Fall is the time of year many attorneys who graduate from law school in spring find out if they passed the bar and can start their careers.
It brought back some stories of stress – and joy for our attorneys.
John Shanklin: Mixing bar results with pregnancy exam
The day he was supposed to find out if he passed the Texas State Bar Exam was also the day McCleskey attorney John Shanklin would learn if his fourth child would be a boy or girl.
John and wife Jill went in for their 20-week scan.
John feared he’d failed February’s bar exam a few months earlier.
“I just thought I did terrible. I was horribly stressed,” John said.
Jill said her husband’s stress lasted longer than those three months.
“He was stressed the three months leading up to it, the three months after taking it and the three months after that. So, it was like nine months of anxiety,” she said.
Add in another child on the way, and John’s fears of not passing the bar intensified his anxiety.
In 2013, the Board of Law Examiners posted bar results by updating a particular webpage with a link to an alphabetical list of all passing test-takers.
The Shanklins kept updating their phones at the medical appointment to see if the link was there.
“You start to wonder. Maybe my Wi-Fi is off. So, you’re turning your Wi-Fi off, back on, closing out the browser – refresh, refresh, refresh. And it’s not like we were checking once an hour,” Jill said about their constant monitoring.
“We were both sick with worry,” she said, adding John’s fears had convinced her that he’d failed.
The technician pointed out the baby’s heart, saying “this looks good, that looks good,” said Jill, while John kept refreshing.
The technician then asked if they wanted to know the sex.
“When we replied ‘yes,’ she said, ‘it’s a girl’ and looked at us expectantly,” John recalled.
Their response was quite subdued – muted by the bar results stress.
“She’s looking at us like we’re the worst parents ever,” said Jill.
Within a minute, John found his name on the pass list.
“We both burst into tears, started hugging each other and we’re like over-the-moon excited,” Jill said.
The technician wiped off her wand and left.
“She must have thought ‘these people have got their priorities way out-of-whack,” Jill said.
Jenna is now in fifth grade; John has been with McCleskey more than a decade where he is a partner.
He’s also the only attorney in firm history who studied for the exam twice – he was hospitalized for viral meningitis and missed his first opportunity to take the exam.
Bill Lane: ‘Bill, you’re not on here’
In fall of 1989, results were posted in the Texas Supreme Court building.
Lane, who’d been hired by McCleskey along with Frank Ratliff, were waiting for results.
Lane called Elana Einhorn, who was in his class at University of Texas at Austin School of Law and clerking for one of the state’s Supreme Court justices.
“Back in those days, if you knew somebody who was clerking for the justices, you could call them. I had prepped Elana that I was going to call when we heard results were posted,” Lane said.
Lane called that day to get results for him, Ratliff and Ratliff’s wife, Sonny, who worked for the Lubbock County District Attorney’s office. Elana didn’t find Bill Lane on the list.
“Bill, you’re not on here,” Lane remembers her telling him.
Then it struck him.
“Look under William,” he asked.
She found William Patrick Lane passed the bar.
Lane went to Ratliff’s office.
“I passed the bar,” he told Ratliff.
“What about me?” Ratliff asked.
“Oh shoot, Frank, I forgot to ask,” Lane answered.
He called Elana back and found out all three passed.
Scout Blosser: ‘No one’s ever failed’
It was just last year when one of McCleskey’s newest attorneys got the good news.
“We had a lot of pressure on us because wonderful and sweet Bill Lane reminded us several times no one at the firm ever failed before,” she said.
It was funny, but also added to the pressure.
“You study the whole summer, take a hard exam, then – ‘just so you know – no one’s ever failed,’” Blosser said she heard more than once from her colleagues.
She woke up at 6 a.m. on the day the results were posted and, like the Shanklins, started rapidly refreshing.
Blosser got an email to open with a letter.
She had to verify who she was and sign in.
“Then it told you your score. Of course, all you’re looking for is that first line of ‘congratulations’ then after that it was all just blurry words. It was a good day,” she said.
Leena Al-Souki: It was only 13 minutes, but seemed like an eternity
Blosser’s email came before Al-Souki got hers.
Both had clerked at the firm, graduated from the Texas Tech School of Law and were hired at McCleskey.
Now they shared angst.
“She (Scout) gets an email way before I do. Well, it felt like a long time,” Al-Souki said before checking her email history.
“She texted me at 7:44 that she passed,” Al-Souki said, adding she texted Blosser at 7:57 with her happy news. “So, it felt like a long time, but it was 13 minutes.”
Al-Souki handled the few-months-long stress well until the end.
“I’m pretty good with stress until the very last minute. The morning of I was all shaky,” she said.
Like Blosser, she took the exam at Tech’s law school with a few hundred others spread about in different rooms.
Unlike most, she took it on paper.
“I didn’t have a laptop at the time. I just had an iPad Pro and you can’t run the test-taking software on an iPad Pro. I wasn’t going to buy a laptop just to take an exam. I took it on paper. Me and one other person,” she said.
Al-Souki felt if she failed, she had an excuse because she handwrote the exam, she said, joking.
“I think it’s pretty normal to feel like you failed – and I definitely thought I had failed,” she said.
Kent Hale: 99 percent sure he passed, but that 1 percent ‘drove me crazy’
Unlike some of his McCleskey colleagues, Kent Hale was 99 percent sure he passed the bar exam in July of 1980 after graduating from Tech Law.
“I felt I passed the bar, but the one percent absolutely drove me crazy because I couldn’t even imagine having to take the thing again,” he said.
One of the essay questions gave him concern.
“I had a one-word answer that I knew was correct, but it scared me to death. That’s all I wrote and it was correct, apparently,” he said.
Jerry Kolander: ‘If that guy can pass, I can pass’
It took a score of 70 to pass the bar.
“My goal was 70 because if I made more than 70, I overstudied,” joked Kolander, who joined the firm in 1971.
Kolander heard from friends who passed, which sparked confidence.
“If that guy can pass, I can pass,” he said.
Back then, lawyers-to-be called Austin to get results, calling a number aligning with the first letter of their last name.
“It was exciting to have somebody tell you that you’ve passed,” Kolander said.
Kathleen Davidson: She passed … but then wanted to make sure
A few months after taking the bar exam in Arlington, Davidson was dreading the day she’d get results.
The day came when she was clerking at McCleskey. She checked the list online and saw her name next to a bar examinee number.
“I went down to my car, got my bar examination ticket and compared the number on it to the one posted next to my name,” she said, wanting to make sure it wasn’t a different Kathleen Davidson.
“Then I realized I had passed the bar,” she said.
The rest was kind of a blur. She ran upstairs to tell her dad, McCleskey attorney Ben and then others.
