I Just Took the Bar Exam at 45. Here's What It Actually Felt Like

Secured transactions and I are no longer on speaking terms

Licensed by the author

I know this is a little different than my usual fare of defense-related scribblings. If you subscribed to me for Ukraine War news, indulge me in this mild digression. Writing this helps me process what I just experienced.

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Okay, so let’s get something out of the way: signing up for the bar exam at 45, while working full-time as a defense journalist and building a media business, is either brilliant strategic foresight or a severe personality disorder.

The jury is still out.

Three months ago, I decided to sit for the Michigan Bar.

Not because a law firm was waiting with a corner office.

Not because I needed the credential immediately.

But because I earned the J.D., and in my world, you don’t complete the training cycle and skip the war.

So, I paid the cash money, downloaded Barbri, and began what can only be described as a three-month psychological siege conducted by a Secured Transactions professor at a CIA black site with a waterboard.

I quit a full-time corporate job in November to study for the February bar. I thought to myself: Now the runway is clear…

Oh, except for making four videos a week for YouTube, writing on Medium and Substack, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, an ill-timed trip to Disney World at the end of January, and sub-zero Michigan weather that would make Tim Horton say, “Damn son.”

And I mean “below zero” on the uncivilized Fahrenheit scale!

Month One — December: Confidence and Highlighters

The first month felt controlled. Methodical. Even optimistic.

I built attack outlines.

Color-coded my materials.

Told myself this was just another system to learn.

I’ve read 300-page military doctrine manuals voluntarily. I analyze missile systems for a living. How hard could an exam about contracts and torts be?

Answer: it’s not hard, actually. It’s just relentless.

The bar exam isn’t testing brilliance. Law school already tried that. It’s testing whether you can recall the elements of a purchase-money security interest in consumer goods while your brain is on question number 173 out of 200 and every question is a mini-essay.

Personally, I think the exam is the classic definition of institutionalized hazing. I know exactly what that looks like because I served in the U.S. Army.

I feel bad for the dozens of amazing young people, who would otherwise make brilliant attorneys, but simply aren’t good test takers and couldn’t overcome an exam that exists merely because “it’s a rite of passage.”

Actually, Utah just made the news because starting in January 2026, they started offering an “Alternate Pathway” to legal licensure that does not require passing the traditional bar exam. This genius, skills-based route allows law graduates from ABA-accredited schools to become licensed by completing 240 hours of supervised legal practice, specialized coursework, and a written performance assessment.

Well done, Utah. Hey Michigan, taking notes?

Anyways, back to my study routine…

Every morning was MBE (multiple choice) sets. Every afternoon were essays. Evenings were journalism, video scripts, writing, and family life. I took no days off. Weekends were study time.

My days looked like a NATO war plan built entirely out of flashcards by Dr. Strangelove.

Some days I felt sharp. Other days I stared at a future interests question and briefly considered becoming a goat farmer in Somalia.

“To A for life, then to B if B marries C. If B does not marry C before A dies, B gets nothing.” How would you classify this?

Are you out of your g*ddamned mind? Who the fuck writes wills like that?

Month Two — January: The Grind

By month two, the novelty wore off. Okay, I guess we’re doing this for real…

Civil Procedure questions began to feel like psychological experiments. Every answer choice sounded correct if you stared at it long enough. Criminal law scenarios always involved someone intending to assault A and accidentally battering B. Contracts problems revolved around “consideration” like it was a sacred relic guarded by Martian tech priests.

And then there were Secured Transactions… My arch nemesis.

Secured Transactions reads like Saddam Hussain weaponized the alphabet. UCC 9–203. Attachment. Perfection. Priority. Filing. PMSI. It’s a subject that feels less like law and more like a compliance ritual designed by accountants who lost a bet at a strip club at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Corporations and Business Associations weren’t much better. Duties of care. Duties of loyalty. Closely held entities. Shareholder derivative actions. At some point, I started referring to it as “corporate chess, except instead of checkmate, you get a derivative lawsuit.”

Wills and trusts added a comforting reminder that even after death, paperwork will still make your surviving family miserable.

This is actually the month where I realized that I was missing some key rules in my brain; after all, some of my law classes on subjects like torts and property go back to 2021. So, I bought a supplemental bar prep program called Crushendo that provides audio flashcards to listen to black-letter law whenever you’re oscar mike (on the move).

I listened at the grocery store; I listened while writing defense articles and Ukraine War updates. Hell, I listened to them while I slept every night in the hopes that the law would worm its way into my subconscious. My wife was not amused.

Month Three — February: Attrition Warfare

By month three, the strategy shifted from “learning” to “endurance.”

