You are to be in your assigned seat at 8 a.m. Once you enter the testing room, you will not be permitted to leave until 30 minutes after the test has begun. No additional time will be granted to anyone arriving late. No exceptions will be made under any circumstances.

You might not remember receiving these exact instructions from the Texas Board of Law Examiners (BLE), but it's unlikely you'll ever forget what they're for: the Texas bar exam. For nearly everyone who takes this twice-yearly, two-and-a-half day, four-part exam, the results are simple: pass or fail. But a handful of people get a bit more information than that. It's a longstanding tradition in Texas to single out the people who earned the top three scores and honor them, says Nadine Schneider, administrative assistant to the Texas Supreme Court.

On Nov. 6, the BLE released the results of the July 2008 bar exam. Of 2,752 first-time and repeat-takers, 2,209 people passed for a pass rate of 80.27 percent, according to the BLE. For Texas law school grads, that number was slightly higher, 86.9 percent. Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law had the highest pass rate among Texas' law schools at 93.97 percent. [See the chart: "Texas Law School Bar Exam Pass Rates."]

Those who passed will be sworn-in en masse Nov. 18 during a morning ceremony held at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin. But for the trio of top-scorers, the activity starts much earlier.

Once the BLE ascertains the names of the highest scoring test-takers, it forwards them to the Texas Supreme Court. From there, a designated justice starts working the phones to notify the top scorers. "There's usually a justice that's assigned as a liaison to the Board of Law Examiners. It rotates," Schneider says.

All three are acknowledged during the swearing-in ceremony -- their names are printed in the program, and the chief justice recognizes the second- and third-place scorers by name. The top scorer, however, gets to play a special role in the ceremony. He or she is invited to give a short speech, Schneider says. Those remarks are then published in the Texas Bar Journal.

The top scorer is also invited to tour the high court chambers and have his or her photo taken with the chief justice, the justice serving as the BLE liaison that year and any BLE board members present for the swearing-in ceremony. "That's done in the chief's chamber," Schneider says.

In honor of this tradition, Texas Lawyer has contacted a number of these brilliant bar-takers who earned the top score on the Texas bar exam, checking in with them to find out where they are in their careers, among other things, and asking them to share any and all testing secrets.

July 2008 Exam: Nathan James Davis

There's no dust yet on Davis' law school diploma -- he graduated in May from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. But he has already come to Texas, aced the bar exam and left -- well, for a year at least. Davis is in Washington, D.C., clerking for Judge Sharon Prost of the Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. When he finishes next September, he'd like to return to Texas (he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M) to join an intellectual property firm in Dallas. Davis says he didn't employ any particular method to prepare for the bar exam, just a lot of kitchen-table studying. But he did have a secret weapon: his wife, who's a dietician. He doesn't recall exactly what she cooked for him to eat during his study sessions, but he ate it, and the rest is history.

February 2008 Exam: Stephen Shackelford Jr.

Stephen Shackelford Jr.

Harvard Law School grad Shackelford is a born multitasker. While studying for the bar exam this year, he was working full time at Susman Godfrey as an associate in the Dallas office and helping parent twin toddlers. But Shackelford says it helped that he'd already taken and passed a bar exam before (he's licensed in Virginia). Following his 2005 graduation he also spent two years as a law clerk, first for Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston and then for Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. At Susman Godfrey, Shackelford says he practices general commercial litigation, and his caseload includes a variety of issues from contracts to patents and antitrust. Shackelford says he didn't take any bar review classes, he just bought some books and "studied pretty intensely the entire month of February." He felt like he passed but was amazed when, during a regular workday at Susman Godfrey, he received a telephone call from Texas Supreme Court Justice Scott Brister telling him he'd gotten the top score. When he realized who was on the line, he says he got "very nervous," but Brister reassured him, saying, " 'Don't worry, you're not in trouble.' " When Shackelford gave his speech at the swearing-in ceremony in Austin, the only family by his side was his mom. His wife wasn't able to come, he says, "because she was very, very pregnant." And a few weeks after the ceremony, he got the best surprise ever: A newborn son.

July 2007 Exam: Susan Cannon

Like Shackelford, Cannon also got a call from Brister informing her that she was tied for the July bar exam's high-score honor. A University of Texas School of Law grad, Cannon was at work as an associate with the trial section of Baker Botts in Dallas when she got the call, a position she had started after spending a year clerking for Judge Philip R. Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in El Paso. Ironically, she says someone at lunch that day had told her that a state Supreme Court justice typically called the high-scorers, but Cannon says she had no indication that she'd be the one to get that call. "I was very surprised," says Cannon, whose study regimen consisted of taking a bar review class and following the recommended study schedule when the classes ended. It doesn't bother her that she shares the honor with another lawyer. "One of the nicest things about sharing [the honor] is that we also shared speech time as well."

