeavor for me and certainly would not be for the bar examiners.

As time progressed, the New York bar examiners would want to have a bank of questions, but, again, they have resources and decades of prior questions to give them a head start. They can hire people to do it and it would not be incredibly expensive. I [Troy] would enjoy that job. Suzanne would be my first hire. We could totally do it.

DM: Thank you so much. You – and by you, I mean the three of you, the Pieper family –have such tremendous experience and wisdom about this process that I think a lot of the folks who write about this topic don’t. Each of you has taught and practiced for decades in New York. You have prepared generations of students through the various versions and iterations of the bar exam right here in New York. Really, you folks are unique in the body of knowledge, wisdom and experience you bring to the question. You’ve just been superb. I’ve learned a tremendous amount tonight and had such fun listening to you talk about it.

Piepers: Thank you.

SDK: Thank you for being here with us today and sharing what you know because no one knows it like you do. You’ve shown us what’s necessary to prepare new lawyers to be knowledgeable practitioners of New York law and how to get it done.

Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus is a professor of law at Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, where she teaches contracts and sales. As the former director of academic development and bar programs for over 20 years, she coordinated, directed, and implemented all aspects of Touro’s academic support and bar programs. She has written extensively on the bar examination, including “The Bar Exam in a Nutshell,” “Acing the Bar Exam,” and “The New York Bar Exam by the Issues,” among others.

Endnotes

[1] Melissa A. Healey, Sharing the Tuna Platter: A Uniform System of Assessment for Clinical Education, 31 Clinical L. Rev. 275 (2025).

[2] Jurisdictions reported 70,436 persons taking the bar examination in 2024, https://thebarexaminer.ncbex.org/article/spring-2025/2024-statistics (last visited June 17, 2025).