National Conference of Bar Examiners Releases Details on the NextGen Bar Exam

The students starting law school this year will be among the first to experience the NextGen Bar Exam, slated for release in July 2026. The National Conference of Bar Examiners just released a 42-page outline providing deeper insight into the updated exam. 

The NextGen Bar Exam’s development stemmed from calls to create an exam that more adequately tests the legal knowledge and skills necessary for legal professionals today. The current bar exam faced criticisms that it “doesn’t reflect the actual practice of law” and that it tested memorization of legal concepts rather than skills. 

Reuters provided a summary of the changes, which include:

• Removal of the current exam’s three component tests: Multistate Bar Examination, Multistate Essay Examination, and Multistate Performance Test

• Usage of an integrated format that tests both skills and knowledge

• Seven legal skill areas: client counseling and advising, client relationships and management, legal research, legal writing, and negotiations 

• Seven legal knowledge areas: business associations and relationships, civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts, criminal law and constitutional protections of accused persons, evidence, real property, and torts.

• The test will require memorization for some content, but it will also allow the use of support resources for designated subject matter areas. 

• The test will remove subject matter related to family law, estates and trusts, the uniform commercial code, and conflict of laws.

Although the NextGen Bar Exam will go live in July of 2026, states will determine which exam test-takers will receive for a specified period of time. After a period of no longer than five years, all jurisdictions will move to the NextGen exam. 

Pilot Testing Underway for the Updated, Skills-Based Bar Exam

Students currently applying to law school will be the first to experience the Next Gen Bar exam, which is slated to roll out in 2026. The updated exam will test skills identified as necessary for entry into the legal profession, will cover eight subjects, as opposed to the current exam’s twelve, and will use computers for administration, rather than the current practice of pencil and paper. The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), which oversees the bar, will continue to administer the exam twice per year. 

The exam is currently still in development with the NCBE finalizing the content scope outline for the test. The initial draft of the scope content was provided for comment in the spring of this year and stakeholders including bar examiners, judges, law school deans, faculty, and administrators, law students, admissions officers, and attorneys provided almost 400 comments. The NCBE has also started to pilot test item sets. The item sets, which are groupings of test questions based on a legal scenario or procedural issue, will ask exam-takers to perform one or more legal skills. Item sets are designed to gauge both a test-taker’s knowledge of legal doctrine, as well as their proficiency in applying the requisite legal skill(s). The NCBE will use the pilot testing to gain insight into the role that resources play in assisting test-takers, as well as the proper method to grade response items within item sets for reliable and accurate scoring. 

To learn more, visit the NCBE Next Gen Bar exam site.