You can‘t take the Bar exam if your laptop is too modern | Hacker News Reader

You can‘t take the Bar exam if your laptop is too modern

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206 pointsomnibrain154 comments

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My all time favorite was when I took the SAT (long time ago) and the proctor confiscated my calculator.

At the end of the test there was a final question:

“Which of the following approved calculators did you use on this test?”

My calculator was option B.

Did you complain? Sue?

I genuinely thought you were calling the OP Sue, went searching to see if Sue was the new Karen, couldn't find anything, came back and realised you meant sue them... FML.

Wouldn't that be "Did you complain, Sue?"?

It's the same thing both ways! Chalk up another win for English.

But not Sue, did you complain?

Not quite the same:

"Didn't you complain, Sue?" - A question to Sue

"Didn't you compain? Sue?" - A question to Sue who is inattentive

Surely you weren’t the only one who read it that way.

I was the only one who read it that way.

And don't call me Shirley.

Did anyone complain? Bueller?

Can I be Frank? I read it that way, too.

Yes you can, Over.

Roger, Roger.

I'd have been all over that proctor like shit on velcro

Was it a basic calculator or a graphing one that could store data on it?

It doesn't matter. It was approved calculator option B

calculators like TI-84 are programmable and you can even store programs to flash. You could literally type out plain text (like formulas, instructions, etc.) and store it as a BASIC program.

A lot of teachers don't know that there is a simple way to disable programs, and a lot of students don't know about the programming functionality. They don't understand that allowing a programmable calculator is basicially making the test open-book, not to mention it allows students to solve problems computationally (e.g. numerical analysis, euler's method, etc) that they would otherwise have to solve algebraicially.

This point is, it was approved for use. Typing out it's features here doesn't change that.

Ha we had to clear our calculators memory before tests. So of course I wrote a program to draw the "memory cleared" screen.

Examsoft sucks. They are a horrible pain to deal with, they are entrenched in their market, and they have no fear of imposing ridiculous requirements on their users (e.g. bar exam takers) because their users aren't their customers. Their customers are the jurisdictions that administer the bar.

So yeah. I agree it sucks but there is not much to do about it as an exam taker.

I'm so glad I'm out of school and I don't have to worry about this kind of stuff. I feel for students today.

State Bars are so technically illiterate that they don't know the basics of how to procure technology. California Bar has no CTO and didn't know to require an SLA of ExamSoft. When ExamSoft blames the users for their buggy software, the Bar actually believes them.

maybe if we had actually dug into open standards instead of this mushy cesspool of abandonware, not everyone in the world would have to spend their time tracking technology trends

Who is “we” here?

technologists. computer people. computer companies. the people responsible for this mess.

Or maybe blame the California Bar for partnering with such amateur vendors when they had millions of competent technology companies to pick from?

While I'm all for open standards, the fact is they're no magic wand. It's just as possible for an open system to be clunky, outdated and abandoned. Just because it's possible for someone to work on it or fix issues, that's no guarantee anyone will.

The problem here was poor consideration of requirements and inadequate governance, and there's really no substitute for just flat out doing a better job at those. After all, nobody is stopping someone developing an open suite of exam software, it's not against the law or anything. It's all very well saying that's what we need, but somebody has to actually buckle down and do it.

It's basic common sense that by July/2022, some people will have acquired a laptop manufactured in 2022.

Especially when you deal with exam takers in the thousands.

It shouldn't require a CTO for that, IMHO.

They really believe that it's on the vendor to make decisions like that, and that any decision they make is reasonable because the vendors are the experts.

These are the same folks who accidently leaked all of their confidential discipline records because of a "database flaw" that was automatically scraped.

I wonder if disabling the Alder Lake E-cores could work around the problem. Certain games had DRM issues which could be resolved this way.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigabyte-releases-tool-to-disa...

Another stake in the DRM coffin. /I wish.

