character and fitness/ amend application question Forum

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dudnaito

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character and fitness/ amend application question

Post by dudnaito » Fri Jan 03, 2014 10:44 pm

It's rather long, but hopefully my misery can provide some entertainment, and in return, I can get some opinions/advice from some smart TLS'ers.

Suffice it to say I didn't turn in the most well-prepared bar application. I was initially planning on turning in the bar application to State X, for which I already paid the filing fee, and did a fairly meticulous job of. However, upon returning back home and speaking with some friends in the business community and my family, the opportunity back home seemed to be much more optimistic and I had a last minute change of mind. My 28 hour flight experienced some scheduling changes (although got bumped to business... yay), and this resulted in me landing pretty much the day of the deadline. There was no online application as the link they posted was broken- and still is, January 4- (I'm from a REALLY small jurisdiction with around 6 people taking the bar on average, and where the 3 people that once took a Bar all failed, making the pass rate a legendary perfect zero, hint hint), which is probably why we have the single most apathetic Board of Law Examiners staff ever, so I had to basically rush to the courthouse building, get physical copies of the application, and expected to just copy+paste the info. from the application I already filled in for State X.

Well, my hometown application required WAY more meticulous info. than the one I filled out previously (requiring the addresses of every place I lived in for over a month and not just city/state if longer than 3 years like State X's, also required 6 references and not just the 3). I also failed to mention we had a power outage within my first couple of hours back (pretty often occurrence here), so my Macbook Air, which i stupidly didn't plug into the surge protector, died (and is still very much dead, by which i mean, no power at all). This results in me basically hunched over in a public library with a crazy lady sitting two tables down speaking repetitive gibberish to hopefully someone real across that phone line, using my mom's leopard-cased Galaxy S4 to do my research on an island-slow wifi, and a black pen on my hands (something I haven't had to do since laptops were invented) to scrawl what is hopefully legible writing on this bundle of paper...

At the time, I just wrote down everything I could to the best that I could recall, but since I essentially had to move 2 references from my employment over to my character and fitness to get all 6, and since one of the companies I worked for during a scant 2-3 months went bankrupt, and my supervisor is now in my character reference side since he's also a very old friend, AND the application specifically says not to mention the same people twice from the character and employment side, I basically glossed that over not knowing what to do since I'm not AT ALL in contact with the other employees (not even facebook) I worked with for all of 2-3 months as the company went under (wouldn't recognize them if they punched me in the face), and my other work was with my family business where I basically did remote tech. duties (a little programming, business inquiries, filing, responding to legal documents for the English-challenged like my dad) while also studying in Japan with my payment being the vast majority of a law school tuition, meaning that it was more my dad telling me to do stuff his people couldn't do (lack of English and tech skills) but obviously I can't use my own father as a reference either, so not knowing what to do again and running out of time, I didn't input that either.

Even on the residence side of things, I'm kinda a wanderer/bum. I've lived in 5 different countries and around 11 different addresses (required 2 extra pages) since I was 18. For example, I've lived in a motel near Atlanta for 2 months while waiting for citizenship papers, I've stayed in a hut some 50 miles outside of Ulan Bator, Mongolia which quite literally has no address, so frankly, my timelines are probably off by a month or two just to account for some places I can't recall and no amount of research would probably help me recall.

I have no debt, virtually perfect credit, no criminal history, etc... and despite what I wrote on how last minute things were I still spent around 6 hours hunched over trying to write everything down to the best of my ability. I turned it in literally 10 minutes before closing, right in front of a laughing middle-aged clerk, since I was huffing and puffing since, oh, right, the nearest notary public's elevator in the 9th floor just happened to break only after I got things notarized, which of course resulted in a 9 flight downward FLIGHT with only minutes to spare.




So... my question is "how much can I amend?" I, of course, do want to give a more comprehensive account of my references but the amend files don't so much seem to allow a revision of my past as simply an update on current proceedings (oh, you have a new job, or oh you JUST moved, give us the new info) whereas I want to uh... add new pieces of information that's now entered my brain about PAST "residences," volunteer work (?), is this seriously "employment?" employment, etc...

