Adding Legal Research to the Bar Exam : What Would The Exercise Look Like

The current form of the traditional two-day bar exam has been mostly unchanged for decades. The one major change to the exam came when the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) added a third, originally fully optional, exam component called the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) that was in use by over half of the states by 2003. According to the NCBE, the purpose of the MPT is to test an applicant’s ability to perform fundamental lawyering skills that a beginning attorney is expected to know how to do and which is seen as not being adequately tested via the essay or multiple-choice components of the exam.Various authors have criticized the current bar exam format and have offered meaningful suggested changes. This article will focus on deficiencies pertaining to a lack of legal research readiness in the practice of law: A recent study found that 45% of a new attorney’s time will be spent researching. The authors of the MacCrate Report found ten practice skills that are “essential for competent representation,” which are universally referred to as Fundamental Lawyering Skills. One of the ten Fundamental Lawyering Skills is legal research. The report states that “if anything, the bar examination discourages” the teaching of lawyering skills in law school.My proposal is to add an interactive legal research exercise to the MPT, meaning that applicants would have to conduct research in one or more databases to answer questions. By making the exercise interactive, other Fundamental Lawyering Skills will be tested, as explained in this article.Part I reviews the best assessment and measurement methods and strategies. Part II concerns relevant issues with the current bar exam, and solutions that authors have proposed. In this part, each component of the bar exam will be reviewed for significance and effectiveness. In part III, I address how to improve the MPT by directly addressing its criticisms through the use of an interactive legal research exercise that would accurately address several of the Fundamental Lawyering Skills that may be tested. In part IV, I offer two examples, presented in Appendices A and B, of what an interactive legal research exercise could look like, as a means to generate discussion that will lead to further development of such an exercise