Sara Passes The Bar

After more than three months of nervous anticipation, great news arrived on Sunday. Sara received word that she had passed the California Bar Exam!!

(She's seen here celebrating with Mary and Slick.)

After her graduating from Washington University Law School in May, Sara headed out to Arizona where she barracaded herself in our house in Prescott (before we moved in ourselves) and began preparing for the California bar. Rather than take a bar exam prep class, she chose to do it on her own. (Those who know her best were not surprised.) She developed an aggressive schedule of 12 - 14 hours of study per day and for the next two and a half months lived a monastic life and studied California and Federal law night and day. (Well, except for the daily visits to Starbucks .)

Surprisingly, particularly to those of us not a part of the legal profession, law school does not prepare you for the bar exam. That you have to do after law school. (Interesting system, huh?)

In August, Sara went to Oakland, CA to take the exam, a mind (and butt) numbing three day experience. Along with nearly a thousand other people, she sat for the test. Security for it was something that Homeland Security and the Arizona Border Patrol can only dream about.

At the end of the first day, Sara was certain that she was going to fail. The exam covered topics she had time to study only cursorily while other topics she had poured over were virtually ignored. Though the exam went on for hours, there was not always enough time to complete the tasks presented.

She didn't know anyone else in the room submitting to the rigors with her but she did make the acquaintance of an attorney licensed in two other states who was taking the California exam to expand his practice. He told her the California bar was the hardest he had ever taken. That, along with her experience over the final two days and the knowledge that approximately 50% of all who take the bar in California fail it, convinced Sara that she wasn't going to succeed.

Sara tried to prepare for bad news. She told us not to get our hopes up. Carolyn and I, however, were optimistic. We have a lot of faith in Sara. When we moved to Arizona, we got to see the final weeks of her studies. We saw how hard she was working and the commitment she was making to accomplish yet another tough assignment.

So, it was joyous news when Sara got the word last Sunday that she passed. She might have been surprised but we were not. (She's such a drama queen!)

Way to go, Sara. We are very proud of you. All of your years of hard work have paid off.