I don’t have a strong opinion personally, but my wife is a lawyer and I remember her cramming all the BARBRI material in the weeks before her Bar exam. She said she basically could have skipped law school and done just that stuff (and saved hundreds of thousands of $$$ lol)

That’s how I did the AWS solution architect exams. Except it was hours not weeks before :)

I spent the training course week on holiday.

Not gonna lie... if I could switch from my dev role to an AWS solution architect role just by passing some tests... I probably would. Maybe I'm just getting crankier, but there's a ton of obvious things that multiple levels of management are not seeing until I bring it up, and I don't really want to get an MBA.

What’s the disadvantage to skipping law school (other than resume issues, I assume)? Could one actually do this and come out a “real” lawyer?

Unfortunately, the primary value of law school is signaling, but it’s a big one. You could skip law school in California and take the Baby Bar and become a “real lawyer” in the sense you could legally do everything any other lawyer can do. But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

E.g. in the recent leaked conversation between Macron and Putin: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exch...

> Putin quickly turned the conversation to “our dear colleague Mr. Zelensky,” accusing the Ukrainian president of “lying” to Macron about his intention to implement the Minsk Accords, which had sought to end the war in the Donbas region.

> Putin then took issue with Zelensky’s apparent refusal to negotiate with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian separatists, which infuriated the French president and prompted him to exclaim in audible frustration: “I don’t know where your lawyer learned law!”

> But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

This isn't that different from any other profession though. A doctor, professor, or engineer from Harvard or Stanford etc is going to get a lot more respect than the one had no schooling at all (even absent licensing requirements).

"don't worry, I watched a bunch of youtube videos on this."

Yeah, it's totally just like all of these no-degree developers, except when there's a failure in your lawyering, you might get sued, disbarred, and also get jail time for being incompetent in addition to potentially ruining someone else's life, or at least wasting a lot of their time.

I also got the idea from law school that a lot of going to law school is to show to the courts that you've shown you're not going to waste the legal system's time by not knowing how to follow all the procedure and how to write legal documents you submit to the court. The rules of civil litigation and how you must write documents are hideously complicated due to having been built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance to prove their case.

For example, the clerk at the civil litigation court is often like a compiler that will just ignore your document if you didn't do it just right. It's like writing a nice big long program and the compiler's only response is to segmentation fault on you if you made any error in the filing. I bet these court clerks receive lots and lots of filings that are a big unprofessional mess that they just throw in the trash.

> built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance

Did they strike a balance? Or did they just make it pay to play?

"I got my legal degree from Legal Eagle"

I'd say all three of those cases are a bit different from each other and from law. Schools do make a difference for doctors but you still have an MD (or whatever) and can probably earn a pretty decent living in the US even if you went to a lower-ranged US school and aren't a total hack. Yes, academia is pretty status conscious. Engineering (especially software) is more forgiving. The common wisdom around law is that if you can't get into a better school and ideally get a prestigious clerkship, it may not be a great professional choice.

In medicine, residencies matter, and good ones in specialties are competitive. Income ranges for MDs vary tremendously by specialty, with GPs / FPs closer to the bottom.

In computer science, the current hawtness is a FANG pedigree, though the bloom may be comming off that rose. (I've been predichoping that for a decade, salt appropriately.)

I'm not sure what the situation for hard engineering (EE, ME, civil, aero, petroleum, etc.) is, though I'd suspect there's benefit to a larger firm initially. See the MBA route through McKinsey or Big N consultancies for example.

Not in computer science. In the valley, Stanford and UCB graduates are common. I know many self-taught ones that get just as much respect.

It's tangential but what a confusingly written article, it could have very well been machine translated and I'd have been none the wiser.

The jump from bringing up Zelensky not dealing with Donbass situation as per agreement to Macron and him exclaiming that he doesn't know where Putin's lawyer learned law is comical in its absurdity too.

The disadvantage is obviously that you need the stuff you learn in law school to pass the bar. If you can independently learn it then you can come out as a "real" lawyer. But it seems it's not all states you can just do the bar and be a lawyer, some do require law shool.

