Ah, fall bar results season. At once, bar takers who did not engage with us flood our inboxes, professing now to be locked in and to do all the things needed to pass. Those who did engage now pepper us with admissions and moral character questions, all while we continue to support them and to convert them into guest speakers in our 3L classes, the next generation of young alumni mentors, or maybe even future ASPers! Stakeholders on campus who cannot be bothered to respond to our entreaties for collaboration, to mentor our scholarship, or to otherwise understand the difficult work of comprehensive academic and bar support the rest of the year all of a sudden come alive, entirely sure of the by-gone halcyon days of higher bar passage and their (or their to-be-imminently-formed ad hoc committee’s) own abilities to solve a bar passage problem instantly that they expected us alone to solve repeatedly. For those of us already challenged by dual academic and bar support roles during the rhythm of the fall term, even the foreseeable crunch of October still jolts routine, spurs us to act more immediately, and necessitates healthy doses of overdrive, after-burners, running on fumes – pick your vehicular metaphor, really.
It’s hard to remember that you can’t fix everything, for good, right now. So, this post won’t try to do that either. It’s just going to focus on one thing, one little way to get on top of the madness, to save both your time and energy going forward: forging better workflows as you manage the support of retakers.
The retaker communication pattern is not unlike the New Year’s Resolution / Quitters’ Day phenomenon in physical fitness. The lore goes like this: person makes New Year’s Resolution to get in better shape, signs up for gym membership, works out like gangbusters for the first month of the year, and then … stops going in February (sometimes earlier).[1] Regulars rejoice: they get their gym back. Well-meaning resolution-makers fall off the wagon and step back into old habits, or worse, try something else promising a quicker fix.
Sound familiar? Let’s make the analogy clear. The retaker who reaches out to you right about now does some or all of the following: reaches out to you, wants you to review their scoresheet and answers, wants your recommendation on a different commercial course, pledges to go to your programming and use your supplemental resources (like, for example, a stand-alone multiple-choice database), and vows to clear the decks as much as possible despite (now/still) working, caregiving, and/or taking the same extended length winter vacation. Then the 10-week mark of full-time bar prep hits (conveniently for us, right as we are tying a bow in fall semester support responsibilities and trying to grade our fall final exams), and … crickets and ghosts on the e-mail front. Empty progress bars and single-digit counts in our commercial vendor data dashboards. Unattended retaker workshops, simulated tests, and other programming. Flailing into hastily added one-off private tutoring meetings and to-be-scarcely-used supplemental products. Ultimately, this retaker, more often than not, then proves why the pass rate is 2 to 3.5 times less for retakers than it is for first-timers. And the cycle begins anew, this time in April or May.
We all know that at the end of the day, it is up to the retaker to put in the hard work, effort, and thoughtfulness to turn “not yet” into “finally.” But it is up to us to put them in the best position to do all that, while not inadvertently reducing our own capacity to do just that by creating unneeded busy work, wasting time, and failing to quiet our eternal, we-could-have-done-more voices inside our helper heads.
That means we have to work backwards from the opposite of those undesired outcomes and try to build a workflow to manage our part in them. There are four main components to this better workflow:
(1) The initial consult must be an exchange. Our retakers do need a shoulder to cry on and a place to vent. And they need to vent before they can problem solve.
But we (and they) eventually do want to solve their problems, which requires an exchange. It initially requires an exchange of information – their scoresheets and sample answers, your programming schedule, your resources menu. It should also invite further exchange – advance “permission” from their end for you to keep bugging them; concrete scheduling of follow-up meetings; promised follow-up from them on your alternate vendor and resource recommendations. You have the most leverage to set up these norms – they are smarting the most from this setback right now, and they need your help the most right now.
(2) Scheduled, scripted, sincere follow-up. You can’t possibly hope to independently remember to every follow-up moment with every retaker. (Didn’t you just spend a whole summer telling them they can’t remember every rule on every subject roadmap?) And yet, you know when to follow up with them – before a state bar deadline (re-admission, re-accommodation, seat selection), the change of a month, the 5/10/15 weeks out milestones, the before and after a key commercial simulation, and so on. So, program those follow-up points into your schedule and block a significant part of them out as unavailable to colleagues and students. Script them to show awareness to retakers of where they will be on their journey. Ensure a sincere part of your teaching approach – the one they’ve known from you throughout law school – makes it into the message. If it doesn’t really sound like you, they’ll tune out. Finally, automate this e-mail so you don’t have to remember to send it – if you use the right software, you’ll be able to track whether they even opened it or not. While you’re automating, considering also automating follow-up messages to earlier non-responses and these ghosting incidents – a key ingredient to power the last two components below.
(3) Village involvement. Key to destroying the norm that ASPers, and ASPers alone make a bar passer is involving others – your village – in the retaker management workflow. So make sure your workflow tracker accounts for who they are on your campus, whether they’ve reached out, and what they’ve heard. Delegate the lead contact role if the other person in the village is a more persuasive voice than yours. (Bonus: this changes the interaction setting on bar passage from the dreaded all-hands faculty meeting where any hot take from the mob goes to a considerably more manageable 1:1 setting. Double bonus: your data on the village’s involvement is certainly what your dean wants and needs to see.) And while you certainly cannot control your retaker’s family member or employer, you can certainly ask about and reference their input into their retaking journey when you meet with them.
(4) Collection of data. Every follow-up point in your workflow is data. If you’ve ever suspected – like I do, that blowing off a meeting or ghosting outreach correlates with bar passage – this is your time to prove it. If you’ve noticed your retakers saying the same thing every time, at the same point in bar prep, referencing the same obstacles, it’s time to collect it and word-cloud-style mine its content for patterns. If (or rather when) this happens again with retakers who still neither follow your counsel nor refine their efforts, and your stakeholders at the law school call you to the carpet again, you will have the data that both shows your efforts and their lack of it. And if you need to write an article to support your hard-won faculty status (and the scholarship responsibilities that come with it), you could hardly do worse for starting points. I’m hardly the first person to suggest this – I commend to you several colleagues’ work on automating engagement with students[2] and using new technology to uncover bar passage risk.[3]
Rome wasn’t built – or rebuilt – in a day, and neither will your retaker workflow. But you can build one that does what we hope our own retakers will do between now and the next results cycle: get better every day.
(Shane Dizon)
[1] See, e.g., William Clark, Why Your New Year’s Resolution to Go to the Gym Will Fail, The Conversation, Jan. 2, 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-your-new-years-resolution-to-go-to-the-gym-will-fail-127090; Donovan Routsis, Why Do Most People Quit the Gym by February?, Rail Stop Fitness, Feb. 13, 2025, https://www.railstopfitness.com/blog/why-do-most-people-quit-the-gym-by-february.
[2] In fact, our community talked about this awhile ago on the Google Group. https://groups.google.com/g/academic-support-and-bar-prep/c/5t57S2DpP_s/m/F90UdQ0QAgAJ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer. I also recall Joni Wiredu mentioning a few years ago using customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage student engagement workflows.
[3] Kelly Curtis, The Invisible Crisis: How Generative AI Transforms Risk Detection in Legal Education, Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting, Jan. 2026.
