Why the Solicitor Exam Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me

A personal story about failure, meaning, and redemption.

This piece is for anyone who has struggled or is currently struggling with the Law Society of Ontario (LSO)’s Lawyer Licensing Examinations. A born-to-be criminal lawyer with zero interest in real estate or estate planning, I wrote the Solicitor exam THREE times before I passed.?

The following is a haiku I wrote on the feedback form after my first attempt in June of 2018:

“Solicitor, ugh!

Why must I suffer through this

Barrister’s nightmare?”

A seven-hour nightmare indeed. The solicitor exam was by far the most emotionally exhausting and demoralizing task I have ever had to complete, and it largely contributed to what became the most trying time of my life. I did go on to find the light at the end of the tunnel and pass, but it took me a little while. I seek to share my story in the hopes that it may help others do the same.

As an auditory and experiential learner, studying was never the approach I took to achieve my academic success. Instead, I listened attentively in class, asked a lot of questions, and got involved. This worked out for me quite nicely until I was finishing law school and realized that the LSO discontinued its bar admission courses roughly a decade ago. Since then, the Ontario bar exams have been entirely self-study.

That’s right LSO candidates, after you complete your third-year law school exams, you are handed two large bricks of materials containing over a million words worth of reading.

I read the Professional Responsibility and Criminal Law sections of the Barrister materials before calling a quits on the “studying.” I passed that exam without issue, but it was no real surprise when I failed the Solicitor exam.?

In my experience, the pressures and stresses that come with these exams increase with each sitting. By my second attempt in November of 2018, my skin broke out so badly that I had to remove the face-recognition function from my iPhone because it could no longer recognize me. It took me prescription-level acne cream and months of treatment to get my face back to normal. This despite having multiple tutors and reading every single word of the materials. Sure, the LSO recommends reading these materials three times, but between articling and feeling demoralized about areas of law I would literally not even practice if I was paid millions to, this was just not possible for me.?

Just before Christmas of 2018, after I failed the Solicitor exam a second time, I had thoughts about not wanting to be in law anymore. I was in such despair before my third attempt in March 2019, that I just focused on self-care when I could not study. I stopped drinking altogether after New Year’s Eve in preparation for that third sitting, just so I could tell myself I truly did everything in my power to pass. The sobriety and weight gain were glaring; everyone thought I was pregnant.

As a final note, the Solicitor exam made my articling experience worse. I was too stressed out to really focus on my job despite normally thriving in my role. Luckily, I had already worked in the same firm with my amazing principal Carolynn Conron since my first year of law school and was familiar with our matters. That being said, I could have done and learned WAY more had my attention not been divided between articling and my Solicitor exam re-writes. I am a believer that the most important component to the Lawyer Licensing Process in Ontario is the experiential training, so this was a hard pill for me to swallow. I was very miserable having to dial down my quality of work in order to prioritize an exam I had come to dread so much.

Okay, the experiences I have shared so far have been quite negative, but things did get better and I did eventually make it. Here is the light at the end of the tunnel where I will explain why I truly believe the Solicitor exam was the best thing that has ever happened to me and why it was worth it in the end.

I was beginning to lose sight of the hard, meaningful, and rewarding work I was inspired to do. For as long as I can remember, I had always felt my purpose in life was to be a champion of freedom for those who had no voice. This made me feel entitled to become a criminal defence lawyer, bitter when it seemed that the profession was slipping through my fingers. The struggles I encountered because of this exam in particular, however, made me have a breakthrough.?

It was 1:00 AM less than two weeks before I wrote my third attempt. I was drafting a very different version of this piece originally entitled, “Why the Solicitor Exam Almost Cost Me My Career as a Lawyer.” This version was much more akin to a rant and included some choice words I was going to share with the LSO about their licensing process. I was about to go to sleep when I came across a 2017 Ted Talk entitled, “There’s more to life than being happy,” by Emily Esfahani Smith. Happiness being the furthest thing from how I was feeling, I decided to watch the Ted Talk. In it, Smith details the four pillars of meaning found in her research. Those four pillars are: belonging, purpose, transcendence, and story-telling.?

In Smith’s words, story-telling is “the story you tell yourself about yourself. It creates a narrative from the events of your life and helps you understand how you became you.?What we don’t always realize is that we’re the authors of our stories?and can change the way we’re telling them.” In sum, the premise of her research is that changing the narrative of one’s struggles can change one’s life.The psychologist Dan McAdams calls this positive re-framing a “redemptive story,” where the bad is redeemed by the good. People leading meaningful lives, he’s found, tend to tell stories about their lives defined by redemption, growth and love.?