Essentially all require law school.

Specific details here, if anyone is actually curious: https://barprephero.com/learn/take-the-bar-exam-without-law-...

Which also includes the important detail that the people who go to law school are 3x as likely to pass than the people who didn't (but had multi-year apprentices at a law firm).

That suggests the value of the actual teaching isn't insignificant.

It doesn't suggest whether the teaching is useful for the career of a lawyer, or just for passing the Bar, though. You'd hope it to be true of both, of course, and ideally more about being a good lawyer than about how to pass the Bar.

The disadvantage is that the vast majority of states no longer let anyone just sign up and take the bar, you need a degree, or at least some sort of sponsorship to even register to take the exam. The days of just taking the bar “Catch me if you can” style are long since past.

Source: Years ago I looked into “just taking the bar” only to come across ridiculous hoops and requirements.

From what I recall, majority of people who tried failed. The pass rates for people who did not went through school were abysmal.

Was it more than zero? Did they pay to take the test?

Yes they did paid. Yes some passed, but it was very small percent .

I'd like to add to the rest of the discussions: you can get a JD from a law school and still end up not being able to practice law if you fail the Bar. Yes, you need a JD to take the Bar exam in most places, but the 'credential' that gives any actual value is just the exam.

Have a friend who had to take it a couple times over the course of I think 5 years before he finally passed. Worked IT until he finally passed.

Was your friend Joe Pesci?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBarc_-Eoek

Practically every profession in healthcare has equivalent exams - physician, nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, occupational therapist. You must have the degree to take the exam, and you must have the exam to get a license. I know of quite a few nurse anesthetists who had graduated and taken - and passed - their boards, but had not yet had those results blessed by the credentialing committees. Most relied on their still-valid RN license to pay the bills for a month or two until the committees could do their work.

At least in nursing they have the nurse licensure compact; if you are a certified RN in any NLC state, you can practice in any other. It's not perfect, but it's a lot easier than medicine.

Once upon a long time ago, when I lived in Florida, I was interested in running for election as a county judge. There were provisions in the statutes for small counties (under 40k population). There was a special program only offered at UF in Gainesville that was 3 years long and only for people who wanted to run for County Judge. I believe even though it was the same length as a regular JD, that if you passed this course you could not sit for the bar exam.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/34.021

I hope someone in the community releases an unofficial patch to make it work on 12th Gen CPUs, that just happens to make it work on actual VMs too.

I bet if you disable the e cores it would work. Worth a try

i'll do it if somebody can provide me a copy of the software

Missing part of headline “and your state bar uses Examsoft”

That is not the only option your state bar could have chosen.

What's wrong with pen and paper.

It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper.

Only part of the exam is an essay exam, but modern law is going to be practiced on a computer, and it makes sense for the test to be administered on a computer.

(if only they could get away from ExamSoft...)

> It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper.

It is taking everything in me not to make a full-on "kids these days" rant.

In order to make it fair, you would have to hobble every test taker to use pen and paper.

I remember writing essay answers with pen and paper and also with a typewriter and using Wite-Out. I would not want to compete using those tools against someone who is able to edit their answers before submitting them.

If it makes you feel better, in my modern western country, all exams are still done with pen and paper. It pretty much only has advantages: easier to proctor, less issue with cheating, less technical problems, everyone is taking the test in the same condition. The idea that you could just come out of school and not be able to write a dozen pages without feeling pain feels weird to me.

It fades pretty quickly. My hands cramped returning from each summer vacation as a child.

I mean, it is wise of you to hold back. Writing by hand can be painful without the proper technique. I have one book that teaches you how to write properly by hand. It turns out that you should use your shoulder a lot more; it’s much easier to cramp up if you use your fingers to drive the pen/pencil, which is what I have always done. When was that book released? Maybe in the 1910s sometime. They don’t teach people such things any more.

