ProfessorTommy.Tips

If you’re not a basketball person, this is going to sound backwards: Sometimes fans root for their own team to lose. That’s where some Indiana Pacers fans found themselves this season. Last year, Indiana made a surprise run all the way to the NBA Finals and pushed the Oklahoma City Thunder to Game 7, but ultimately lost the series. And in the gut-punch moment that made it feel even crueler, Tyrese Haliburton went down with a torn Achilles early in that Game 7. It was an inju

At 48 hours out, you’re not building new knowledge. You’re protecting what you’ve already built. Rest is strategy. Composure is power. 🎥 Watch the short video below and give your brain the reset it deserves.

The Lunar New Year begins today, and it ushers in the Year of the Horse (specifically the Fire Horse). If you’re taking the bar exam next week, that timing feels almost too perfect. Horses don’t win by darting all over the track. They win by staying controlled, conserving energy, and moving forward with purpose. That’s exactly what the bar exam rewards too, especially at this stage. Here’s the theme for the remaining few days of your bar preparation: Stay in your lane . And

As the NextGen UBE gets closer, I'm seeing a very common misunderstanding about the star symbols in the NCBE’s NextGen UBE Content Scope Outline . The NextGen UBE is the NCBE’s redesigned bar exam, created to better measure foundational lawyering skills (reading, analysis, reasoning, writing, and using legal materials) while still testing a defined set of doctrinal concepts. The exam is designed to feel more like the work lawyers actually do, often with a mix of what you know

Yesterday, the National Conference of Bar Examiners released a new document: " NextGen UBE Constructed Response Guide ." It's touted as the "NCBE’s Official Resource for Understanding and Responding to the Written Components of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination.” The document is attached for your reference. If you're taking the NextGen UBE in July 2026, I highly recommend that you review this new document and the previously released resources found at the end of the documen

Some pop-culture moments don’t happen because a studio planned a crossover. They happen because the calendar accidentally creates one. And people can’t resist treating it like an event. We saw that in Summer 2023 with “ Barbenheimer ”: Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day (July 21, 2023) and audiences turned it into an unlikely double-feature phenomenon. Two completely different vibes. One shared release date. Suddenly, “which one are you seeing?” became “are you d

I recently broke my pinky toe. It’s the kind of injury that feels almost comical to even say out loud. A pinky toe? That’s barely a toe. It’s the bar prep equivalent of thinking, “It’s just one small issue. Surely it won’t matter.” So I did what a lot of smart, capable people do with small problems: I ignored it. I broke it on Dec. 21, 2025. At first, it didn’t seem like a big deal. I could still walk. I could still function. I told myself it would “work itself out.” I didn't

January 15 is National Hat Day. It's a fun excuse to break out your favorite cap, beanie, fedora, or “good luck” hamburger hat. But on bar exam day, headgear is one of those “seems harmless, becomes a problem” items. Here’s the big picture: State boards of bar examiners' and the National Conference of Bar Examiners' NCBE test-day policies generally require your head (and often ears) to be uncovered for exam security. And many jurisdictions expressly prohibit hats/caps/hoods i

For years, the Uniform Bar Examination portability pitch was simple: take the exam in one UBE jurisdiction place, transfer an eligible score to another UBE jurisdiction. The NextGen UBE transition is turning that simple idea into a more complicated planning problem, especially during the July 2026 through February 2028 window when some jurisdictions will be administering the NextGen UBE and others will still be offering the Legacy UBE. Recently, the landscape has started to c

Mike Tomlin is the longtime head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers , and he’s famous for delivering short, memorable one-liners in press conferences. (Steelers fans call them “ Tomlinisms .”) After the Steelers and Ravens played a chaotic, down-to-the-wire game that ended on a missed last-second field goal that sent the Steelers into the playoffs and ended the Ravens' season, a reporter asked Tomlin to put into words how razor-thin the margin was between season over and kee