About Jay Bijlani
Esquired is a minority-owned business founded and operated by Jagdish “Jay” Bijlani.
Most bar exam instruction is built from the outside in – from published rules, released questions, and informed guesses about what graders want. Jay’s is built from the inside. He spent years on the grading side of the California Bar Examination, scoring thousands of real answers written by real candidates under real time pressure, and learning precisely where points are won and lost.
Nineteen years later, that experience underlies everything Esquired does: one-on-one preparation for bar candidates, and assessment consulting for the organizations that prepare them.
Ready to Get Started?
Discover how Jay’s tailored services can help you achieve your bar exam goals.
The Method
Esquired exists because of a gap Jay saw from both sides of the exam.
When a candidate fails the bar exam, they receive a score. Not a diagnosis — a number. The official result tells them which section was weak. It says nothing about why.
Most bar prep companies attempt to fill that gap with grader feedback on practice answers. But that feedback is typically impressionistic: “your analysis was weak,” “work on issue spotting,” “the rule statement was incomplete.” It sounds like diagnosis. It isn’t. There is no underlying model of what skills are actually being measured, which means a student who follows the feedback conscientiously may work hard on the wrong thing entirely.
A weak analysis and a weak rule statement are not the same problem. A student who never knew the rule needs different work than one who knew it but couldn’t connect it to the facts — and both of them need different work than one who did both and expressed it in a way the grader couldn’t follow. Three failures, three fixes. Generic feedback flattens them into one.
Over nineteen years, Jay built that grading experience into a structured diagnostic method — one that identifies which specific skill broke down, where in the answer it happened, and what it cost downstream. The feedback it produces is grounded in what bar answers are actually scored on, not gut instinct about what “good writing” looks like. And the method doesn’t change with the format: a California essay, a performance test, and a NextGen UBE integrated question set are all measuring the same underlying skills. The exam changed. What earns points didn’t.
About Jay's Real Experience
The Bar Grader.
Jay graded thousands of essay answers across multiple administrations of the California Bar Examination for The State Bar of California.
Grading is not reading. Before each administration, graders complete formal calibration training: they score pre-selected sample answers and work as a group toward consensus, so that the same answer receives the same score regardless of who reads it. Jay went through that process across five administrations.
That is what separates knowing what a rubric says from knowing how it gets applied – to a real answer, under time pressure, by a grader reading hundreds more.
It is also, notably, the same process the National Conference of Bar Examiners has since built into the NextGen UBE: graders now score pre-scored exemplars before touching live responses, with additional calibration embedded throughout the grading window.
The Law Professor.
Teaching followed grading almost immediately.
At Santa Clara University School of Law, Jay served as Clinical Professor of Lawyering Skills and Assistant Director for Academic Development. He taught two upper-level legal writing courses built around timed analytical writing, including a small-section course for students in the bottom third of the class. He also developed a full bar preparation curriculum, trained adjunct faculty, ran skills workshops, and advised students across all three years.
At Golden Gate University School of Law, as Assistant Director of Bar Exam Services, he co-created and taught the Practical Legal Writing curriculum covering all three formats of the California Bar Exam, taught the primary bar preparation course, oversaw the Practice Essay Feedback Program – training the graders who provided skills-based formative assessment to students – and analyzed bar passage data for faculty and administration.
Across both roles, one pattern held: students rarely failed because they didn’t know the law. They failed because they couldn’t show it in the way the exam actually measures.
Two Ways to Work With Jay and Esquired
For Bar Takers.
One-on-one preparation for the legacy California Bar Examination, built around the skills the exam actually scores.
For Bar Prep Providers.
Assessment consulting, diagnostic feedback, and licensing for organizations preparing candidates for the NextGen UBE.