Barry’s Bar Cards and mnemonics were instrumental in my bar exam success. Combined, they provided the single most powerful synthesis and simplification of the voluminous materials we were required to know. They were invaluable tools!
— Erin O.

About Barry's Bar Cards

When I took the bar exam in 2007, I realized that it requires a lot of memorization - a lot more than in any one semester of law school. Outlining was too slow and not suited to drills. Commercial flash cards were too detailed - I needed the material condensed down to simple rules that I could quickly recall under the pressure of the exam. Although I took a review course, I saw room for improvement and decided to supplement the lectures and handouts with my own materials.

The result is “Barry’s Bar Cards,” a set of over 1,000 flash cards and unique mnemonics. The cards are designed to be used with two freely-available flash card programs (one runs on Macintosh only, the other runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and anything else that supports Java). The programs do more than just show you the cards: as you learn the cards, the programs space them out, so you see the cards you are struggling with more frequently.

I have also created some original mnemonics that are more memorable than the typical offerings from the review courses. You might be able to remember “MY LEGS” for Statute of Frauds when you only have a couple of mnemonics, but the phrase really has nothing to do with contracts (unless you remember some contrived story about a frog). So instead, I have mnemonics like “MADDEN PA” for the factors for awarding spousal support (Family Law) and “Before Paying Paul, Analyze Unseen Demands” for the list of security priorities (Secured Transactions).

The materials in this package cover all 6 multistate bar exam (MBE) topics as well as 10 state topics. Five of the state topics are based entirely on national materials, while the other five are based on a mix of national and New Mexico materials. A bit over half of the flash cards cover the MBE topics.

To learn more about how the programs work, take a look at the Screenshots page. That page also shows some sample cards (including the mnemonics mentioned above). The list of materials included with the package is shown on the What’s Included page. Finally, if you’re ready to start studying, please go to the Purchase page.