July 2006 Exam: Rick Haan

Rick Haan

Haan may have earned the top score on the bar exam, but that doesn't mean the Texas Tech University School of Law grad walked into his new gig with the real estate transactions group at Thompson & Knight with the topic down cold. "I still had a lot to learn. I still had to ramp up like everyone else," says Haan, who's an associate with the firm's Dallas office. Two years beyond the bar exam, he is "perfectly happy" at the firm and says he is called upon from time to time to offer test-taking advice. "There have been some people from school and from the firm who have called to ask advice, some acquaintances in other states," he says. So far he hasn't loaned out his notes to anyone -- "I think I still have them, but they're collecting dust" -- but he has been willing to dispense advice when asked. What he says is this: Make the fear of failure work for you. "The fear of failure drives everyone to study," he says. "Probably more than you need to."

July 2005 Exam: Amy P. Mohan

Amy P. Mohan

Since acing the July bar three years ago, commercial business and IP litigator Mohan has changed firms. The Harvard law grad started off at Mayer Brown and then followed a partner over to the Houston office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in March of this year. She hasn't told anyone at Pillsbury about her bar exam performance -- she says it's strictly a résumé credential -- but she figures a few people know, like her colleague from her former firm. She says she still has some of her notes on her computer, but so far no one has contacted her for test-taking advice. "Maybe that will come," she says.

February 2005 Exam: Sommer L. Coutu

Coutu was walking her dog near her home on Manhattan's Upper West Side when she noticed a voice-mail message on her cell phone. It was Justice David Medina of the Texas Supreme Court congratulating her for getting the high score on the Texas bar exam. Coutu had taken the February bar exam, but she was sure the call was a prank for three basic reasons. First, she had no idea that high-scorers were officially recognized. Second, she had been working in New York for the two years since graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, as an associate in the litigation department of the firm that was Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, so she wasn't entirely familiar with the makeup of the Texas court. She admits she Googled Medina before calling back "to make sure it wasn't a joke." And third, she did not feel confident that she had even passed. Although she had passed the New York bar exam on the first try two years earlier, she says she felt the Texas exam was much harder. "I know that's not what people would commonly think, but there were more essays," she says, which added to the challenge because "you have so little time and you're writing so fast and trying to remember so much, I think you have to know more overall." Plus, she was working full time while studying. "I did the BarBri tapes at night by myself," she says. The news couldn't have come at a better time for Coutu. She and her husband had decided to move back to Texas -- it's home base for both of their families -- but she says no firms wanted to interview her absent a Texas law license. Now she was able to follow-up with firms and say she had not only passed the Texas bar, but she had aced it. "It helped me get my foot in the door because Austin is a hard market," she says. "Before that, I was going on nothing other than I really want to move back." As luck would have it, she interviewed at a firm in May, while she was back in Texas to give her speech at the swearing-in ceremony, and she got the job. She started as an associate with Richie & Gueringer, but left eight months later to join George & Brothers as a litigation associate. Now her husband is in law school -- he started this fall at the University of Texas School of Law -- and she stands ready to give him bar exam advice when the time comes. "Right now," she says, "he's just nervous about finals."

July 2004 Exam: Douglas W. Lukasik

It was the weather that led Duke University School of Law graduate Lukasik to Texas and to bar exam glory. "I grew up in Illinois, and I was looking to move somewhere warm," he says. He started as an associate with Gardere Wynne Sewell's Dallas office after graduating and has been there ever since, practicing primarily construction litigation and civil business litigation, he says. When he found out he'd scored the highest on the bar, he says he was attending a weeklong CLE seminar. He was checking the BLE's Web site every couple hours just to see that he'd passed, and when he saw his name, he figured that was the end of it. At the next break in presentations, however, he noticed his cell phone had a message. It was from an administrator at Duke, telling him that someone at the Texas Supreme Court was trying to reach him. Lukasik had no idea that high scorers were acknowledged in Texas, and he assumed that any message from the high court couldn't be good. "I called the person back. I thought, 'Oh no, what happened?' I was pretty worried about what was going on," he admits. "Fortunately they were not revoking my admission to the bar; it would have been really bad to have found out I passed and then to have had a reversal."

