The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Committee on Admissions has just  announced that it will administer the NextGen bar exam beginning in February 2028. Thirty-three jurisdictions have now announced plans to adopt the NextGen exam.

The NextGen bar exam is being developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), which currently develops bar exam content for 54 of 56 US jurisdictions.  The NextGen bar exam will replace the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) that the District of Columbia currently uses and, like the UBE, will serve as the basis for score portability between participating jurisdictions.

Designed to reflect the work performed by newly licensed attorneys, the NextGen bar exam will test nine areas of legal doctrine (civil procedure, contract law, evidence, torts, business associations, constitutional law, criminal law, real property, family law) and seven foundational lawyering skills (legal research, legal writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, client relationship and management). Tenets of attorney ethics will also be tested in conjunction with other topics and skills.

The new exam will balance the skills and knowledge needed in litigation and transactional legal practice and will reflect many of the key changes that law schools are making to their own curricula, building on the successes of clinical legal education programs, alternative dispute resolution programs, legal research, and legal writing and analysis programs.

The subjects and skills to be tested were developed through a multi-year, nationwide legal practice analysis focused on the most important knowledge and skills for newly licensed lawyers.

Like the current bar exam, the NextGen bar exam will be administered, and the written portions graded, by the individual states. The exam will be administered over one and a half days, with six hours of testing time on day one and three hours on day two.

 You can read more about this  here.

For those of you who are not waiting until 2028, and are currently studying for the February bar exam this month, there is still time remaining to get help understanding those concepts that you don’t quite “get“ or how to earn extra points on your essays even when you don’t know or remember the applicable law. We can provide this assistance to get you on track to pass in the final weeks before the exam. You can learn more about our famed bar exam tutoring program here or email us at info@marinolegal.com.