Prof. Richard Conviser: "The Man Who Built BAR/BRI"

As seen in The National Jurist | September 2010

The man who built BAR/BRI A conversation with Richard Conviser, the law professor who turned a small Illinois bar prep course into the world’s largest bar review.

BY JACK CRITTENDEN

R

ichard Conviser has been glorified, vilified, praised and feared. But no one has ever questioned his success. Conviser, after all, is the man who built BAR/BRI into the largest bar exam prep course in the world. And he did it while holding a tenured position at Chicago-Kent College of Law. “I am proud of the fact that this bar review course that started with 17 students ended up with more than one million, and that we got there because of reputation,” he said in July, right after BAR/BRI concluded its summer programs. “I am equally proud of my teaching. To this day, all these years later, I love getting up in the morning and going to work. Both of my jobs give me great pleasure, great satisfaction.”

Both of Conviser’s jobs, however, were not in his plans when he attended the University of California at Berkeley for both undergrad and law school.

The Chicago native was focused on international law, and after graduation received a grant from the Ford Foundation to study at the University of Cologne in Germany for three years. While there he acquired a German Doctorate.

When Conviser returned to the U.S., he stopped in Chicago to visit with family before heading back to the San Francisco Bay Area. While there, he interviewed with Baker & McKenzie.

“I got wowed,” he said. “They were about to open an office in San Francisco.

They wanted me to learn to be a lawyer in Chicago, and then they would send me to San Francisco to help open the office.”

Even though he could have waived into the Illinois jurisdiction, Baker & McKenzie wanted him to take the state’s bar exam.

“If that had not happened, today I would be a practicing lawyer,” Conviser said.

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him prepare for the exam and was disappointed with the quality of the course.

“It occurred to me that somebody had to do something about this,” he said. “And that is how BAR/BRI was started.”

The story is actually a little more complex. Conviser started his own bar review, calling it Bar Review Institute or BRI. His first office was in Baker & McKenzie’s law offices, and he ran the business and was one of the primary lecturers. His first class consisted of 17 students.

From the start, Conviser focused on securing top-notch law professors to teach his prep course, something new at that time. Conviser hired professors from University of Chicago, Northwestern, and Laurence Tribe from Harvard Law School. Conviser was also lecturing a lot and traveling around the country as BRI was quickly expanding.

He soon left Baker & McKenzie to focus on the bar review business full-time. But he still needed another job to “help pay the rent.” He joined the law faculty at DePaul University and then moved to ChicagoKent several years later.

Around the same time that BRI was ramping up, William Rutter had started Bay Area Review (or BAR) in California.

Conviser had a good relationship with BAR, even lecturing for them in the early years. BAR took control of the market on the West Coast, and BRI spread throughout the rest of the country.

The two companies came together to create a bar review course for the state of New York. At the time, the largest prep course in that state, PLI, was charging only $175. Conviser ran ads showing that their prep manual was much larger with the headline, “Which one would you rather

have?” Other ads called attention to their $1,750 price and asked, “What’s it worth to you to pass?”

Within a few years, PLI’s bar prep course was out of business, and the BAR/BRI partnership was making money.

Conviser was now ready to complete taking his prep course nationwide. But he lacked the capital to acquire BAR. “We knew an investment banker affiliated with [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich], and he became interested in the bar review business,” Conviser said. “They approached BAR and BRI separately to acquire us, as a simultaneous transaction.”

Harcourt acquired the two companies and Rutter was appointed CEO, with Conviser as President.

“Bill [Rutter] was doing all of the expansion work, and I was running bar review,” Conviser said. “Ultimately, a few years later, Rutter’s thing wasn’t working out and he left to do his own thing—CLE— which was a huge success.”

Now BAR/BRI was in all the major states,

and it continued its push into every state.

“We created the concept of student representatives,” Conviser said. “In those days nobody had student reps. We set it up so you can actually talk to your classmates to find out stuff.”

Conviser also focused on perfecting the courses’ outlines, and created the “Conviser Mini Review” — a condensed version of the larger outline.

The higher-quality materials, combined with its aggressive marketing efforts, helped the company establish market dominance.

The company, however, ran into some legal troubles as it grew. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that BAR/BRI’s 1980 agreement with its Georgia franchisee was an unlawful restraint of competition.

It fought a few lawsuits with competitors in the 1990s and then settled a 2007 class action lawsuit that accused BAR/BRI and Kaplan of agreeing to not compete. Kaplan is now BAR/BRI’s biggest competitor.

But Conviser said BAR/BRI’s success is related to word of mouth.

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“You can have all of the fancy four-color brochures in the world, do whatever kind of advertising that you want to do, but there is a reason why we have gotten these students over the years,” he said. “It is really a word of mouth business. You’re in law school for three years, and from the get-go you know students in the second and third year. By the time you are ready to make a decision you know who we are.”

Thomson Reuters eventually acquired BAR/BRI and then merged it with West.

But all along, Conviser has been given free reign to run BAR/BRI. Conviser is still Chairman and CEO, and a law professor.

“I figured out [the balance of work] years ago,” he said. “It occurred to me that, as the business was growing, I couldn’t do what I had done early on like publish and [law school] committee work. I told them that I loved being a professor, and that I would basically teach law school for free.”

Today, Conviser still teaches his classes and remains very involved with his students.