About our founder and her passion for helping students

In addition to preparing students for the bar exam,

Duncanson is also a patient rights advocate, a musician, a cancer survivor and currently serves as board member of a non-profit assisting cancer patients and survivors. Duncanson has also taught as an adjunct professor at four Southern California law schools and resides in California.

Lisa Duncanson, known as the “bar exam guru,” is the Program Director and founder of The Bar Exam Cram Session, a bar review company providing condensed review courses for the California Bar Exam. She is also the founder/owner of Bar None Review (established in 1999) and the author of the Bar Exam Guru Blog. Having successfully prepared thousands of bar examinees (many of whom have taken the bar on multiple attempts prior to finding our program), Duncanson saw first hand the difference and impact that live instruction, real feedback and concise bar exam materials have on a student’s confidence and bar exam success. When asked how her program is different, Duncanson says, “Examinees pass when given the chance.” “Often students are bogged down with so much detail and minutia in standard bar review courses that they miss out on the bigger picture and ultimately miss out on showing the exam graders that they deserve to be lawyers,” said Duncanson.

Many of Duncanson’s students are repeat bar examinees who are working full time and are unable to take off a significant amount of time to study for the bar exam. It was through working with these students and helping them pass against the odds, that Duncanson developed the Bar Exam Cram Sessions. The Bar Exam Cram Session is a two day bar passing course. It is the nuts and bolts of everything you need to know to pass the bar exam. But, The Bar Exam Cram Session is much more than just two days – students also receive email support, a study plan for the last ten days leading up tot he bar exam, The Bar Exam Cram Sheets (TM) which are condensed outlines organized in such a way that many of our students claim that the essays write themselves. And, even though she would not claim to be able to predict the essay topics, Duncanson also provides her “predictions” of likely essay scenarios and sample essays to practice in these highlighted (likely testable) areas. All of this gives students real confidence on the exam – which ultimately leads to a very high success rate.

Duncanson is the author and co-author of over 20 bar exam and law school study guides. Her titles include: The Bar Exam Writing Template Book (ISBN 0-975-34725-X), The Performance Test Maximizer: A Guide to Mastering the Performance Test, The Essay Writer Series (a fourteen book law school study guide series, and The California Bar Essay Workbooks (ISBN 0-975-34724-1), a two volume workbook containing over 100 past bar exam questions and answers, Basic Bar Studies (a text book used by several ABA law schools) and the very popular Bar Exam Cram Sheets.