February 2004 Exam: Sanjeev Ayyar

Sanjeev Ayyar

Although Ayyar is licensed in California, when he sat for the Texas bar exam -- he passed the Golden State's grueling exam in one try -- he says the Lone Star State's exam was worse. "I felt Texas was harder, because I didn't have a lot of the subjects in law school," says the 2000 graduate of University of California Hastings College of the Law. Nevertheless, Ayyar managed to do OK. He took the Texas bar thanks to a job at San Antonio's Cox Smith Matthews, which he landed after earning his LL.M. in tax from New York University School of Law. Ayyar had previously worked for Gray Cary in California before leaving to earn his master's of law degree. In August, he moved from his associate position at Cox Smith over to an associate position with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld's San Antonio office. The reason, he says, was that he wanted to do more corporate tax work and less Employee Retirement Income Security Act work. For Ayyar, giving the speech at the swearing-in ceremony in Austin was the high point of his honor. "I am kind of a ham, so I really enjoyed it," he says. "It was a chance to thank my family and my wife and think about the practice of law and step back and reflect for a moment."

July 2003 Exam: Justin K. Ferguson

Weil Gotshal & Manges corporate law associate Ferguson of Dallas still has his review materials at home from the summer 2003 bar exam. "There's so much information in them," says the Texas Tech law grad, "it's a good reference." Not that he has looked at them over the past five years, he says, but he does think they're "nice to have." Especially when they represent a job well done on the exam. Ferguson says he had no idea he'd earned the top score; he says he'd gone back to Lubbock after he found out he'd passed, and the trip explains why he didn't hear about his high-scoring status until well after the second- and third-place scorers were notified. "I actually got a call from Justice Dale Wainwright. They were trying to track me down for two or three days," he says. Ferguson was at work when he got the call, and he had "no idea, none at all" as to the reason for it. When he found out, he says, "I was ecstatic, to say the least." Ferguson started his law career at Baker Botts in Dallas and in 2005, after two years, he moved to Weil Gotshal, where he practices primarily corporate transactions and mergers and acquisitions.

February 2002 Exam: Judd L. Leach

Talk about a whirlwind weekend. On a Friday, Leach pulled his first all-nighter as a new associate with Jones Day in Dallas. He graduated from Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law on Saturday, drove from Dallas to Austin on Sunday, then gave a speech Monday as the high-scorer on the Texas bar exam. Leach says he learned he had earned the top score on the February bar exam about a week before the ceremony and had been trying to set aside time to prepare remarks. Then life intervened. By Monday, he says, "I was so exhausted I had no prepared remarks, so I winged it." It went fine, he says. "My family says it wasn't bad, but it certainly wasn't memorable," says Judd, who moved to Jackson Walker's Austin office in August 2007, where he's an associate with the real estate transactions group. Nevertheless, then-Chief Justice Tom Phillips praised Leach's effort. "He told me the best speeches were those that weren't memorable," Leach recalls. "So it certainly wasn't a memorable speech, but I achieved that goal."

July 2001 Exam: Dr. Russell Allen Chorush

Dr. Russell Allen Chorush

"Some people might say I studied too much," says Chorush, a partner in the Houston IP boutique Heim, Payne & Chorush. "There were some people who enjoyed the six weeks during BarBri, but I was not one of them." The reason Chorush was studying so much? Fear. "I hate to admit that, but fear can be a huge motivator," he says. Chorush came late to the law: Until he started at the University of Houston Law Center, he had been a laboratory manager for Texas Instruments. He decided to go to law school, he says, after getting to know a patent lawyer. He was valedictorian of his law school class and says he definitely was motivated to keep up the intensity level while he studied for the bar exam. "In my case, I had a wife and two young kids. I had left a job that paid reasonably well to go to law school in the first place, so the possibility of not working because I didn't pass the bar was pretty intimidating." He found out he had achieved high-score status when his wife called him at work to pass along word that "someone named Justice Hankinson had called" -- then-Justice Deborah Hankinson to be exact. Chorush says his first thought was that some friends were playing a joke on him. When he called back and reached the court, he says, "I was just shocked. I didn't believe it until I called her back." But Chorush wasn't done with bar exams: In 2004, he took the Patent Bar Exam. He doesn't know his numerical score on the patent exam, just that he passed. And for Chorush, that's enough.

