Let's See How Much He Really Wants To Be A Lawyer

As Chris is getting ready to finish his law school experience, he’s finding that getting out of law school seems to be a lot harder than getting in. Sure, in order to get into law school he had to take the LSAT exam and send in applications to good schools and maybe write an essay or two for those applications. But in order to call himself a lawyer, to use those three little letters at the end of his name, Esq. (not that he cares about that sort of thing, I’m just using that as an example of the little he receives after all the work he’s put in), he has to do everything but sign away the rights to our first born son. Of course he has to finish his final semester and get the diploma (he doesn’t want to attend graduation). After he’s finished with finals and graduation, however, he has to take another class to learn how to pass the Bar Exam, a grueling 2 or 3 day mind numbing horror of a test that over half the people who take in California fail (okay, so the Utah Bar pass rate is higher, but I’m going for effect here, experience the horror with me people). For the price of the class that Chris is taking before the bar, we could have taken a nice vacation, or put a nice down payment on a car, or paid our rent for a couple of months. After he’s finished the class, of course comes the Bar itself. But you can't just walk into the examination room and say “hey, can I take this test?”. Oh no, you have to send in an application that needs a background check, fingerprints, a passport type photo, driving records for the last three years, lawyer recommendations, peer recommendations, a urine sample, a blood sample, a lock of hair, the location of your childhood baseball card collection, and your signature to a paper stating that you haven’t sold your soul to the devil yet but he can have it for the right price after the test, and it all has to be notarized. Okay, okay, some of that is made up, but you get my point. The background check alone was enough to disturb the peace of our little family. Chris looked at the Bar application a month and a half before it was due, which should have been enough time, right? Wrong. Chris looked into it and apparently the background check can take up to 20 weeks to get back. 20 weeks! That means that an applicant would have to look at the application 5 months before turning in the application! Also, the application has to be turned in four or five months before you can take the exam, so really, you have to be getting ready to take the bar a good 9 months before you can take it. When Chris read that, he panicked a little bit because without the background check, they will not allow you to take the test, period. No excuses, no exceptions. Luckily the FBI is having a bit of a slow month because Chris got his background check back in a mere three weeks after doing everything he could to get it expedited. Chris is waiting on just one more letter of recommendation and his driving record and then after paying somewhere around $500 for the actual test, he can hold his head high as he walks into the test that everyone dreads for three years of law school. Hopefully he passes the first time because he has to wait 6 months before he can take it again, but if he does pass it, what a relief. Then he’s a lawyer.