Kim Kardashian has been trying for some years to become a lawyer. She didn’t go to law school; in fact, she hasn’t graduated from college. But California allows one to be become a lawyer by “reading the law,” effectively an apprenticeship. That used to be common. It is how Abraham Lincoln, for example, became a lawyer. Kardashian has been working in some capacity with a Los Angeles law firm for six years.
In California, you can read the law, but you still have to pass the bar exam. Kim announced on Instagram that she had taken the bar exam and failed it, for which I give her credit (the acknowledgement, not the failure):
I believe the California bar exam is relatively difficult, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Kardashian pass it someday. In the meantime, she joins Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris as bar exam failures. If Kim does pass it someday, she will be by no means the dumbest lawyer in California.
One word of advice, though: don’t rely on artificial intelligence! Kim says that ChatGPT has often steered her wrong:
Kardashian told her All’s Fair co-star Teyana Taylor that she has used ChatGPT for “legal advice.” And it didn’t go great.
“When I need to know the answer to a question, I’ll take a picture and snap it and put it in there. It has made me fail tests … all the time,” Kardashian explained. “And then I’ll get mad and I’ll yell at it.”
“So she’s a frenemy?” Taylor followed up. And Kardashian agreed, “Yes, a frenemy. And then it’ll say back to me, ‘This is just teaching you to trust your own instincts. So you knew the answer all along.’”
I’m not sure what tests she is talking about failing, since she didn’t go to law school. But, once again, it is easy to laugh at Kim Kardashian for relying on ChatGPT to learn the law, and many have. But how much more foolish are the lawyers who have used AI to write briefs, or the federal judges, at least two of them, who have relied on AI to write orders, and found to their horror that the AI program has fabricated cases, and quotations from cases, that don’t exist? At least Kim is going back and forth with ChatGPT on her own nickel.
So, while some are mocking Kardashian, I wish her well. There is nothing wrong with a nontraditional path, and if she brings the same determination to practicing law that she has brought to her other careers, she might turn out to be pretty good at it.