Lack of backspace and clipboard is the point. I don't think modern people should be able to write long good text without them.

Could you share some more about this book?

It was painful for me decades ago. Not sure what it has to do with kids these days.

>pen and paper

Kids these days. Back in my day we used chalk and a slate!

Go on and copy twelve pages of a book right now. Tell me at the end that it's not painful.

> It's literally painful to do an essay exam on pen and paper.

Hahaha, flashbacks to "Blue Book" exams in college, which was a long time ago but recently enough that I basically never wrote anything by hand (all typing) except those tests. They did indeed hurt.

[EDIT] To be clear, they hurt because I rarely wrote anything by hand.

You are already fighting through the pain of taking a test. Pen and paper is just a tiny bit more.

It does not need to be painful. There are pens that require far less friction to write than ballpoints or pencils, namely fountain pens and rollerballs. Good technique helps too, e.g. writing with your whole arm instead of your fingers and your wrist only.

Unfortunately, most people in Europe seem to be done with fountain pens after the first few years of elementary school. I am not sure about the rest of the world, but I would guess that it is similar.

// EDIT: Grammar

> Unfortunately, most people in Europe seem to be done with fountain pens after the first few years of elementary school.

I grew up in New Zealand.

Our writing stationery was pencils; the teachers didn't want young students using pens until the student could demonstrate competency in writing neatly. But after that, all the students used cheap ballpoint pens; maybe a gel or rollerball pen.

I never encountered fountain pens until the end of high school.

The hallowed pen licence! Our classroom had a sheet on the wall listing those who were allowed to be issued pens. Didn't make mine until year 6 I think.

Damn, I still wouldn't be allowed a neat writing device under that regime.

The century the test is being administered in?

I took pen and paper exams at school and university between 2007 and 2012 and it was absolutely fine

I'm sure writing a comment like this means I'm getting old, but nonetheless

I took A-levels in 1980 (entirely pen and paper) and a comp sci degree in 1983. The exams for the latter were entirely paper-based.

I still regularly use pen and paper to take notes and design things as a software engineer because in my opinion it's simply the best tool for the job.

All my CS exams in UC Berkeley were pencil and paper and I thought it was fine (preferrable to computer exams). I understand that some people doesn't like it.

This might shock and amaze you, but I took many midterms and finals for my CS and EE classes using pencil and paper in the 21st century, and this was at a well-known Californian private university.

Were everybody else also doing it on pen & paper, or were you the only one?

? Every exam I ever took for my BS in EE was pen and paper. 2015-2020.

Good question :)

Yes, all students took the test together on paper and pencil in the classroom; a digital version of the test was not available.

I just went through my files to check, and indeed the final exam for my artificial intelligence class was in-class, 2 hours, pen only (no pencil).

My point being that it's quite different if everyone does it on pen & paper. If you're the only one, it's a disadvantage to do an essay exam on paper when your competition does it on laptops, no?

I went to college in this century. I could probably count on one hand the times where a test wasn't on paper.

If the incompatibility is specifically with Intel's 12th gen platform, then it probably stems from the mix of P and E cores having different CPUID data, which has also been a problem for some video games with aggressive DRM/anti-cheat measures.

But it also wouldn't surprise me if the incompatibility has been misidentified and actually stems from 12th gen systems being the most common occurrences of machines that ship with Windows 11, with the core isolation and memory integrity features on by default. Those actually make use of hardware virtualization features: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/device-protectio...

Does anyone know if this same issue is present in the PearsonVue software?

To be fair, if lawyers use and become familiar with up-to-date technology, the whole system breaks down. Our economy depends upon a lag between technological development and regulation.

No idea how the Bar exam works. Sounds like no notes or anything?

Why they would need to have a CPU check? Does the software have some anti-cheating mechanism?

You can't take a math exam if your calculator is too modern.

Not sure if modern is the right word here; I guess graphing calculators from the 90s would also not be allowed. Unless you mean something different?

