Welcome to the MEE. Our goal on the Multistate Essay Examination, a.k.a. the MEE, is simple: to rack up the most points possible in the shortest amount of time. And we're going to talk here about some ways to do that, a system that, the more you do it, will just become mechanical and automatic as if you're not even really writing so much as just assembling your answers.

And to get to that point where these essays just flow out automatically, we're going to break things down and then put them back together so that every minute we use and every sentence we write has a purpose: to get us points. And to get there, this lecture is going to proceed in three parts: first, a little explanation of what the MEE is; second, some strategies about how to read MEE questions; and then, finally, the keys to writing good MEE answers. Let's get going.

What the MEE Is (and Isn't)

And let's start with the introductions. Just make sure everyone knows everyone. The MEE is the Multistate Essay Examination. It's part of the UBE, the Uniform Bar Exam, which is the two-day test written by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

The UBE, as you might know by now, but hey, these are introductions, it's always better to be sure, is two days long and has three parts. The second day will be devoted to the Multistate Bar Examination, or the MBE, which is a six-hour, 200-question multiple-choice exam.

On the first day, you'll do the other two parts. One half of the day is the MPT, or the Multistate Performance Test, and the other is the Multistate Essay Examination, the MEE, which is our focus today. The MEE is going to take half the day, and it's going to count for 30% of your total UBE score. And by the time we're done here, you'll know how to max out that score as much as possible, and how to overcome some common issues and problems.

On the MEE, you'll get six essay questions with 30 minutes to answer each one. Now, this is an essay exam, which means you'll be writing your answers. And we're going to talk about strategies about how to do that, especially since you're going to have to work quickly.

With any exam, especially one involving writing, it's always a good idea to ask yourself, what am I trying to show here? What am I being tested on? And for the MEE, that includes several things.

One is just spotting legal issues. Now, sometimes the prompts and the questions will clear this up for you, like they'll identify this as a UCC issue or a personal jurisdiction issue, but sometimes you'll have to suss out the issue for yourself.

The second thing is distinguishing relevant facts and legal rules from irrelevant ones. Now, this is always a central challenge for lawyers. You can't address everything. You have to sort out the signal from the noise and focus on what's important.

The third thing is legal reasoning. How well can you apply the legal rules to the facts? Can you spot ambiguities? Legal reasoning involves a wide range of skills, and you'll have honed them by the time you sit down to write.

And fourth, communicating your analysis effectively in writing. Now, this is not a style competition. You're not aiming for a Pulitzer Prize here, and we're not going to try to reinvent your personal writing style, but short, clear sentences are a big plus on the MEE, just as they are in legal practice.

And we're also going to talk about how to effectively use headers, both to make sure that we hit all the major points in our answers, and also that all of our issues and ideas are presented in a way that the graders can't help but see, which, of course, means they'll have to give up some points in return.

Naturally, you also have to know the substantive law that's being tested. All seven of the MBE subjects are fair game on the MEE. That means civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts, criminal law and procedure, evidence, property, and torts. But the MEE also tests a few subjects that are not on the MBE. That includes business associations, conflict of laws, family law, trusts and estates, and Article 9, which you might recognize as secured transactions.

Now, the MEE is not focused on the law of any particular state. It's the Multistate Essay Examination, so your answers will be the same whether you're taking the Texas Bar or the New York Bar. And that's great for us because it means we can all prepare the same and go into this thing together.

Grading

Let me say something about the grading. The MEE is written by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which gives graders a detailed scoring sheet telling them what to look for. So again, they're not just grading based on how much they like your writing, but how well you check off the priorities on the scoring sheet. And that's what we're going to focus on.

So what is the MEE not? It's not the time to trot out your rhetorical skills and practice beautiful closing arguments. It's not even about being a "good writer." You might be a beautiful writer and that's great, but we're not going to focus on your style or anything like that because that's not what you're being graded on.

You need to communicate clearly, of course, but we're not worried about structuring a nice essay with an inspiring opening quote and a beautiful conclusion. We just want to follow a recipe for maximizing points, so that you get a high grade. It's also worth knowing that MEE grades are relative, which means that everyone can't get a perfect score and everyone can't get a low score.

It's a curve with a distribution. In some states, that's on a 1–6 scale; in others, it's a 1–10 scale, and we don't all need to be 6s or 10s to pass the bar. We just want to get the most out of the MEE. The better we do here, the more wiggle room we'll have on the MBE and MPT.

Time Management

Finally, a quick word on time management. Because we only have three hours to work through six questions, most of which are going to have multiple prompts within them, we're going to have to be very conscious of our time management. Again, there's no need to stress about it. We're going to break this down so that it's a mechanical kind of process which will just feel automatic. But it's still worth being conscious of time and how we use it on the basic tasks that every question involves: reading, planning, writing, and revising.

Now, there's no single formula about how much time to allocate each of those tasks, and one of the advantages of doing practice questions is that you'll be able to figure out what works best for you. Some of you are very fast readers. Some of you are more deliberate. Some really benefit from outlining answers before writing, and some don't. You know your own skills and preferences, and there's no one-size-fits-all method here. And we're going to talk in more detail momentarily about specific strategies for reading MEE questions and writing MEE answers.

But just for the sake of illustration, let's say we've got an MEE question with two prompts [the prompts are the specific questions that we're asked to answer] and about a page of text to read.

That means we've got about 15 minutes per prompt. It'd be 10 if there were three prompts. So again, the MEE moves really fast. And that math isn't an exact guide. Some prompts will take a little longer than others, and we'll talk about that a little later. Every question is different. The idea here is just to get an overall sense of how to think about the average question.

So maybe it takes you 5 minutes to read and mark up the prompts and the fact pattern, which, let's say, is about one person building a house on another person's land without their permission. That leaves you 25 minutes to plan and to write.

You might take another 3 to 5 minutes to jot down a few notes on each prompt, like identifying the issue if the prompt doesn't already make it clear [adverse possession may be the issue here]; going on to note some rules that you're going to apply, like the multifactor test for adverse possession; and maybe a fact or two that seems significant, like how long the house has already been there.

So now you've got 20 minutes left. That's 10 minutes per prompt to write your answers, which is going to be how you spend most of your time. Now, that could mean spending 6 to 8 minutes on each, fully writing out that legal rule that you've already identified, applying it to the facts, and stating your conclusion as clearly as possible.

Ideally, you'll have a few minutes left over at the end to give everything a quick once-over for any glaring errors and then make sure that you've answered everything, but there's no need to worry too much about a spelling error here and there. The graders aren't looking for you to be grammar teachers, just clear communicators.

Again, that's just one possible way to think about time management, and you'll know what works best for you: more time for reading or planning, for example. The most important thing in terms of time management, I think, is not measuring out how many minutes you spend on each task, but rather the structure and discipline it'll give you.

You need to answer each prompt instead of spending all your time perfecting one. Your total score will depend on how you answer everything, not just your best answers. So, if you're crossing the 20-minute mark and you're still on prompt one of a two-prompt question, you know it's time to wrap up and move on because you've got potentially half or more of your points still sitting there for the taking.

Now, no matter how you slice it, the two most important and time-consuming parts of an MEE question are reading it and writing your answers. So we're going to focus in on those two skills.