February 2001 Exam: Richard Dearing

Forget books and lectures; Dearing had a different approach to bar review. "I really just listened to bar review tapes," says Dearing, who's from Louisiana. "It's a better way, because you can actually speed up [the tapes]. They have pitch control, and if you lower the pitch you can get through it a lot faster. If you speed up the entire tape to double-speed, you can finish an hour in just over a half-hour." Dearing's career has been on a fast ascent, too. He started as an associate with Vinson & Elkins in Houston before sitting for the bar, he says, and then clerked for U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal of the Southern District of Texas. He left V&E in 2004 to head to New York state and a position with the attorney general's office. "It was at a time when Eliot Spitzer was AG here, and it was an active AG's office, so the main thing for me, moving from the private sector to government as a young lawyer, you get more responsibility." Dearing says he handles a "whole gamut of civil cases that the state is involved with, which lately is a lot of federal pre-emption cases." Dearing is licensed in New York but was able to avoid that state's notoriously tough bar exam by "waiving in," a situation Dearing says he was "ecstatic" about. He says he doesn't think anyone in his office now knows about his Texas bar exam accomplishment, and he doesn't advertise it. But he does admit that when he comes across someone studying for the bar, he'll volunteer some advice. "But I don't tell them I got the high score."

February 2000 Exam: Timothy M. Spear

Spear is another top-scorer who swears by bar review tapes. "The tapes are just better; you're not sitting there in class being distracted. It's easier to focus and write notes. It helps you concentrate." Another "huge advantage," he says, is the fact that he already had a bar exam behind him -- after graduating from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1997, he took the Missouri bar exam that summer. Spear moved to Texas in 2000 from Kansas City to take a job in Houston at what was then LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. In spring 2005, Spear joined Gardere Wynne Sewell in Houston. He came over as a partner and works primarily in energy transactions. He remembers the time period around the swearing-in ceremony as a happy time, not just because he'd topped the test, but because two days before the ceremony, his wife gave birth to their fourth child.

February 1998 Exam: Robert C. Kowert

Austin lawyer Kowert has become somewhat of a bar exam guru in his firm, Meyertons, Hood, Kivlin, Kowert & Goetzel. Because it's an IP boutique, Kowert explains, the firm hires a lot of engineers, who then train to be patent agents. "A lot of them decide to go to law school, and I get a lot of people who come to me for advice. They are always curious, when they get to law school, how to do it." When it comes to bar exam review, he suggests they listen to first-year law school topics on tape. "I had a really long commute, and I'd listen to them in my car, and that was helpful to study for the bar." Kowert started his law career as an associate with the Austin office of Conley Rose, where he'd been working throughout law school. He says he took the February bar exam after speeding through law school in just two-and-a-half years by taking summer courses. "I was interested in patent law. I was already a patent agent, and I knew what I wanted to do, so law school was just an obstacle," says Kowert, who worked as a computer engineer designing circuits and software for five years at Dell Computer Corp. and National Instruments Corp. before entering law school at the University of Texas. (He's also an inventor, holding six patents of his own.) In 2003, he and a few colleagues formed their own firm. As an older student with a wife and child, he says leaving a successful engineering career to become a lawyer was a big risk. He studied hard but also relied on his talent for cramming and a short-term memory he describes as near-photographic. "I've always been a big crammer for tests, so I guess starting about a week before the bar exam I just studied around the clock. I crammed like crazy," he says. "I basically just memorized [the books] cover to cover."

February 1996 Exam: Michael R. Cowen

Michael R. Cowen

After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law in 1995, Cowen headed to New York City, took and passed the New York bar exam (on his first try, no less) and settled in as an associate with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. "I wanted to get trial experience at a big Wall Street firm," Cowen says. But love soon brought him back to Texas. "The woman who is now my wife inspired me to come back," says Cowen. Before heading east, he had studied for the Texas bar exam while clerking at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, where he worked for Judge Reynaldo Garza. That he had earned the highest score shocked him, he says, especially since he wasn't totally sure he'd even passed the test. "There was one person behind me who, at every break, started talking about every single question," Garza says. "He was talking about things I didn't even get, and I thought, 'Oh no, I am screwed.' " He was at work in Garza's chambers when the Supreme Court called with the news. Cowen believes Garza himself took the call, because Cowen says the judge was the one who delivered the news that the high court wanted a word with him. "He said, 'I think you're in trouble,' " recalls Cowen with a laugh. "That was one of the reasons it was so great to work for him." Garza passed away in 2004. Today Cowen heads a three-lawyer personal-injury firm called the Cowen Law Group in Brownsville. He says he doesn't talk about the bar exam -- that would feel like bragging, he notes -- but he knows other people do, and that has helped him earn the trust of clients. "I have a referral-based practice," says Cowen. The exam score, he says, "helps put me in the minds of other people as a sharp guy" and "makes it easier to get the client to agree with the referral." He says people ask him for bar exam advice all the time, and this is what he says: "I tell them to study but to relax during the test. After the first night, I went out and shared a bottle of wine with some friends. Find a way to sleep, to relax because during the test, you're not going to get any more information in your head."