Did you ever wonder what it takes to become and attorney in Michigan?

By David McClelland

Did you ever wonder what hurdles a person must clear to become an attorney in Michigan? Well, I did and I learned about it first hand. Here is the route one must take.

To be accepted to a law school in Michigan, college graduates must have done well academically during their undergraduate years, pass the LSAT (the law school entrance exam) and satisfy specific requirements of the school to which they apply.

Once in law school, the first year is the most challenging and it isn't unusual for as high as 50% to drop out before their second year begins. Students who are fortunate enough to be able to attend law school full-time during the day, can usually graduate in three years. Students who must work during the day and attend law school classes at night, as I did, usually take four years to graduate.

Night law students have a limited social life during those four years. The routine for me was to play racquetball each day at 6:30 a.m. (to give me the stamina I needed), to work all day and then head down to the University of Detroit Law School by 6 p.m. and attend classes from 6 – 10 p.m., Monday through Thursday each week. Friday evening and the weekends were spent studying and briefing cases for the following week since that was no time to study on Mondays –Thursdays.

Then, three or four years later, if students have successfully passed all of the classes and graduated, are they ready for the Michigan Bar Exam? Not quite.

The Bar Exam is a two-day affair in Lansing. The first day is a 15-question essay exam on Michigan law and it is most challenging. The second day is the Multi-State exam, a 200 question, multiple-choice exam given all over the country on that day. Piece of cake, right? Not quite.

There were no law school courses that used multiple-choice questions and no courses that were devoted to Michigan law. Amazing, but true. So, students all take expensive and demanding Bar Review courses for several weeks to have a chance to pass the all-important Bar Exam.

Then, everyone heads over to Lansing in late July for the two-day, grueling exam. It is also given in late February each year for those who failed the July exam or who graduated from law school at an unusual time.

The secret for me was to order the PMBR (Preliminary Multistate Bar Examination (8 hours of cassette tapes) during my third year and listening to the 200 multiple-choice questions and answers over and over again as I drove between Bloomfield Hills and U. of D. Law School in downtown Detroit across from the Ren Cen.

On the Bar Exam, one needs a score of 135 to pass and that is an average of the two exams. If one scores 150 on the Multi-State exam, he or she passes as long as they made a good faith effort on the state essay exam. The Mult-State was where I excelled.

The other, somewhat surprising thing, was that one doesn't specialize on any area of the law in law school and it isn't until joining a firm or company that one specializes.

If you ever wondered about becoming a lawyer in Michigan, now you know.