LSJ: Is there any truth to the following legend? The Emanuel outline series evolved from outlines that you created when you were a law student at Harvard. Your father owned a printing press or a publishing company, and he helped get your outlines into book format.
Emanuel: Yes, the “legend” you refer to is basically correct. When I was a first-year law student at Harvard in 1974, my section-mates and I were having a hard time with Civ Pro. With the help of a couple of classmates, I put together a 150-page outline of the subject, which was always intended as a small-scale “commercial” outline to be sold at Harvard. My dad indeed owned a small printing company in NJ, and he printed up about 200 copies for me in April of ’74, with a soft cover and 3-hole punching, held together by one metal ring through the top-most hole. By early April, we hadn’t finishing writing (or indeed taking) the whole course, so we printed the first 3/4s of the outline and charged $6 for it. We then came out with the final two additional chapters, for $1 each, a few weeks later – serial publishing à la Charles Dickens.
 I set up a table outside the Harkness Dining Hall (Harvard was very nice to me in that and other ways), and sold the books at lunchtime each day. I sold to about 90% of my 140-person section, and about 4 copies to the folks making up the other 3/4s of the class – it was my first introduction to market segmentation.
LSJ: Tell us a little bit about your days at Harvard. Did you enjoy the law school process?
Emanuel: I was kind of a rebel, and pretty immature (I had gone straight through from college, so I arrived at age 22). I found the place pretty large -- 540 students per class, one of the 2 or 3 largest law schools in America at the time -- and pretty cold and impersonal. Most classes had 100+ students in them, something that has changed quite a lot since. I didn’t go to class very often, and mostly stayed in my dorm room writing outlines for the last 2 ½ of the 3 years. Not the way I’d do it today, or recommend that anyone else do it. But the students were really smart and nice, so I enjoyed the outside-of-class interactions. And there were certainly a lot of legendarily brilliant faculty members. I had a small part in the law school musical while Prof. Arthur Miller had a big part. We were both publishing our competing Civ Pro outlines – his for the “Sum and Substance series” – and we would sit together correcting our proofs, me the lowly 1L with chutzpah and him the already-famous treatise/casebook author and TV star; he was remarkably nice to me under the circumstances.
LSJ: Did you have any Harvard classmates that became famous?
Emanuel: It turned out to be a pretty accomplished class. Some of the more famous ones are:
Chris Cox – current SEC chairman trying to avoid a collapse of the American financial-system. He’s the guy who John McCain just said he would immediately fire for incompetence if he were Pres.
Ken Chenault – current Chairman and CEO of American Express (and currently struggling with Amex cardholders’ inability to pay their bills the way they used to, given the same financial-system collapse. Is there a pattern here?)
Ted Wells – famed white-collar criminal defense lawyer based in NYC. Ted unsuccessfully defended White House aide Scooter Libby at his perjury trial, successfully defended Agriculture Sec’y Mike Espy, and has handled many other high-profile trials. Ted’s wife Nina, who was a student at another Boston-area law school while we were all in law school, was my first non-Harvard outline sales rep.
LSJ: Have you have ever practiced law, or did you head straight into the outline business right after law school?
Emanuel: I practiced for a couple of years, mostly at the 30-lawyer firm of Cowan Liebowitz & Latman in NYC. I did general practice, a little litigation, a little corporate work, an occasional divorce. Even then, it was very hard to avoid being a specialist from the beginning, but it was easier at a smallish firm, which is one of the reasons I chose it. (Plus, my father had co-founded the firm many years before). All the while, I continued writing and editing additional outlines evenings and weekends, which my dad printed and sold from his print shop. By the start of my 3d year after law school, I had five titles out, and I felt that the revenues (even though they were less than $100K annually) would be enough to sustain my wife Marilyn and me, plus our infant son Michael, in our roach-infested 2 bedroom apartment in the Westchester suburbs outside of New York City. So I opened up a 2-room office in downtown New Rochelle that I could walk to from the roach apartment, and took a few cases while working on the outlines.
In reflecting on all this now (at the age of 57), it looks a lot scarier and riskier than it seemed to me then. I suppose that if you’re going to start up your own law practice or other business, there’s a lot to be said for doing it while you’re still pretty young and unbowed, and when you have relatively few financial obligations (assuming that you’re not crushed with, say, $100,000+ of student loans, specially made nondischargeable in bankruptcy if things go wrong thanks to our very enlightened Congress. Sorry for the polemic.)
LSJ: Emanuel recently became involved in the seminar business of MBE preparation. Tell us a little bit about that decision. Tell us a little bit about your programs.
Emanuel: We got into the business because we thought we could improve on what was being offered. We thought there were several opportunities to do things better. First, we thought we could create a new ground-up set of outlines keyed solely to what actually gets tested on the MBE, based on analysis of thousands of past questions. Second, we thought we could come up with practice questions that would be accompanied by more sophisticated answers – including more detail about why the wrong choices are wrong – and that would be organized more tightly by topic. Third, we thought we could put forward better lecturers, speaking live in more locations, and with opportunities for every student to ask questions of the lecturers. Fourth, we thought that adding Power Point slides to every topic during the lectures would help visually-oriented learners, and would help to focus the lectures better. And finally, we thought we could make good use of professional bar tutors – lawyers who are admitted to practice but who spend a lot of their time coaching bar applicants – who would administer small-group live sessions, typically with fewer than 20 students in the room, to go over material presented earlier in the day.
