CU Law School in Boulder starts preparing for new bar exam
Apr. 18—A new statewide bar exam in 2028 will change the way law school students are tested upon graduation, and faculty at the University of Colorado Law School at the Boulder campus are already preparing for it.
February of 2028 will be the last time the existing bar exam in Colorado will be available. Denise DeForest, director of academic support at the CU Law School, said the new exam will test less on memorization and factual knowledge and more on higher-level application skills.
"It's not going to be an easy test. I think it will actually fundamentally test a next-level skill, which is how do you use this doctrine and how do you make sense of it," DeForest said. "And that will be quite the test."
The existing test, called the Uniform Bar Examination, was adopted in Colorado in 2012. The Colorado Supreme Court announced in March that Colorado will adopt the NextGen exam in 2028, joining 14 other states that have announced similar plans.
"I do think the new exam will help make better lawyers, because it will be testing skills that are not currently tested and so law schools will ensure that they are teaching those skills," said Jessica Yates, attorney regulation counsel for the Colorado Supreme Court. "And in that sense, the people graduating from law school will have a better skill set for the practice of law."
DeForest said conversations among faculty at the CU Law School have begun about how to integrate this new skill-based and second-level analysis into the way they teach. Usually, these higher-level skills wait until the third year, but with the new test, the Law School will need to introduce it earlier.
"For us as a faculty, we're starting to come to grips with this idea that we're going to have to expose all our students to a lot of these concepts and a lot of these ideas skills-wise in their first year," DeForest said.
The first year of law school is overwhelming to many students already, she said, and the goal is to be sensitive to that in the way it's integrated. The first class to take the new bar exam will arrive on the CU Boulder campus in the fall of 2025.
The NextGen exam, which was developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, was created to test a broad range of foundational skills using a set of clearly identified legal concepts and principles needed to practice law.
"It reduces the number of subjects while expanding the scope of the types of things it's testing for in terms of skills," Yates said. "That is something we think will be a good development that better mirrors the actual practice of law."
The NextGen exam will cover nine subjects including civil procedure, criminal law, family law, contract law and real property. Through the use of multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions and performance tasks, it will also test seven skills including legal research, legal writing, client counseling and advising, and negotiation and dispute resolution.
"The practice of law does involve legal research and writing but it also involves these other skills, such as client management, that currently aren't being tested and it's important for new lawyers to show competency in these very important client skills," Yates said.
Colorado administers the Uniform Bar Exam every February and July. It will administer the Uniform Bar Exam in February of 2028 and then move to the NextGen exam in July of 2028.
"I think it more accurately reflects the practice of law, and I'm all for testing my students as to how ready they are to do that," DeForest said.
