Lawyers are a strange breed indeed. When it comes to the practice of law, most seem to have no STOP/OFF button. I know, I've looked. They just go and go and go and go...........clients calling at 5 AM or 11 PM, last minute negotiations and settlements after months of trial prep, they even make vacation plans around the most attractive destinations offering CEU's. Note this recent example, Brandy's story picked up by the H-town Chronicle:

New lawyer Brandy Buck, who learned this week that she passed the Texas bar, deserves special congratulations since she was near the end of her pregnancy in July when she took the exam and she had contractions during the test.

"It was the third day and on the first or second essay question, I had two very, very painful contractions," Buck recalls. "I was at the beginning of the ninth month. The doctors expected her any day." But her now 11-week-old daughter Campbell was thankfully born two weeks later.

"I guess she had just about had enough of oil and gas (law)," said Buck, who was on an oil and gas question when the contractions came. (Note: Texas oil and gas law essays are especially feared by out-of-state law school students. They don't teach this stuff most other places.)

Buck is a new associate at the Houston office of Vinson & Elkins. The New York University School of Law grad told her daughter yesterday that she'd passed the grueling exam. "She just smiled and laughed and we went to lunch," Buck said.

She took the July bar down in the Astrodomain. Her husband took it at the same time and sat a few tables away. Buck let the proctors know she'd had contractions and that her husband was nearby. She downed some anti-contraction medicine her doctor gave her just in case.

"The head proctor came over and said I needed to leave if I was going to have the baby," she recalls. That was her plan, she swears.

At the exam breaks and at lunch, the EMT on hand at the exam took her blood pressure and wheeled her around in a wheelchair, she said. But she was able to make it through the whole day.

"Every time I went to the bathroom a proctor followed me, I think to see if my water broke," she said.

The 25-year-old said she hopes to go into corporate law, maybe securities. She hasn't told her clients yet about the oil and gas essay contractions. Most of them are, of course, oil and gas companies. She joked that she's not sure what challenges she'll plan to face at nine months if she has another child, maybe a big trial.