February 2026 Exam Breakdown

Why Watching Lectures Is Keeping You From Passing the Bar Exam If you’re studying for the bar exam right now, there’s a good chance your day looks something like this: You wake up. You open your course. You hit play. And then you spend the next three to five hours watching lectures. At the end of the day, you feel like you did something productive. You covered material. You followed the plan. You stayed “on track.” But your score isn’t moving. You’re still stuck in the same r

Mentally preparing for bar exam results is...not easy. You finish the exam. You’re done studying. There’s nothing left to fix. And now you have been waiting for weeks (months) for May 1st. That kind of waiting can wear on you, even if you’re doing your best to stay busy and move forward. The Loop During prep, if something felt off, you could do something about it. You could study more, review a topic, or run another set of questions. There was always a next move. Now there is

The Task Memo The PT is much more formulaic than people think. The February 2026 California PT is a good example. Once you strip away the subject matter and the intimidating language, the task becomes much more straightforward. The first thing you should notice is that the memo tells you exactly what you are doing, as it always does. You are preparing a brief in support of a motion in limine seeking to exclude a handwritten transcript of text messages. A lot of examinees prob

👉 Book Free Strategy Call This is a classic Community Property essay, straight and to the point. It tests whether you can apply the basic presumptions, trace separate property, and properly allocate interests across multiple assets. Community Property typically does not test obscure rules and in fact the answers are quite formulaic. Also, the conclusions are not going to dictate your score. Of course you want to apply the rule properly and come to a reasonable decision, but

This is a straightforward Civil Procedure essay and probably the most digestible essay of the five from this exam. It tests whether you can stay organized and not overwork issues that are relatively clean. The exam is really about four buckets: subject matter jurisdiction, personal jurisdiction, service of process, and discovery. You also get a big structural clue here. There are four calls and about five paragraphs. That is not random. These essays are usually written in ord

👉 Book a free strategy call I had been waiting for misleading advertising/specialization/solicitation to be tested on a PR fact pattern for quite some time, and we finally got it. Along with those issues, we had our standard array of duties, unauthorized practice of law, and a few medium/minor issues here and there. A tricky part of PR essays are the duties . They are ubiquitous. You almost can’t go wrong stating a duty, and the same fact can easily go under multiple duties

Essay 2 Contracts/Remedies Breakdown The February 2026 California Bar Exam essays are out. If you have not reviewed them yet, you can find them here . I also broke down the Real Property essay from the February 2026 California Bar Exam, which you can read here. This post will focus on the second essay testing Contracts (UCC) and Remedies. In typical Contracts/Remedies fashion, this essay was not only dense with issues, but many of these issues were major and required efficie

If you're struggling with essay structure or timing: 👉 Book a free strategy call Essay 1 Real Property Breakdown The February 2026 California Bar Exam essays (just not sample answers) are out. If you have not seen them yet, you can find them here. Here is what Essay 1, Real Property, was actually testing and what separated a 55 from a 65 and a 75. This was a difficult fact pattern. It was dense, and tested waste pretty heavily, which is rare. There were three calls: Reed ve