New York will adopt NextGen bar exam, considers surprising shifts in state-law tests
New York, the jurisdiction with the largest number of bar candidates, will adopt the NextGen bar exam as it considers rejiggering the state-specific part of the exam, too, according to the New York Court of Appeals. (Image from Shutterstock)
New York, the jurisdiction with the largest number of bar candidates, will adopt the NextGen bar exam as it considers rejiggering the state-specific part of the exam, too, according to the New York Court of Appeals.
The state, where 14,354 examinees took the bar exam in 2024, becomes the 30th jurisdiction to adopt the test, according to a Jan. 8 press release from the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
“This one surprises me,” Sean Silverman, the owner of Silverman Bar Exam & LSAT Tutoring, told the ABA Journal in an email. “There has been talk for a while now that New York had wanted more New York law tested.”
Home to more than 350,000 licensed attorneys, New York requires bar candidates to pass a state-specific law component. Currently, candidates must pass the online New York Law Course and the online, open-book New York Law Exam.
But the notice posted Jan. 8 from the New York Court of Appeals states that a committee will develop “options for a robust New York-Specific bar eligibility requirement, … including the possibility of an in-person New York law component.”
The potential of using an in-person test “concerns me,” says Deborah Jones Merritt, professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “They might put that exam on the afternoon of the second day of NextGen, so that people would have to memorize rules for both the federal and general principles of NextGen and the New York-specific law. That would completely undercut the potential of what’s good about NextGen.”
Along with eliminating a paper-and-pencil option, the day-and-a-half long NextGen exam will emphasize skills that junior attorneys need—such as research, client management and dispute resolution—over memorization. The exam replacing the Uniform Bar Examination will have fewer stand-alone multiple-choice questions, and the traditional essay questions will be replaced with integrated question sets, requiring students to read and apply primary legal and factual resources to certain fact patterns under time pressure.
The first administration of the NextGen exam is scheduled for July 2026, but New York, with 16 ABA-accredited law schools, will launch it in 2028. The UBE and its components—the Multistate Essay Examination, the Multistate Performance Test and the Multistate Bar Examination—all sunset in 2028.
Merritt says she is also concerned about the portability issues that an in-person state-specific exam might create.
“New York offers the state portion three times a year now,” she says. “And that’s already something of a restraint on portability. If they limit it to doing it just in the afternoon after NextGen, that’s only twice a year.”
Seventeen jurisdictions have a state-specific portion of their bar exam, says Joan Howarth, professor emerita at the University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law. Howarth says she recently wrote a report on this topic for the Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform, a group comprised of nine state supreme court chief justices and three state court administrators looking at legal education and bar reform.
“I like the ones where you take the class online, and the quizzes are right in it,” says Howarth, the author of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing.
Other states might be influenced by New York’s move to the NextGen while also using a state-specific rigorous exam, Silverman says.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if a number of states treat the NextGen exam more as a component of their bar exam, rather than treating it as the full exam,” he adds.
“The NextGen bar exam, developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners after a yearslong study, which included a nationwide practice analysis, will test a broad range of foundational skills deemed necessary to the practice of law and, like the Uniform Bar Examination, will provide New York test-takers with a portable score,” said Heather Davis, chief clerk and legal counsel to the New York Court of Appeals, in the court’s Jan. 8 announcement.
In each jurisdiction, the highest court has authority over the admission of attorneys to practice in its courts, aided by its bar admissions agency.
