Oregon is about to become the first U.S. state to adopt a large-scale attorney licensing pathway that does not involve taking and passing the bar exam.

The Oregon Supreme Court will now vote on a proposal to allow law school graduates to become licensed after working for 675 hours under the supervision of an experienced attorney, as an alternative to the bar exam.

The Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners has been developing the alternative licensing pathway concept since 2020, after COVID-19 disrupted the bar exam in many jurisdictions. Oregon was one of a few states that adopted some form of so-called diploma privilege in the early months of the pandemic, allowing law graduates to become licensed without taking the bar exam. But all these states have since returned to requiring the bar exam.

Under the proposed program, called the Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination, law graduates must complete at least 675 hours of legal work under supervision — a figure chosen to match the number of hours most people study for the bar exam, according to Willamette University Law Dean Brian Gallini, who served on the committee that developed the proposal.

They must also submit at least eight examples of legal writing; take the lead in at least two initial client interviews or client counseling sessions; and head up two negotiations, among other requirements.

The applicants’ portfolios would then be graded by Oregon bar examiners, and those with qualifying scores would be sworn into the state bar. Participants would be paid for their work. The board of the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners unanimously voted on August 24, 2023 to send the proposal to the state’s high court, which has the final say in the matter.

“I think other states are looking at these rules and seeing if it’s viable for them,” Gallini said. “One of the goals of the committee was to draft rules that we think other states could import.”

Currently, only Wisconsin allows graduates of the state’s two law schools to be licensed without passing the bar. New Hampshire allows a small cohort of law students who complete a specialized curriculum to bypass the bar. But Oregon’s supervised practice program would be much larger in scale, offering a bar exam alternative to law students within and outside of the state.

Oregon Bar Examiners plan to develop a second alternative licensing pathway in which students at the state’s three law schools would spend their last two years of law school completing practice-based coursework.

You can read more about this plan here.

 

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