Contact: Anne Marie Gattari
Pub date: July 8, 2025
Ask any law school leader in the U.S. if preparing their graduating students for first-time bar passage is a top priority, the answer is likely to be a resounding “YES!”
Ieisha Humphrey’s answer is “YES, with a twist.”
As Michigan State University College of Law’s new Assistant Dean for Professionalism, Leadership, and Bar Success — a role supported by generous third-party funding — she wants bar prep programs and legal institutions to design supportive and effective bar prep courses for test-takers facing current challenges or dealing with past issues.
At MSU Law, she is developing a bar program that does just that.
“Life doesn’t pause during bar prep for these students,” Humphrey said. “Financial challenges, health struggles, discrimination, loss – it all has an impact on how well you do. That’s why we offer holistic, student-centered support that addresses the full spectrum of barriers students may face.
Humphrey and her research partner, Joseline Jean-Louis Hardwick, a professor at Cooley Law School, are surveying law students around the country to measure how trauma, mental health, and socio-economic factors affect their bar exam results. The survey is currently closed and will reopen in October. To learn more, click Trauma-Informed Bar Prep Study
The goals of the study are to identify barriers standing in the way of rigorous bar exam preparation; analyze how trauma, mental health, and socioeconomic factors affect scores, and develop recommendations for law schools and bar prep providers to improve support.
Humphrey said such support is becoming increasingly necessary as the number of first-generation students goes up. Often, students facing barriers are first-gen students, she said, noting that MSU Law’s class of 2027 is 80 percent.
Anthony E. Varona, Dean of the University of Seattle School of Law, wrote a recent article in support of special assistance for first-gen students in the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Magazine.
“We need to reduce the financial burden on first-gen law students. We must provide mental health and academic support services, [and be] responsive to the special challenges our first-gen students face,” he wrote.
First-gen students don’t have the benefit of “built-in” mentors that students from college-educated households have, he wrote.
“College-educated households tend to have a higher prevalence of family members who are attorneys, able to advise law . . . [provide] professional networking,” he wrote.
Humphrey, an alumna of Cooley Law School, always knew she wanted to be a lawyer. She didn’t know she would become a teacher, which is how she views her work in academic support.
She came to MSU Law from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, where she was Associate Dean for Student Affairs. Previously, she served in student support roles for nearly 10 years at Cooley, where she was also an adjunct professor.
Woven through this work is Humphrey’s dedication to preparing students to take the bar exam.
“Bar prep support has been filling my cup for the past 12 years,” she said. “Passing the bar your first time out is so important.
“That’s why I came to MSU College of law. We’re launching a comprehensive, multi-part initiative to support bar passage. I’m proud to be a part of it.”