Most exams only allow a small number of calculators. Something like Wolfram Alpha is not allowed. Exams want to limit you to a fixed set of built in functionality as to opposed to using the best tools that are available to you.

Abolish the bar? Wut? Why? Because its hard?

Something something gatekeeping by old people

I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law.

Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks.

I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.

I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.

The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents).

As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay.

The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.

As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.

As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me.

Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness?

Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?

Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders

> Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers?

Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks.

I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."

I think they're pointing out the ridiculous costs of law school and the wealth barrier of entry that creates.

Someone who could pass the bar exam, and could end up being a great lawyer isn't even given the chance, because they can't afford to attend law school (which is necessary to take the exam, from what I gather, but IANAL & I'm not from the US).

Financial aid is readily available at all top tier law schools for anyone that could plausibly end up a “great” lawyer. As much as I dislike the hierarchical nature of post secondary school, there is no doubt in my mind that the hypothetical person who has not distinguished themselves to the point where a top tier law school would notice them and offer financial aid by the time they’ve completed an undergraduate degree and taken the LSAT does not exist or, if they do, they are so rare as to not exist.

Now, are people who could pass the bar exam and be merely a “good” or “acceptable” lawyer being frozen out by the wealth barrier? Absolutely. But actually probably not: these people can go to a lower tier and cheaper school.

I don't know enough about the system in the US and I might be talking out of my ass here, since most of my impression are formed by reading online discussions, but here goes... I was always under the impression that you can just buy into most unis in the US? There's the scholarship programs, but I was also under the impression they're often through sports rather than grades (and to me it's obvious that there's not necessarily a correlation between someone good at American Football and law).

Post-baccalaureate study scholarships are unrelated to sports scholarships. Law is a post bachelor degree. “Buying” your way into a top law school is possible but basically entails buying your way through an undergraduate degree as well which means that you might have “bought” your way in but you’re still ultimately incredibly well prepared. And these people who buy their way in subsidize the exact people you’re concerned about being kept out: poor but well qualified candidates who can become “great” lawyers.

> . I was always under the impression that you can just buy into most unis in the US?

This is true at the richest levels. If you are willing to write a multi-million dollar check as a donation (name a building/room after your family), you will probably be admitted. In 1999, apparently a $2.5 million donation secured Jared Kushner's admittance into Harvard. This has to be adjusted not just by regular admission but also by the increased competition (it is more than twice as competitive). So I would expect we might be getting closer to a $10 million donation. Although schools would probably cap it/auction it off if they got too many donations.

This is by far the minority of admissions.

Other cases where people "pay to get in" are literally bribes, and people can and have gone to jail.

> There's the scholarship programs, but I was also under the impression they're often through sports rather than grades

There are a lot of scholarship types: academic, need-based, interest based (an engineering may spend money to help aspiring engineers), corporate (we'll pay your tuition if you work here for 2 years after), and athletic. Not all schools offer all types, and some (like interest based scholarships) are unaffiliated with any school (although athletic scholarships are).

Also, athletic scholarships are limited to your undergraduate (pre-law or pre-med or your BA/BS in X).

In all cases, the scholarships help you pay for school, but tend to be different from the actual admittance process. So the correlation would be between someone good at Football and someone who can afford school. Which, if you think about it as a job (they make the school a ton of money) is fair in a way.

Minor clarification. Sports scholarships are limited by duration, and often apply to BS and MS for 5 years max, with 4 years of playing time.

Generally switching schools requires a year off, but there are some loop holes by applying to a grad major that is not present in the original school. Basketball and football players seem to use these often. You can google for more information, and I believe it still wouldn't work for law/doctor programs, but I haven't looked into this.

> Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?

Are you saying that a "burger flipper" should always be one and never aspire to eventually be a lawyer?

I'm not trying to erode society down to nothingness. I dislike academic credentialism.

I just want there to be many paths to learning. Formal schooling. Apprenticeship. Private mentoring. Hell, you could probably get a series of YouTube channels (with a very low success rate) or something closer to a MOOC.

