Anyone found good free CLA study resources besides the obvious ones?

Same boat a few months ago. Here's what I'd tell myself:

The CLA exam is more application-focused than the study guides suggest. They test whether you understand cla/cp exam, not just whether you can define it.

My tip: when you see a scenario question, mentally walk through it step by step before looking at the answers. The wrong answers are designed to catch people who jump to conclusions.

Good luck — the fact that you're doing this level of prep means you're going to be fine.

Same boat here — I've been grinding through materials for a few weeks now and honestly the hardest part for me has been the legal document drafting section. Like, I can memorize procedural rules fine, but when it comes to actually applying the correct citation format under pressure or knowing which exhibits need to be indexed a specific way, I keep second-guessing myself. Is that something others struggled with too, or am I just weak on that piece?

The YouTube thing is so real. Found a few videos that seemed promising but they were clearly just repurposed bar prep content that doesn't map cleanly to the CLA/CP scope. I've had better luck with NALA's own published materials honestly — their study outline is dry but it actually matches what shows up on the exam blueprint.

Curious what everyone finds trickier — the ethics portion or the substantive law review? Ethics trips me up because the questions are so scenario-based and a lot of the "right" answers feel like splitting hairs.

Failed my first CLA attempt by four points and honestly it stung because I felt ready going in. What killed me wasn't the substantive law — it was the MPT-style performance section and the rules of professional conduct/ethics weighting. I'd spent weeks memorizing rule statements and almost no time actually drafting under a clock. On the real thing I burned twenty minutes on the first performance task and had to rush the rest.

Second time around I changed two things. First, I stopped passively reading outlines and forced myself to do timed questions every single session, even when I didn't feel like it — the goal was getting comfortable being uncomfortable, not getting every answer right. The cla cp exam practice test here was where most of that reps came from, mostly because it actually mirrors how they word the ethics and procedure questions instead of the cleaned-up textbook phrasing. Second, I built a one-page "trap sheet" of the distinctions that kept getting me — conflicts of interest, privilege vs. confidentiality, supervised vs. independent paralegal tasks. That stuff shows up constantly and the wrong answers are designed to look right.

If you're studying off mostly free stuff, my one piece of advice: don't measure your readiness by how much you've read. Measure it by how many questions you can get right cold, timed, on a bad day. That's the gap that failed me the first time.