Dana Lake
Editor-in-Chief
Bar applications are a nebulous sort of anxiety for law students, always around but still far enough away that it might be forgotten about for weeks at a time. Sort of like a rainstorm on the distant horizon, or assigned readings in a paper class. Spring semester means it is time for 3Ls to finally ask their firms to shell out the hundreds of dollars these applications cost, and put their honor on the line.
If you are the sort of person who has wondered if you have ever been charged for a crime and you don’t know it, or if you anxiously check to make sure the original copy of your birth certificate has not been consumed by rats since the last time you saw it, even though it never leaves your filing cabinet, this article is for you. The truth is that applying to take a bar exam is not that hard. By spending only ten minutes working on the application every PR class, you can have the whole thing done before the professor even gets to candor.[1]
That isn’t a recommendation to wait until the day before the filing deadline to start, though. If you are a standard applicant who has never gotten a parking ticket and worked for only one company before law school, you can breeze through pretty quickly. But much like law school applications, there are character and fitness questions that can take more time to answer (and provide documentation for) than you might expect. Even seemingly innocuous questions like, “Did this job require you to substantially engage in the practice of law?” can lead you down a rabbit hole that requires a panicked email to your PR professor.[2] No one wants to ask their firm to pay a late fee before they have even started working.
The Uniform Bar Exam and state-specific exams all want to know the same information: Where have you lived, worked, and committed crimes for the last ten years? You will also need your application for any law schools you have attended, which can be downloaded from the LSAC website. Your employment history needs to match between your bar and law school applications, and in general, you should have consistency between both documents. If you listed a C&F issue on your law school app, it needs to be disclosed to the Bar, and vice versa. If you have a C&F issue that you didn’t disclose within your initial application to law school, you will need to file a correction with the school.
It is extremely, extremely rare to fail to be licensed because of a C&F issue. During the investigation that takes place after your application is submitted, if there are additional questions or documents needed, you will be contacted and have the chance to work through whatever issue may have come up.
The real problem with bar applications is that the C&F investigation requires you to be fingerprinted. This is a huge pain in the neck. There are generally two options: go through a company, or DIY. IdentoGO, a fingerprinting company contracted with the state of Texas and other UBE jurisdictions, can electronically send your prints over to your investigator. They take care of everything; you just have to show up with your government issued ID. The locations available for this service are, of course, located at minimum two hours away. The closest office to Charlottesville that does fingerprinting is located in West Virginia, and they are only open on Tuesdays. Appointments book out weeks in advance, so it’s worth getting to this soon. The second option is to go through mailing a paper fingerprint card to your jurisdiction through a company like MorphoTrust USA. After pre-enrolling, you have thirty days to get to a law enforcement agency to have your prints taken and then submit the card.
Applying to take a bar exam might be an anxiety hanging over your head, but it doesn’t have to be. If you managed to fill out a law school application, you can do this easily. Below are the first filing deadlines for UBE states coming up soon.
Alabama, Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Rhode Island: Feb 1
Illinois: Feb 15
Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah: March 1
Washington: March 5
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dl9uh@virginia.edu