Obviously, you need to demonstrate you learned from those paths. And I wondered if the bar exam was sufficient to show that. So I asked someone who claimed to be a lawyer on the internet as I don't know how sufficient the bar is as a measure.

Chamath Palihapitiya would be mad if all he made was 400k/yr, and Burger King was his place a choice as a young man looking to flip burgers.

The same way I feel about requiring doctors to go to medical school before they can do a residency.

The bar exam and law school have different purposes. A law school teaches the laws of the entire country. A bar exam tests the law of the specific state. While many laws are similar, they're not the same, and the differences matter a great deal.

And secondly, a great many people can eek their way through law school who have no business actually practicing law, and the bar exam is essentially the last filter keeping those incompetents away from the practice of law before they can harm clients. (The law provides recourse to clients when a lawyer's actions deliberately harms clients, however, there is little to no recourse for clients if their lawyer makes a mistake.)

> The bar exam and law school have different purposes. A law school teaches the laws of the entire country. A bar exam tests the law of the specific state. While many laws are similar, they're not the same, and the differences matter a great deal.

This was true 10 years ago. Now the majority of states use the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), often without a jurisdiction-specific component. It's unfortunate.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

They should do it like medicine. You go to school, then a residency then pass your boards. It would be better if you went to law school, did x number of hours under a lawyer, then take the bar exam.

That is called articling.

Cost-wise the thing I find extremely strange as a foreigner is the US insistence that people should do a full year BS before studying law and medicine. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Here you just study the field you want to practice from the start.

The costs by themselves are also shocking to be fair. Here the full four years of a law degree allowing you to pass the bar would only set you back 753€ to which you would probably have to add a year of preparation and the cost of the exam itself which probably bring you to somewhere between 2000€ and 4000€ for the academic part of actually becoming a lawyer.

Incidentally, in the US, the transformation during the early to mid 20th century of the basic law degree (originally typically LLB [Bachelor of Laws]) into a postgraduate JD (Juris Doctor) with a 4-year undergraduate degree prerequisite, and the standardization of the LLB/JD program at three years (from earlier instances that were one or two years) was done by the legal profession in a failed attempt to erect barriers to entry to members of immigrant/ethnic minority communities. When I was in law school I wrote a paper for an ethics class on this topic. (Ethics BTW came to be a required class in ABA-accredited law schools in the wake of Watergate.) Outside the US I believe the basic university law degree is typically an undergraduate, bachelor-level program.

As a lawyer, there is so much more that falls under the umbrella of "practicing law" that is nowhere near as demanding as a trial or contract negotiations. I personally think the credentials that lawyers have are completely unnecessary for a large portion of the tasks that only lawyers are allowed to perform.

I think the bar exam is more like, sufficient but not necessary, anyone who can pass the bar is easily capable of being a lawyer, but I don't think the bar is necessary at all to prove that someone is capable.

What kind of law do you practice? In my view every litigator has to be ready to go to trial.

I guess if you are going to be a contract document review attorney or something then maybe the bar is overkill in some ways. But I would argue that the only value added by someone like a document review attorney is the fact that they passed the bar (demonstrating a broad base of knowledge).

I am not a lawyer, but I would guess there is a position for "slightly more than Legal Zoom". I want to create a will (and don't need to worry about estate taxes.) I want to create an LLC. My counterparty and I agree on the terms and we need someone to draft or modify a contract that specifies what we say.

This is exactly how I feel as well. There is a ton of stuff that lawyers do that is basically rote, there are a handful of questions you need to ask, and then you do the thing, and there's no reason someone with an associate's degree and a six week training course couldn't do it, with a strict rule to refer more complicated stuff to the attorneys.

I was under the impression that most attorneys are not litigators. You can easily spend a career writing wills or creating trusts or doing business formations, or helping people through real estate transactions without ever setting foot in a courtroom.