We have two courses, each of which is available separately, but which are available together for a discounted “bundled” price. The “MBE Refresher” is given early in the bar-review season, before the student has begun a “full service” course like Bar/Bri. For the July bar, the MBE Refresher occurs in May.
The course consists of three days, 3 hours per MBE subject, with a topic-by-topic review of the substantive law in that subject, but exclusively focused on the particular ways that that topic is repeatedly tested on the MBE. Then, there are small-group tutoring sessions at the end of each of the three days
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The “MBE Intensive Workshop” is given after the full-service course is over, which in the case of the July bar means early July. It, too, is a 3-day course. Day 1 is a simulated MBE taken under real-world exam conditions, and designed to demonstrate the topics and question-drafting techniques that have the highest probability of popping up on the real test. We auto-score the tests immediately, and on the evening of Day 1 email each student a detailed subject-by-subject score report that shows where they placed relative to their peer group. Days 2 and 3 go over the Simulated Exam in a topic-by-topic order, for 2 hours for each of the 6 subjects. There’s coverage of not only the questions on the simulated exam, but also of other ways that the same topics get tested. So, for instance, there might be a discussion of a particular question on, say, firm offers under the UCC, but the discussion would include a review of the various ways firm offers get tested on the MBE, not just the sub-issues tested in that particular question. Each lecturer reads the score report from the prior day’s test, so the lecturer can focus on those questions – and particular answer choices – that that particular group had special trouble with. You’d be surprised how much variation there is from group to group in what causes problems, especially where each group typically consists mostly of students from a particular school. At the end of both Day 2 and Day 3, there are small-group bar tutor sessions to go over additional questions.
LSJ: Do you have any advice/words of encouragement for law students?
This is a vast topic. Here are a few semi-random thoughts, mostly related to the tie-in between law school and practice:
a). The law is a great and diverse profession. It welcomes and rewards many different skill sets, so it’s important to find the niche that’s right for you. For instance, if you’re an outgoing performer-type, who likes to be on stage or to compete publicly, then litigation might be right for you. If you’re more introspective, and more bookish, tax or estate planning might be right. If you’re fascinated by the details of business deals and by economic life, a corporate-transaction practice might be the thing. The important thing is to examine your personality and interests, and give yourself the best chance to gain exposure to a specialty that would be a good match for who you are.
b). Make an effort to gain objectively-verifiable credentials for the type of practice you think you want to do. So if you want to litigate, do moot court, or perhaps volunteer as an intern for the local DA. Employers like to see that you were serious enough about the particular specialty in question that you took the time to gain relevant experience in it. Also, cultivate a close relationship with professors who teach your specialty. Profs aren’t the equivalent of a placement service, but students often underestimate the extent to which a prof who knows you well and likes you can assist you in finding that starting position – for instance, a recommendation by a prof to a firm where the prof once worked or is otherwise known gives you a way to separate yourself from the pack.
c). If finances allow, don’t be afraid to take a public-service or public-sector job right out of law school. Most people I know who did a judicial clerkship, or worked for a government agency, or worked for a non-profit organization, value the experience greatly even if they then went into private practice or a house-counsel position for the bulk of their career. When you’re young and perhaps somewhat less-encumbered, that’s the time you’re most likely to be able to get that once-in-a-career “different” job experience that will enrich you and set you apart from others.
LSJ: What about bar candidates? Any advice for them?
It’s a very grueling and intimidating process, and that’s even truer in California than elsewhere, where the exam is a day longer, and the passing standard is materially tougher, than almost anywhere else. Just remember that everyone is facing the same intimidating aspects. A couple of more specific suggestions:
a). Start your preparation early – don’t wait for your full-service bar review course to begin in late May. So you may want to do some substantive reviewing during the spring or even winter of your final year, especially as to subjects you haven’t looked at since your first year.
b). Grind away every day, 7 days a week, during the late-May through late-July period. It’s exhausting, but better preparation really does make a difference. Studies have shown that when people fail, very often they developed a “fear of failure” that caused them to behave like a deer in the headlights, and prevented them from putting in a hard, organized, focused daily effort during the final couple of months.
c). Do lots of practice questions, both multi-choice and essay. As to essays, try to get someone who knows what bar examiners are looking for to hand-grade your answers. Force yourself to focus on your weak areas. There’s a natural tendency to spend too much time on the areas you’re already good at, because it’s more pleasant. But your best strategy is to try to bring up your weak areas to at least a reasonable level of competency, because by doing that you’re harvesting the lowest-hanging fruit. To take an extreme illustration, in New York many foreign-trained lawyers prepare for the bar without ever having had a course in U.S. Evidence law; I tell them that they should concentrate on Evidence, because it’s more effective for them to pick up the easiest principles and get some questions right, than for them to get additional points by buffing and polishing their already-pretty-good skills in, say, Criminal Law or Contracts.
LSJ: One last question: What separates Emanuel’s MBE prep program from the other courses out there? Is it the materials? – the instructors? – the format? All of the above?
We think it’s all of the above. The materials were written personally by me, over the last two years, from scratch, with a tight focus on what really gets tested on the MBE. The instructors are the “best of breed” – people who are well-loved teacher-of-the-year types at their home law schools, and who have demonstrated a special interest in bar teaching. Most courses are live, whereas the competition’s are mostly on tape. Our bar tutors, working live in small groups, give personalized attention that we believe our competitors don’t effectively offer. And the format – in which sample questions are discussed in an organized topic-by-topic way, to permit the student to make a “mental map” of the subject – also sets us apart.
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