At this point, I wasn’t trying to master new material. I was trying to make sure the rules I already knew didn’t leak out overnight like a slow tire.

This was my biggest fear: Staring at a blank essay screen, knowing the answer, but unable to pull the rule out of my memory so I could apply it to the facts.

Then, two weeks before the exam, I got sick.

Nothing dramatic. Just enough of a flu virus to sap energy and focus. The kind where you reread the same paragraph three times and it still looks like it was written in Ancient Egyptian Coptic.

At that point, I had a decision to make. What happens when you’re sick and unable to focus in the final two weeks before the bar exam? Ideally, this would have been prime study time.

Maybe I should skip the February exam and wait until July?

Hold on, Wes. You know that recon matters. Besides, in the military, I learned that the longer you avoid something, the bigger it becomes in your mind. So, I went.

I know the law. Worst case, I’ll have to go back in July. But the recon alone will be invaluable.

What recon you ask?

Sensory intel. What the room feels like, what the timing feels like, what your body does under pressure.

Timing intel. How long essays actually take you under test conditions. How time drains faster on MPTs than you expect.

Logistical intel. How the seating works, how noisy the room is, how the breaks work, what food you wish you brought, how the bathroom lines affect pacing.

Psychological intel. What it feels like to face the MBE block after lunch. What it feels like when fatigue hits at question 137. What panic feels like on question 31, and how you recover.

This info is worth its weight in gold if July is the main battle.

So, I booked my hotel in Lansing and, like an inmate on death row, started the long walk to the bar exam.

Exam Day: The Arena

Walking into the exam room felt oddly familiar. Rows of adults pretending not to size each other up. The quiet tension. The forced calm. It felt less like academia and more like a pre-brief before something operational.

I know I’m the “old-timer” in the room at 45, but I didn’t expect all of the other test takers to look like veritable infants. I just wanted to yell at some of these kids like I was their dad: “Hey, put a freaking coat on you lunatic, it’s 10 degrees outside…”

The bar examiners had therapy dogs on-site for stressed out test takers. Let that sink in.

Now, I’m a “dog guy” so I thought this was awesome until you step back and realize what their presence signified: you will be stressed and these dogs are here if you need to cry while petting a furry friend.

Jesus… Is it that bad?

The MPT performance test came first.

The MPT, or Multistate Performance Test, sounds intimidating until you realize what it actually is.

It’s not a test of what you memorized. It’s a test of whether you can function like a lawyer under pressure.

Imagine someone hands you a box. Inside that box are:

A fake client file, a stack of fake internal memos, a handful of fake cases, some fake statutes, and a ticking clock.

You get 90 minutes.

Your mission: read it all, figure out what matters, ignore what doesn’t, extract the rules, apply them correctly, and produce a clean, professional document; usually a memo to your fake boss.

There’s no outside knowledge required. Everything you need is in the packet. It’s a closed universe. This fact actually hurts quite a few test-takers because they don’t think there’s any way you can prepare or study for the MPT, so they ignore it during bar prep.

Not me. I practiced writing MPTs for weeks leading up to the main event.

It’s basically “Lawyer for a Day,” except the partner isn’t impressed by your vibes and the deadline is merciless.

For a layperson, I’d describe it like this:

The MPT is less about knowing the law and more about thinking clearly while drowning in paper.

It rewards organization.

It rewards discipline.

It rewards reading comprehension under stress.

It punishes ego, fluff, and people who think they’re cleverer than the instructions.

In other words, it’s military journalism with footnotes.

You’re given raw information, some of it useful, some of it irrelevant, and you have to turn it into something coherent before the clock runs out.

If the rest of the bar exam feels like academic trivia night with real consequences, the MPT feels like a job interview where they slide a folder across the table and say:

“Show me.”

And that’s probably why I liked it.

It didn’t care how many mnemonics I memorized. It cared whether I could execute.

And, I’ll say this plainly: I feel like I crushed it. If the bar exam had been ten MPTs and a sandwich break, I’d already be updating my email signature.

Then came the essays.

While studying for the bar, I took an analytical approach, ensuring that I had the rules down on the most frequently tested bar exam topics.

Well, the bar examiners apparently read my study plan and decided to conduct a targeted strike. Fully half of the essays were on topics that rarely show up. I had deliberately deprioritized studying these because historically they show up less often.

There is a very unique emotional experience when you turn the page, recognize the subject, and realize this is not your strongest flank. It’s not panic… It’s more like slow dread that borders on regret.

I wrote something for every question. Clean structure. Issue statements. Rules as best as I could recall them. IRAC where possible. No blank pages. If nothing else, I made the graders work for it.

