Abdul: The Attorney – The Untold Story
Most people go to law school. I commuted to it. Three to four nights a week, I drove from Springfield to St. Louis to attend classes part-time at Saint Louis University School of Law. By day, I worked full-time for the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. Nights and weekends, I held down two part-time radio DJ jobs. My law lectures? Listened to them on cassette tapes during those long highway drives.
I missed fewer classes than most full-time students, finished law school in 3.5 years instead of the usual 4–5, and even managed to win moot court in 2002. I wasn’t just doing law school. I was grinding through it.
But that was only the beginning.
When I sat for the Illinois bar exam in February 2003, I failed—by five points. Close, but not close enough. Illinois had a policy: if you missed passing by four points or less, you qualified for an automatic regrade. I missed it by one point.
I was disappointed, but not defeated. I was ready to regroup and take the exam again. I even considered filing suit against the Board of Bar Examiners after learning there had been a nationwide scoring error on one of the multiple-choice questions. Over 7,000 test-takers were affected.
I emailed the Board requesting a regrade.
And then I got the call.
A kind woman from the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar told me, “We received your request, but you don’t need it. You passed.“
That one-point scoring error? It bumped me from five points out to four points out—just enough to trigger the regrade. And on regrade, I cleared the mark.
No lawsuit necessary. No appeal. Just resilience.
For me, it wasn’t just about passing the bar. It was about proving, yet again, that hard work pays off—even when the odds say otherwise.
Oh, and when I told my best friend from law school? she said, “Maybe this will finally teach you some humility.”
My response? “I was right the first time. Why should I change?”
And my mother, when I told her the news in her most proud Black mama voice?
“I knew they couldn’t keep my baby down.”
I didn’t just earn a law degree. I earned every mile of it. And the license, like the journey, was anything but ordinary.
The moral of the story? Resilience isn’t glamorous. It’s not Instagrammable. It’s showing up, staying the course, and letting your work speak when circumstances try to shout over you. Sometimes the system breaks. Sometimes it gets it wrong. But if you’re prepared, persistent, and principled, even a one-point margin can become a turning point.
You don’t have to be lucky. You just have to be ready when luck decides to show up.
And one more thing—if you’re going to have a huge ego and talk a lot of smack (and I do), you better be able to back it up.
