What is better for legal employment prep? Forum

[Rsrcht]

What is better in preparing for legal employment:

Taking law school classes on subjects that are not relevant to your desired practice but nevertheless are on the bar exam, or relying solely on bar prep companies such as Barbri?

Why?

[ggocat]

What is better in preparing for legal employment:

Taking law school classes on subjects that are not relevant to your desired practice but nevertheless are on the bar exam, or relying solely on bar prep companies such as Barbri?

Why?

Assumption: if you rely solely on bar prep companies, you will take courses that are related to your desired employment.

You should take courses that are related to your desired employment.

Why? Taking bar courses does not necessarily improve your likelihood of success on the bar. See Douglas Rush & Hisako Matsuo, Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage?, 57 J. Legal Educ. 224, 236 (2007), available at http://law.bepress.com/expresso/eps/1889/ ("The only statistically significant relationship between the number of upper division, bar examination subject-matter courses taken and bar examination passage occurred for graduates who ranked in the third quartile of their graduating class. The mean difference in the number of such courses taken by those lower ranked graduates who passed and those who failed the bar examination was less than one class.")

[18488]

related question for anyone with bar-exam-taking experience: how many subjects is it reasonable to completely rely on Barbri for, without taking the courses? I imagine this is more feasible for some subjects than others. For example, family law and trusts and estates is on almost every state's bar--do you really need to take these if you aren't planning to do estate planning?

[Matthies]

Other than the required classes the only bar class I took was crim pro. I did not take Commercial Paper, Secured Transactions, Wills, Trusts, Family Law, Agency, Partnership or Corporations. I relied on Bar Bri for all that. Don’t know if I passed yet, but I felt Bar Bri did a good job of teaching us what we needed to know if we had never taken the class.