A new bar exam is coming. Here's what it will test.
Incoming first-year law students will be the first to take the NextGen bar exam

By Karen Sloan
May 25 (Reuters) –

With a new bar exam set to debut in July 2026, the National Conference of Bar Examiners on Thursday unveiled what the overhauled test will cover.

The newly released 42-page outline identifies the specific lawyering skills and areas of the law that will be tested on the NextGen Bar Exam. It also clarifies which areas of the law examinees must memorize and which they will be tested on with the help of resources — a departure from the current bar exam which is heavily weighted toward memorization.

Students who start law school this fall will be among the first to take the NextGen exam, said University of Maine law professor Jon Lee, who served on the committee tasked with determining the scope of the new test.

The National Conference formally launched the development of the new test in early 2021 and said it will place more emphasis on legal skills and rely less on the memorization of legal concepts — partially in response to criticism that the existing exam doesn’t reflect the actual practice of law.

The new test will do away with the current exam’s three separate components — the Multistate Bar Examination, the Multistate Essay Examination and the Multistate Performance Test— in favor of an exam designed to better integrate knowledge and skills.

For example, the new exam may use a common fact pattern to test two or three areas of the law and a variety of legal skills over five or six questions of various formats, said Cynthia Martin, a Missouri judge who is leading the development of the new test.

The National Conference previously said the NextGen bar exam will test aspiring attorneys in seven skills areas, including client counseling and advising; client relationships and management; legal research; legal writing; and negotiations. And it will test examinees in eight areas of the law: business associations and relationships; civil procedure; constitutional law; contracts; criminal law and constitutional protections of accused persons; evidence; real property; and torts. The new test will drop family law; estates and trusts, the Uniform Commercial Code; and conflict of laws.

A committee spent more than a year hashing what topics to retain and remove from each of those broad subjects, as well as which topics must be memorized. It received more than 400 public comments.
The National Conference also has pilot-tested new exam questions with 2,500 third-year law students and recent law graduates from 70 law schools, and it expects to begin releasing sample test questions later this summer.

It is nearing a final decision on the length of the exam, which officials have said will be no longer than the existing test, and likely shorter.