03 / BAR BUDDY
Learning that never stopped.
Building a Study Tool Under Pressure
I built Bar Buddy while preparing for the bar exam because the available study tools did not work the way I wanted to study. Using AI together with curated legal material, I built a private system that could keep generating new questions, explain mistakes, and adapt as I learned.
Commercial courses offered lectures, outlines, and question banks, but the questions eventually repeated. I wanted a system that could keep testing me, explain a mistake in plain language, and then ask another question to see whether I had actually learned the rule.
Bar Buddy organized the Uniform Bar Exam's thirteen subjects by topic and subtopic. I could study an entire subject, isolate a weak area, combine several topics, or generate a mixed session. It supported multiple-choice and short-answer practice and followed each response with the governing rule and an explanation.
To build it, I first organized a large body of black-letter law into a database the system could use reliably. I then added user accounts, study modes, question history, progress tracking, and safeguards around question generation.
The product used AI to vary questions and respond to performance, but the legal source material remained fixed and curated. The AI was there to make practice less repetitive, not to invent the law or substitute for learning it.
Bar Buddy remained a private tool rather than a commercial launch. It gave me an effectively unlimited supply of active practice and became a complete working study system rather than a loose prototype.