The NextGen Exam and Alternative Bar Admission Pathways

How lawyers are licensed in the United States is entering one of its most consequential periods of reform in decades. Beginning in July 2026, the NextGen Uniform Bar Exam—a redesigned assessment created by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE)—will begin to replace the traditional Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) in jurisdictions around the country. The NextGen exam moves away from a memorization-heavy model toward an assessment that aims to blend doctrinal legal knowledge with real-world lawyering skills, including legal research, writing, client counseling, and negotiation. Its rollout is already prompting law schools to retool curricula, students to reassess preparation strategies, and employers to reconsider how licensure timelines affect hiring and training.

State supreme courts and boards of bar examiners possess the authority to set licensure requirements and determine how those rules are implemented. The NCBE develops and administers the national components of the bar exam, but each state decides whether and how to adopt them. Recent testing reforms reflect this decentralized structure: more than 40 U.S. jurisdictions have announced plans to adopt the NextGen UBE, with several slated to administer by July 2028, including Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Some states have also authorized supervised practice options that allow candidates to earn licensure through structured training and evaluation, bypassing the bar exam altogether.

Bar admission rules determine who may enter the legal profession and help ensure that new lawyers meet minimum competence standards. For nearly a century, the UBE—a standardized exam created and scored by the NCBE—has dominated bar admissions across states, with its scores transferable from one state to another. Traditionalists argue that rigorous, standardized testing provides an administrable, objective safeguard for clients and courts. Reformers counter that the old model entrenches inequities, prioritizes high-stakes test performance over practical readiness, and fails to keep pace with how law is practiced today.

At the center of these debates is a question that has shaped attorney licensing for generations: what constitutes competence to practice law, and how should it be measured? The NextGen UBE offers one answer by embedding skills testing within a standardized national framework. Alternative licensure pathways suggest another, shifting emphasis from testing to demonstrated performance under supervision. As jurisdictions approach the July 2028 transition point, these arguments will shape not only the future of bar admission policy in many jurisdictions, but also the future composition of the American legal profession.

In this week’s Saturday Seminar, scholars consider how the NextGen exam and alternative licensure pathways may transform legal education and who gets to become a lawyer.

• In a forthcoming paper in the Northwestern Law & Economics Research Paper Series, Kyle Rozema of the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law analyzes how bar exam requirements operate as a regulatory mechanism controlling entry into the legal profession. Using data from 1984 to 2019, Rozema finds that requiring bar exam passage decreases the number of active lawyers by approximately 14 percent nationwide, with minimum score rules accounting for 80 percent of that impact. Rozema demonstrates that policies delaying licensure after graduation further restrict labor supply, and argues that regulators should weigh these costs more explicitly when revising bar admission rules.
• In an article in the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, Deborah Merritt of The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Andrea Curcio of the Georgia State University College of Law, and Eileen Kaufman of the Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center argue that traditional bar exams do not adequately assess competence. Drawing on empirical data from California’s supervised practice programs, the Merritt team illustrates that alternative licensure pathways evaluate a broader range of lawyering skills while remaining feasible and equitable. Merritt and her coauthors contend that supervised practice better protects the public by directly assessing the competencies new lawyers use with clients. Regulators should expand non-exam pathways when revising bar admission rules, the Merritt team urges.
• In a forthcoming article in the UNT Dallas Law Review, Steven Foster of the Oklahoma City University School of Law, and Nachman Gutowski of the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas, argue that the NextGen UBE should shift from a score-based model to a standards-based system to more accurately reflect minimum competence. Foster and Gutowski explain that the traditional UBE’s reliance on relative essay scoring produces inconsistent and misleading results across jurisdictions, undermining fairness. Differing minimum passing scores across states create barriers to mobility, Foster and Gutowski note. As jurisdictions transition to NextGen, Foster and Gutowski urge adoption of a single national passing standard to ensure genuine score portability.
• Law schools must adapt their curricula to prepare their students for legal research questions on the NextGen UBE, argues Anne Johnson of the Mercer University School of Law in an article in the Law Library Journal. Johnson reports that, beginning in July 2026, the exam will test candidates’ ability to conduct and communicate legal research under realistic practice scenarios. Research questions will require examinees to identify relevant issues, evaluate the authority of multiple sources, and justify their use of those sources within a fact-rich problem set, Johnson explains. Johnson urges librarians and legal research and writing faculty to design a pedagogy collaboratively that builds these competencies and aligns with the NextGen UBE’s practice-oriented approach.
• Illinois should consider alternative paths to bar admission, argues Jeffery Parness of the Northern Illinois University College of Law in a forthcoming paper. Parness surveys various approaches adopted in other states, including diploma privilege in Wisconsin, law school-based honors programs in New Hampshire, apprenticeship models in Oregon, and curricular-based licensure pathways in Minnesota. Parness notes that these approaches rely on structured coursework, portfolios, and supervised practice, either in place of or alongside a traditional bar exam. Observing that several states have determined that exam-centered licensure is an inadequate measure of competence, Parness recommends that Illinois draw on these state experiments when developing its own alternative pathway.
• In an article in the Arkansas Law Review, Brian Gallini of the Quinnipiac University School of Law argues that the modern bar exam functions more as a barrier to entering the legal profession than as a measure of competence. Gallini acknowledges that some candidates fail the bar exam because they are unqualified, but emphasizes that the exam is minimally related to actual lawyering skills and disproportionately restricts entry of first-generation, lower-income, and historically underrepresented candidates. Gallini instead recommends creating a supervised public-service pathway to licensure that requires candidates to complete structured legal work addressing basic human needs. This approach would provide a more meaningful assessment of practice readiness while alleviating lawyer shortages and strengthening access to justice, Gallini concludes.