One of the first things they taught us in law school is that most lawyers won't actually spend much time at all in a courtroom, and I've found that to be true. There's so much else that lawyers do, and a lot of it is done preliminarily by paralegals, and in my opinion, a lot of it could go out the door at that point, having been done by the paralegal. I actually think a lot of work does go out the door at that point and there's just a grand performance happening where we all pretend that the lawyer did more than a cursory review.

Maybe that's not how law should be practiced, but judging by the wills and LLC agreements that come across my desk, it's how it is practiced and the world goes on without noticing.

I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam.

Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not.

I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties.

I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.

> Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not.

You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned".

IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.

If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.

Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways.

From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others.

It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams.

As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.

Well I think there's different aspects to IQ.

Retention is one as well as problem solving.

I think both play an important part in a lot of situations.

I would do law school online, but guess what? It still costs $70k a year to do a JD that's almost entirely online. The cost is really absurd. I feel that way about all higher education, but especially about JDs. Cheaper learning platforms are the future.

I really don't understand logic behind that price other than we can just charge that much. Material doesn't change that much, I doubt the ratio of staff to students need to be very low either... No special or expensive equipment is needed either...

It's because this profession is regulated by the government. So the prices skyrocket. This happens with any thing regulated by the government. A liquor license in CA can run up to $300,000 dollars. Health insurance is insanely expensive. The more automobile regulation, the more the price goes up.

Regulation is a double edge sword.

They make a thing safer but then the increased cost excludes a lot of people from using the thing until typically only the rich are able to enjoy a thing.

I wish the government would regulate my health insurance a lot harder.

You could always just give your money to the insurance company. I'm sure they would appreciate it.

I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer.

He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books.

He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.

What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor.

It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well.

Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it.

Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.

To be fair, the Bar exists because lawyers themselves felt there were too many lawyers.

What should be abolished is those crappy proctoring applications. Either implement remote-friendly tests or do as TOEFL has done since decades and apply tests at controlled locations.

The bar exam weeds people out at the wrong point--after they've racked up 300k in loans. They should just set a minimum LSAT score to achieve the same purpose.

Or better yet, make a JD a Bachelor of Law degree without weeding out.

But then how do you weed people out?

Let the market decide. Nobody is going to hire someone with shit grades from a lowly ranked school. But instead of having 300k in debt, those unemployable Bachelor of Law grads will be no worse off than if they had a BA in an unmarketable field like sociology or poli-sci.

Right now, they have to go get the the BA in anything (most do stuff like poli-sci) AND then they have to go spend 3 years and 300k dollars on a professional degree.

The glut of lawyers isn't really a problem without all that wasted time and debt.

Requirements like the bar exam exist also to protect the insiders who also happen to make the rules. In economics it's called an insider-outsider problem. Not saying we should actually abolish the bar, just hinting at a possible reasonable argument.

also called regulatory capture

I'd say that's something different. Regulatory capture is when a regulator who is supposed to be outside the system gets drawn into it (like a banking regulator who gets defensive about a flawed risk model by a bank after they've given their approval). Bar associations are by definition run by people who are part of the system.

Just buy a Ryzen laptop. Intel's 12th Gen has had a number of issues - hardware acceleration in browsers not working, problems with thread scheduling under any OS except from Windows 11, excessive power consumption and overheating in benchmarks. On top of that Intel has done a lot of illegal stuff to protect their market positions.

I think you miss the whole point of why this landed on HN.

Why would somebody need to buy another laptop just to be able to attend the exam?

Because buying a laptop running a drastically new architecture increases the chances you'll run into software issues. This exam app is not the only thing Intel has broken.

“Why doesn’t this work on my Linux laptop?”

Meanwhile, as a Ryzen user, half of my virtual machines won't work and crash, USB is flakier than a biscuit in the Sahara, and my OEM refuses to release AGESA updates and I can't update the AGESA myself to fix literally dozens of problems on Ryzen.

"Just!" buying new hardware isn't a solution.

What is the OEM?

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