The best way to prepare for the essay portion of the bar exam is to put in a lot of practice answering real essay questions and comparing what you wrote to the selected high-scoring answers provided by the California State Bar. Spotting the issues and applying the correct rule of law to the facts are crucial to success, and BarIssues.com provides a systematic way to keep track of where and how often specific issues appear in essay questions.

The California State Bar releases essay questions and selected answers from each bar exam as one big file. If you know you have trouble with a particular subject or issue and want to practice essay questions where that issue appears, you would have to search through those files by hand. Or, you sign up for BarIssues.com, which gives you access to a database of all released essay questions and model answers since 2001, searchable by subject or by issue. Using their online tools, you can search for all essay questions in a particular subject or all essay questions that include a specific issue. It’s also helpful to sort by Number of Exams, to see how many times that issue has appeared.

BarIssues.com offers a six month subscription for $99 or a one year subscription for $149. Users of this website can receive $20 off by using the discount code BREN2736. (This is an affiliate code, which means you also support this website by using it.)