Missouri preparing for switch to NextGen law exam

Real life — and real lawyering — rarely involves the kind of multiple-choice questions encountered on a bar exam. But in just a few years, law students will be tested in ways that better reflect the issues they’ll encounter in the profession they’re seeking to enter.

Beginning in July 2026, the National Conference of Bar Examiners will launch the “NextGen” bar exam. Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Mary R. Russell, who touted the revised exam during her speech at The Missouri Bar’s annual meeting in September, said the test will focus on demonstrating that new lawyers are ready to practice.

“When today’s first-year law students graduate, their entrance into the profession will be quite different from the one we experienced,” Russell said.

The NextGen exam has been in development since 2018. Judge Cindy Martin of the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District, who led the national task force that tested the new exam and now chairs the implementation steering committee, said the new test will focus on foundational skills in civil and criminal procedure, contract law, torts and other critical areas.

Currently, the widely-used Uniform Bar Exam, or UBE, includes a six-hour, 200-question multiple-choice exam, as well as essay and performance components. The new test doesn’t eliminate multiple-choice questions, but they will be de-emphasized in favor of such skills as legal research and writing, analysis, research and client counseling.

Examinees, of course, won’t sit with an actual client or be turned loose in a law library. Yet the test is intended to have students do much of what practicing lawyers do every day.

“If a client walks into my office, they don’t come in and say, ‘I’m only going to talk to you about contracts, I don’t want to talk about any other law,’” Martin said in an interview. “They present a problem to you. You have to identify, what are the substantive areas of law that are implicated by this question? What information do I need? Where else am I going to go to get that information, and how am I going to go about helping this client?”

The move to the new test comes as some states are exploring alternative methods of professional licensure for lawyers. Wisconsin uses “diploma privilege” to admit students from in-state law schools, and Oregon is considering proposals to use apprenticeships or practice-based law school curricula in place of an exam.

Lou Mulligan, dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, is already preparing for the evolving nature of bar examination. Later this year, the law school will begin offering its students bar preparation courses at no additional cost.

The move, he said in an interview, will relieve students of the financial burden that post-law-school bar prep courses impose and could be a “gamechanger” to those planning to enter government service or practice with smaller firms.

It also builds on the school’s longstanding emphasis on practical skills over academic legal theory. Mulligan said the prep courses would include both in-person and online components, with extended bar prep class that can be taken for credit during last semester in law school.

“Not that we’re teaching to the test, but we’re teaching you to become a lawyer, and a heck of a good one,” he said.

The current components of the UBE will be discontinued after the July 2027 bar exam. Although each jurisdiction still has final say over when and whether to adopt the NextGen test, scores on the new test can be translated to an equivalent score under the UBE system.

That will be particularly important in Missouri, which borders eight states and whose lawyers frequently practice in cross-state metropolitan areas. Mulligan notes that his current 1Ls will take the NextGen test if they sit in Missouri but could still face the UBE if they practice in neighboring Kansas.

“Let’s get a clear system,” he said, “and do the best job at UMKC Law School to ensure that all of our students are as successful as possible, whatever that licensure process is.”