This was very eye-opening for me and made me realize what I needed to do. I already had my sense of belonging. I already had my purpose. I even had transcendence. It was my story that I had all wrong though, even if the fatal mistake was just on the pivotal point of my Solicitor exam. Up until then, I had seen the Solicitor exam as an unnecessary hoop I had to jump through to become a lawyer and assume my destiny. The thought of failing out of the licensing process felt like the end of me. I was having an identity crisis. I even told my friends and family that if I failed again, I would quit and do something else with my life instead.

Before my grandmother passed away in October of 2018, she spoke about how she had never seen me so negative about anything in my life. She was right. I would vent about the Solicitor exam to anyone who would listen. So, during my third attempt in March of 2019, I decided to try and keep a smile on my face. People noticed, because even though I still felt pretty lousy, I was being complimented on my smile. It’s really true that attitude makes a difference and that a smile can go a long way. For instance, when I checked into my Barrister exam and was asked how I was doing, I responded with, “I’m excited!” The proctors exclaimed that in their fifteen years of administering the exams, they had never once heard a candidate say that. It was true though, and throughout that whole day, I was thriving.

I could not lie nine months later during my third Solicitor sitting and tell anyone that I was excited. Instead, I joked with the proctors that I had better pass this time since I was now a Solicitor veteran. “After all, third time’s a charm!”

I saw the colour drain from the faces of a few candidates sitting around me, but this comment alleviated much of my stress. The rest of the day did not feel as heavy; it was just an exam. A few weeks later when the results came in, my colleagues made me check with them at the office. I realized I had passed. We screamed at the top of our lungs and literally jumped for joy. I was going to be a lawyer.

The Solicitor exam was a test of my character and how I viewed myself. It was immediately following that Ted Talk that I switched the title and the narrative of this piece. It had become my redemptive story. Before, I chose to focus on the negative instead of realizing that I was not alone in my struggles and that the best was yet to come. I had more clarity, and found out that Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, apparently also failed his bar exams twice. He went on to appoint the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlin and the Honourable John Sopinka to the Supreme Court of Canada.?

Through my candid discussions with other candidates and lawyers about my failure, I learned that MANY people failed their first, second, and even third attempts of one or both bar exams. This includes renowned members of the bar and even a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. As a wise colleague told me in the weeks preceding my third attempt, these exams are not reflective of a candidate’s ability or potential. They can measure those who can perform to standard, but they cannot measure greatness.?

This experience allowed me to remember my resilience, realize my mistakes, and regain my sense of self. And maybe, that’s part of why the LSO sets the licensing process up the way that it does: to form lawyers who can search and find the meaning that makes them who they are, all the while demonstrating the necessary competencies to practice the law.?

I was called to the bar in London, Ontario on June 20, 2019. Now standing from the other side of the licencing process, I can understand the LSO’s standpoint a little more as our profession’s regulator. Although I remain critical on the arbitrary nature of the exams and the need for such a broad-schemed licensing model, I appreciate the tools and accommodations that are made available by the LSO to help candidates pass. These opportunities should be promoted as much as possible.

To all of you writing or about to write, know what learning styles and needs you have going into the exams. If you fail, reach out to the LSO through your licencing portal and ask to speak with a lawyer at the Licensing and Accreditation Department. They will call you and have detailed discussions with you about the personalized report you will receive in the weeks following your results. Other than that, utilize tutoring, do practice exams, share resources, and most importantly talk to your colleagues. I spent hours on the phone with candidates I have never met talking about these exams, and since hearing how much of a positive impact it has had, I decided that I will always take a call from a candidate in need of some guidance or encouragement. Do not hesitate to reach out to me personally.

Finally, know you are NOT alone. Even if it seems like everyone around you is passing without issue, trust me when I say that I have received tons of messages proving otherwise. Research suggests that the legal profession is among the worst for mental health and substance abuse rates, so perhaps the ridiculous culture of perfectionism and silence surrounding struggle within the legal community needs to change. Never forget that failure is key to success: you get up, and you try again.

Now it’s your turn. What story will you tell?

Sam Puchala is a "die-hard" criminal lawyer and the Founder of Velox Law Professional Corporation / Société professionnelle Droit Velox.

She would like to thank the individuals at the Ontario Bar Exam Courses (OBEC), Elissa Banach, Ottavio Colosimo, Larry Crossan, Anita Szigeti, Maya Kotob, Denis Roy, Rob Kitto, David Kirwin, Carolynn Conron, Kaitlin Smith, and her friends, family, and other colleagues for their ongoing support throughout her licensing journey.

Thanks also to the Middlesex Law Association for publishing this piece in the July 2019 issue of the MLA Snail.