The Nigerian law school once the stamping ground for upbeat aspiring lawyers as the last hurdle to mark off a glittering yet grueling 5 year university LLB study has in recent times become the waterloo of many a Nigerian law student just like Napoleon Bonaparte had suffered the ignominy of defeat at the great battle of waterloo.

It is such that recent bar exam result announcements in Nigeria seem more like a bloodbath with scores of law students needlessly booking their place at the perennial bar exams. A lot of law students approach the Nigerian law school (NLS) with little more than steely determination to succeed without reading the handwriting on the wall only to see their lofty dream of acing the bar exams go into a tail spin.

A quick glance at the law school results for the past two sessions should tell us something about the heartbreaking failure rates recorded at the exams. According to sources, in the 2013/2014 session, about 3000 students of the roughly 5000 students who sat the bar exams failed with only 2000 students passing the exams. That is about 60% failure rate for only that session, the highest recorded in 50 years at the Nigerian law school. This announcement angered a lot of students and led some to protest accusing the law school management of deliberately failing them.

Again in the 2015 session about 1805 out the 5588 students who sat the bar exam that year failed with four first class being recorded in the process. That puts the failure rate for that session at nearly 35%. So if we take the 35% failure rate as our baseline, it would mean that nearly 3 to 4 out of every 10 law students admitted at the NLS will likely flunk the bar exams – that’s a scary proposition!

Now we turn to the $64, 000 dollar question. What is the cause of this shambolic performance among law students at the Nigerian Law School? There are about 5 possible reasons for the pedestrian NLS mass failure.

(1) A lot of students often ramble at the bar exams.

Usually at the LLB university level in Nigeria, law examiners prioritize quantity over quality. As a result, many law students regurgitate page after page of crammed subjects hoping this would make up for the lack of quality and depth that characterize their writing. In the majority of times law examiners at the university often overlook deficiencies in the approach and analysis of legal problems posed to students in their exams. No matter how good a student is, writing a well-reasoned one page answer to a problem question won’t make the grade for the award of good marks by an examiner. You’ll have to write page after page of argument sometimes leading to the use of extra sheets before any student ever feels like they have done enough justice to a question (and herein lies the art of rambling).
So in a bid to win over an examiner with an appetite for quantity students tend to say both sense and nonsense hoping the examiner will take what is Caesar’s and ignore the irrelevant (we call this erring on the side of surplusage).

So can you think of the approach to answering law exam questions at the NLS? You guessed right. It’s quite the opposite. The technique examiners adopt in their marking guides at the Nigerian law school seem like being read one’s Miranda rights by the police. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law”. Law school examiners can hold the nonsense you say against you period.

At the law school students adopt this same university-styled approach to answering exam questions. They regurgitate things crammed, talk aimlessly, say a lot of sense and some nonsense for good measure and somehow hope the examiner “will understand”. But is it quite the contrary. Rather than beat about the bush and waste the examiners time it is often better to just cut to the chase and say what is relevant to a given question without having to prioritize quantity of quality.

In an interview with the Nation newspaper, the DG of the Nigerian Law School Olanrewaju Onadeko was quite explicit on this rambling approach adopted by students. To quote him “Most students use the university approach to answer questions during the bar exams and end up failing”. He further said that students don’t understand the question being posed, go off point and don’t provide answers relevant to the question. Aren’t we as guilty? You be the judge!

(2) Poor and Un-lawyerly analysis of legal problems.

Let’s just say law students get a little pampered at the university. Often we are treated as neophytes in law and it is not rare to hear lecturers refer to their protégées as “my students”. But once at the law school, you have to cease seeing yourself as just a student (which is symbolic of one’s immaturity in law). Since the law school represents the ultimate hurdle to one’s membership of the legal profession, one has to really think like a lawyer at this stage.

Usually you are judged by the yardstick of “someone who is soon going to be a lawyer”. Thus your approach and analysis of legal problems must come to resemble that of a real lawyer or as near that as you can get. Thus when a law school examiner looks at a candidates answer he would probably be asking himself the question “would I be satisfied enough to rely on this candidates answer if I were his or her client?” Don’t just see your answers as hypothetical, see it as legal advice meant to solve a real client’s problem. Be a bit more reflective, inquisitive and probing in whatever approach you adopt in solving problem questions. Take nothing as given. As part of thinking like a lawyer which the law school expects of you, you will have to mature in your analysis of legal problems, spotting key issues, distinguishing legal authorities while also knowing how to argue like a lawyer.


Go to Law Student Hub for the rest.

The standard be dropping everywhere, even today's journalist on print lots of him instead of her and other typos