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Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in othe

Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus study time constraints; 2) what you're asked on the bar exam has very little connection to the actual practice of law. Lots of theory and hand-wringing, but neither law school nor the bar exam truly prepare you for HOW to be a lawyer. Glad I passed both on the first try. Won't ever do it again.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their proceedings and the lawyers, given all this and the difficulty of the exam, are a time and a half as expensive as New York's. [1] "For fiscal year 2014, the average elapsed from filing to disposition [for the Delaware Supreme Court] was only 154.2 days, and the average elapsed time from submission to disposition was only 27.3 days" [a]. Meanwhile, in California, the median time to process an appeal, statewide, is 518 days, ranging from 423 in Ventura to 693 in Sacramento [b]. [a] http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pdf http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pd... pages 2 and 3 [b] http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Rep... page 28
- gnicholas 9y ago
  > given all this and the difficulty of the exam, [CA lawyers] are a time and a half as expensive as New York's. Former big firm lawyer here. This is definitely not true across the board. In the firm I worked at, we had three "rates": reduced, normal, and New York. The NY rate was only charged by NY lawyers, or by other lawyers working on matters for NY lawyers (typically for NY clients, who would put up with it). It may be that small-firm lawyers are much less expensive in NY, but I would doubt that this is the case. If you're comparing upstate NY to SF, you'll see a big difference, due to cost of living. But compare upstate NY to Sacramento, and the difference would not be anywhere close to 1.5x.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task (e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section by section, bodies of California's commercial code everyone was agreeing to ignore. Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.
    - gnicholas 9y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding. There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        Discounts are a huge part of it. That said, I typically try to box legal bills in advance for everything except litigation. For the avoidance of doubt, I give both coasts the same budget. Guess which side's lawyers love running right through it (or approaching it to within 5¢).
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      I fail to see why listing out a larger legal document should be 30-45% premium. That is like saying "Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)" Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).
- stmaarten 9y ago
  Delaware is a good forum to litigate internal corporate affairs because forming and regulating corporate entities is a major industry and revenue driver for that state. The Chancery Court is specialized in an arcane and technical area of the law, which makes Delaware better than other states for this one purpose. Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need. I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    Employment and consumer law tends to frown upon changing the body of law by contract. I'm referring to business formation, contracting, merging, fundraising, et cetera. If you sign under California law for many of these agreements, you will often find at least 3 pages listing out specific sections of California civil procedure and commercial code that both parties will, almost every time, find it beneficial to exempt themselves from. You can't do it in a single, blanket paragraph. You have to write out custom paragraphs for each and every section. California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).
    - stmaarten 9y ago
      Ah, yep. I agree with all of that, except I'm not sure if there's a linear relationship between case lifespan and fees. The delay in California really comes from overburdened courts and distant trial dates. Anecdatally, I haven't found that this encourages lawyers to churn any more work than the case "naturally" supports (i.e., the amount they can get away with billing given the claim size, complexity, insurance pot, fee clauses, etc.).
rhino369 9y ago
The biggest reason is the minimum passage score is just higher in California. When you normalize the scores between States, California is basically a standard deviation harder than NYC or Illinois.
NTDF9 9y ago
Sounds like tech coding interview process.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Exactly what I thought. A bunch of technical, academic questions that have very little relation to the actual work being done? Yes, I am very familiar with that.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Except after you're done, you get paid like $500 per hour
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Isn't that more like "the firm you work for charges" rather than "get paid"?
- johan_larson 9y ago
  Except lawyers do it once, and they're done. We do it every time we change jobs.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their proceedings and the lawyers, given all this and the difficulty of the exam, are a time and a half as expensive as New York's. [1] "For fiscal year 2014, the average elapsed from filing to disposition [for the Delaware Supreme Court] was only 154.2 days, and the average elapsed time from submission to disposition was only 27.3 days" [a]. Meanwhile, in California, the median time to process an appeal, statewide, is 518 days, ranging from 423 in Ventura to 693 in Sacramento [b]. [a] http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pdf http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pd... pages 2 and 3 [b] http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Report.pdf http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Rep... page 28

gnicholas 9y ago
> given all this and the difficulty of the exam, [CA lawyers] are a time and a half as expensive as New York's. Former big firm lawyer here. This is definitely not true across the board. In the firm I worked at, we had three "rates": reduced, normal, and New York. The NY rate was only charged by NY lawyers, or by other lawyers working on matters for NY lawyers (typically for NY clients, who would put up with it). It may be that small-firm lawyers are much less expensive in NY, but I would doubt that this is the case. If you're comparing upstate NY to SF, you'll see a big difference, due to cost of living. But compare upstate NY to Sacramento, and the difference would not be anywhere close to 1.5x.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task (e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section by section, bodies of California's commercial code everyone was agreeing to ignore. Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding. There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.
    - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
      Discounts are a huge part of it. That said, I typically try to box legal bills in advance for everything except litigation. For the avoidance of doubt, I give both coasts the same budget. Guess which side's lawyers love running right through it (or approaching it to within 5¢).
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    I fail to see why listing out a larger legal document should be 30-45% premium. That is like saying "Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)" Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).
stmaarten 9y ago
Delaware is a good forum to litigate internal corporate affairs because forming and regulating corporate entities is a major industry and revenue driver for that state. The Chancery Court is specialized in an arcane and technical area of the law, which makes Delaware better than other states for this one purpose. Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need. I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Employment and consumer law tends to frown upon changing the body of law by contract. I'm referring to business formation, contracting, merging, fundraising, et cetera. If you sign under California law for many of these agreements, you will often find at least 3 pages listing out specific sections of California civil procedure and commercial code that both parties will, almost every time, find it beneficial to exempt themselves from. You can't do it in a single, blanket paragraph. You have to write out custom paragraphs for each and every section. California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).
  - stmaarten 9y ago
    Ah, yep. I agree with all of that, except I'm not sure if there's a linear relationship between case lifespan and fees. The delay in California really comes from overburdened courts and distant trial dates. Anecdatally, I haven't found that this encourages lawyers to churn any more work than the case "naturally" supports (i.e., the amount they can get away with billing given the claim size, complexity, insurance pot, fee clauses, etc.).

rhino369 9y ago

The biggest reason is the minimum passage score is just higher in California. When you normalize the scores between States, California is basically a standard deviation harder than NYC or Illinois.

NTDF9 9y ago

Sounds like tech coding interview process.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Exactly what I thought. A bunch of technical, academic questions that have very little relation to the actual work being done? Yes, I am very familiar with that.
0xbear 9y ago
Except after you're done, you get paid like $500 per hour
- arethuza 9y ago
  Isn't that more like "the firm you work for charges" rather than "get paid"?
johan_larson 9y ago
Except lawyers do it once, and they're done. We do it every time we change jobs.