Were they elegant? No.

Were they coherent? Yes.

Did I feel like Alexander Hamilton drafting The Federalist Papers? Fuck no.

The second day was all multiple choice: 100 questions before lunch and 100 after.

The MBE, the Multistate Bar Examination, is 200 multiple-choice questions designed by people who have clearly spent years studying human doubt.

If the MPT is “show me you can do the job,” the MBE is “prove you can keep your composure while we mess with your head for six straight hours.”

An MBE question doesn’t just ask what the law is. It asks whether you can spot the one legally significant detail buried inside a paragraph that reads like a mildly cheesy short story. Seriously, I would narrow down the answer to two possibilities, go back and carefully re-read the question prompt, and realize a single word completely identified the answer.

Here’s what a typical MBE question feels like. (Note: This is not from the actual bar. They are quite litigious if you share their content. I just made this one up.)

You start reading:

“A homeowner in State A entered into a written contract with a contractor to renovate her kitchen. The contract provided that the contractor would complete the renovations by June 1 in exchange for $40,000. On May 25, the contractor informed the homeowner that due to supply chain disruptions, he would not be able to obtain the specified imported tile and instead proposed substituting a domestic tile of comparable quality…”

You think, “Okay, contracts. Breach. Maybe anticipatory repudiation.”

Then the question keeps going.

“The homeowner responded that she would not accept any substitution and that timely completion was ‘essential.’ On June 1, the contractor completed the renovations using the domestic tile. The homeowner refused to pay…”

Now you’re juggling substantial performance, material breach, perfect tender, mitigation, expectation damages, and your own rising blood pressure as that vein in your forehead threatens to burst, spraying blood all over the scan-tron sheet.

Then you get to the answer choices:

A. The homeowner must pay because the contractor substantially performed.
B. The homeowner need not pay because the contractor materially breached.
C. The homeowner must pay because the contract was divisible.
D. The homeowner need not pay because the contractor anticipatorily repudiated the contract.

All four sound correct.

Two are legally plausible.

One is technically correct.

One is designed to ruin your morning.

The MBE is not testing whether you “know contracts.” It’s testing whether you can:

1. Identify the controlling rule.

2. Ignore attractive but irrelevant doctrines.

3. Avoid answer choices that are 90% right but fatally flawed.

4. Do this 199 more times without spiraling.

And then it does this across Torts, Contracts, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Real Property, Constitutional Law, and Civil Procedure… For six Godforsaken hours.

The fatigue is real.

Around question 120, your brain starts bargaining.

“This one could go either way.”

“Maybe they’re testing an exception.”

“Was that rule slightly different in federal court?”

This is where discipline matters more than brilliance.

Because the MBE isn’t about being clever.

It’s about being steady.

You read carefully. You spot the issue. You apply the black-letter rule. You eliminate the obvious traps. You move on. No drama. No ego. Just surgical precision.

The most dangerous answer choice on the MBE is the one that “feels right.”

The best bar takers don’t pick what feels right.

They pick what the rule requires.

And they do it 200 times.

There’s a moment during the bar exam when you realize this is not about intelligence. It’s about composure.

Fatigue hits. Doubt creeps in. You question whether you misread something obvious. Then you reset. Focus on the next question. The next issue. The next paragraph.

By the end of Day Two, I wasn’t euphoric. I was numb? Sad? Relieved? I’m still not sure how to feel.

Today, the day after the exam, I guess I feel melancholy. The bar was such a big part of my life for months and now, poof, it’s over.

I think that’s what surprised me most.

I’m not anxious waiting for the results. Maybe I passed. Maybe I didn’t.

If I passed, great. I’ll add “esquire” to the resume and go back to writing about drone warfare and defense budgets.

If I didn’t, I know exactly what to focus on next time, while reinforcing what I already know.

What changed for me isn’t the law.

It’s perspective.

Three months ago, the bar exam was a looming abstract threat. Now it’s just terrain I’ve walked. I’ve seen the room. Felt the fatigue. Managed the clock.

It’s not mystical anymore.

The bar exam isn’t a test of genius. It’s a test of “disciplined execution” under artificial monotony. It’s a war of attrition conducted with blue books and laptop chargers.

And if there’s one thing veterans understand, it’s endurance.

So, for now, I’m back to journalism. Back to defense analysis. Back to building a passionate audience. I actually have a metric ton more time in my days now so let’s ramp up!

If July calls, I’ll show up.

This time with Secured Transactions memorized like it’s a field manual.

Not because I have to.

Because I don’t spend three months preparing for something unless I intend to win it.

Thanks for reading, friends.

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