BarBri
From LawGuru Wiki
BarBri is a company in the United States that offers the most widely used bar exam preparation course in the country. Virtually every American recipient of a Juris Doctor degree (generally over 90%) attends a six-week course provided by this company, which features lectures by law professors on the six major areas covered on the Multistate Bar Examination - torts, contracts, real property, evidence, criminal law, and constitutional law — along with additional lectures on the specific law of the state. Most of the lectures are presented by videotape. Like other bar preparation courses, BarBri also supplies participants with outlines of the topic areas, and several hundred sample multiple-choice questions.
More than 800,000 students have taken BarBri courses, and the company now also offers prep courses for entering the first year of law school.
History
In 1967, the company was founded by Richard J. Conviser (who as of 2005 was still a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law) in Chicago as the "Bar Review Institute." In 1974, it was bought by publishing giant Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, which promptly merged it with a similar San Francisco-based company, the "Bay Area Review." The new subsidiary was officially known as "Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Legal and Professional Publications," but was marketed under the brand name BarBri. Conviser became head of the merged subsidiary.
Over the years, BarBri has engaged in some rather controversial tactics to reach its current position of market dominance. For example, on November 26, 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that as a matter of law, BarBri's 1980 agreement with its Georgia franchisee was an unlawful restraint of competition on its face. Palmer v. BRG of Georgia, Inc., Template:Ussc.
After a bizarre series of business transactions in 2000 and 2001, the company is currently owned by The Thomson Corporation, the owner of the well-known Westlaw legal research system. In its literature, it refers to itself as "BarBri, a Thomson business," or "Thomson BarBri."
