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Just for a little background, I'm a first semester 3L at a Top 40 school. My grades hover around a 3.0 right now (which I'm hoping to bring up more somewhat this last year), but by graduation I'll have about two years of clinical/internship experience working in various District Attorney's offices. My ultimate goal is to become an ADA, although I'm trying to be realistic about what sort of jobs I could get immediately after graduation. My husband is a fourth year medical student, meaning we'll graduate at the same time. The issue is that he receives his Match Day results telling him where he will be a resident on March 17, 2017.

My concern here is that it seems like several of our surrounding states (where he is putting in applications) have their registration deadlines prior to finding out where he matches. I don't personally know anyone who is in a similar situation, and my school's career counselors weren't the most helpful when I asked them about this process. I'm trying to decide whether I need to pony up registration fees/character and fitness for these states that have earlier deadlines, or if I should take the gamble (hoping he ends up in one of his higher ranked choices where I wouldn't need to register until after he gets his match day results). If I took that gamble and we ended up in a state where I had not registered, how badly do you think it would look to employers to simply wait to take the February bar exam after moving?

If you all have any advice, I'd love to hear some different perspectives. Thank you!

I don't know this for certain, but I'm pretty sure you can still register after the "deadline." There's just going to be a late registration fee or something.

Trust me, nobody cares when you take/pass the bar exam unless you already had a job lined up that requires you pass the July exam.

I'm kind of in the same situation because my husband is active duty military and we had to do some serious bargaining and planning to figure out where we were going to live and where I would take the bar. We ended up compromising and got him to stay in state for my 3L year + 1.5-2 years in our current state. I'm lucky in that I took the UBE and scored high enough to transfer my score. Also, I had a child my 3L year and seriously considered taking Feb instead. It worked out for me that July was fine, but I had no qualms about postponing to Feb had I needed to for my husbands job or bc of the baby.

Long story short, the DA's office will be there in Feb:) just make sure you have money saved up to start paying any student loans you have come January.

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I was in a similar situation last year, except that I knew where I was going after graduation but we didn't know where my wife would match. The process is really stressful so I completely understand your concerns. I spent a huge amount of time and energy worrying about the match and what our lives would be like after graduation. Please feel free to PM me and I can try and provide any advice/help I can.

jessuf wrote:Are any of those states possibly UBE? You could register for a UBE exam and do a score transfer.

Unfortunately, only two of the states he'll be applying to seem to be UBE (Alabama and South Carolina). He's hoping to stay in the south/southeast to be somewhat closer to our families.

Thank you all for the advice! This does make me feel a a bit better about the process.

You may also want to consider expanding the scope of what type of law you want to practice. It doesn't matter what state you're barred in if you're practicing immigration law, as long as you're barred in at least one state.