As you can tell, I'm kind of in a liminous state of panic, tragic hilarity, self-hatred, and general "wtf, dude, am i going to be ok?" Can I just print out like 10 amend pages and basically just hope that they'll replace my application with the new info.? I suppose I can find some references- who although I didn't work with- would know of my brief tenure there if I look hard enough, or perhaps one of my dad's few and often temporary employees would know that I did such work. Even in my law school application, I stressed that it was a family business, implying that an unbiased reference would be difficult to procure, but if I need another reference, I suppose I could find one. I turned in the application this Friday. Would it be sufficient to send out a bunch of amend forms, or will it just shine light that my application isn't as COMPLETE as it should have been. I really have lived quite the wanderer lifestyle though, so is it really necessary that they know of every odd job, family business, my 1 month stay at a blind children's orphanage (since volunteer work apparently constitutes employment) , etc... whose addresses I can't recall since I never knew them in the first place? Seriously, I don't recall the city/village AT ALL, pretty sure I just slept in a car when people pick me up in a random subway station.

Once again, apologies for the stream of consciousness ramblings. I do want to be uh.. "candorous," but not sure how I should go about rectifying. I await the judgment/counsel of TLS on how to proceed. Thanks. :(

Bronx Bum

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Re: character and fitness/ amend application question

Post by Bronx Bum » Mon Jan 06, 2014 11:28 am

tl;dr whole thing but relax. You'll be fine. Just amend. TLS acts like C&F is a lot tougher than it is. I was arrested for assault (just a bar fight though), got it dropped to disorderly conduct, and I'm literally in the SECOND admission ceremony, meaning I'm getting admitted quicker than 95% of the people in my jurisdiction.

Don't worry. Just disclose everything.

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dudnaito

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Re: character and fitness/ amend application question

Post by dudnaito » Mon Jan 06, 2014 6:36 pm

Thanks for the reply, but your problem doesn't share any analogous issues with mine, and I'm not trying to hide anything nor have I ever. I'm TRYING to disclose missing pieces in my employment and residential areas due to some unforseen incidents that had me scrambling to place references and addresses from one place to the other.

My big question is that the NCBE "amend forms" relative to the "revise forms" do not seem to take into account any "errors" as it assumes the final online application is well... 100% accurate and well they should. However, mine, due to reasons that I do realize are tl;dr (or if you have time and the inclination, read above), still have pieces missing from the employment section. Once again, the amend forms are the only forms available to edit anything from your online application, but it basically allows you to only address a CURRENT change in employment for example, which is not the case for me.

Thank you though. Been waiting for a response for days. And due to massive time zone differences and apparently hazardous weather conditions in the Midwest I haven't been able to get into contact with any authority quite yet.

ilove_toshop

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Re: character and fitness/ amend application question

Post by ilove_toshop » Tue Jan 07, 2014 2:37 am

I had to amend the dates of a job I had during college because I had a typo on the date. I also realized I forgot to include my volunteer work at a hospital one summer. I asked my jurisdiction and was told to just use the general amendment form, which gives you a large space to type. The employment amendment form won't work because it is set up for current changes in employment. Essentially, on the general form, I wrote what the errors were, referenced the corresponding page numbers on my original application, and sent it in.

I'm sure that if you need more space than what the form provides, you could attach extra pages. Since they are requesting this information, I don't see an issue with that.

Hope this helps you.

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dudnaito

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Re: character and fitness/ amend application question

Post by dudnaito » Tue Jan 07, 2014 5:44 am

ilove_toshop wrote:I had to amend the dates of a job I had during college because I had a typo on the date. I also realized I forgot to include my volunteer work at a hospital one summer. I asked my jurisdiction and was told to just use the general amendment form, which gives you a large space to type. The employment amendment form won't work because it is set up for current changes in employment. Essentially, on the general form, I wrote what the errors were, referenced the corresponding page numbers on my original application, and sent it in.

I'm sure that if you need more space than what the form provides, you could attach extra pages. Since they are requesting this information, I don't see an issue with that.

Hope this helps you.
Holy crap... i was so caught up in the specific categories, I didn't even see the very bottom "general" section. Thank you so much, I'm sure you're right, and you've relieved my stress 99%. Your name's "i love to shop?" If you were here, I'd buy you something nice, lol. Thank you!!! :D

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