Beginning in February 2028, lawyer hopefuls will take a new bar exam to become licensed to practice in Illinois.
The Illinois Supreme Court and Board of Admissions to the Bar announced that the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination (NextGen) will replace the current Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) starting with the February 2028 administration.
This announcement provides law schools and law students with a significant runway to plan for the exam. Full-time fall 2025 law students, who will likely sit for the July 2028 exam, will have their three-year law school tenure to prepare.
Increased focus on real practice skills
In May 2024, the Illinois Supreme Court and the Board of Admissions to the Bar announced plans to adopt the NextGen exam in 2028, replacing the expiring UBE. The UBE has been administered in Illinois since 2019.
In a press release, Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis said the NextGen exam will place “a greater emphasis on testing the foundational skills required to practice law instead of memorizing legal concepts and principles.”
The UBE has been criticized for a lack of focus on real-world practice skills and competencies required of newly licensed attorneys.
The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), which developed the NextGen and UBE exams, said the new exam will focus on both litigation and transactional legal practice and reflect changes in law school curriculum.
What will the NextGen exam look like?
According to the press release, the NextGen exam will test students on legal principles including contract and constitutional law, civil procedure and criminal law, evidence, real property, torts, family law, and business associations.
It will also focus on lawyering skills, like identifying and analyzing legal issues, negotiation and dispute resolution, legal research and writing, and advising and counseling clients.
Like the UBE, the NextGen exam will include multiple-choice questions and performance tasks that require applying lawyering skills to realistic scenarios.
In addition, the NextGen exam will include questions that integrate a factual scenario with other legal resources, like an excerpt from a statute or court opinion or related documents such as portions of a deposition or a police report, the press release said.
The NextGen exam will be administered over nine hours on a day and a half in February and July. The UBE is currently administered over 12 hours.
Allowing time to prepare
The 2028 administration allows the Board of Admissions to the Bar time to observe the exam being administered before it’s given in Illinois.
Currently, 40 jurisdictions have announced that they will administer the NextGen exam, including Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, New York, and the District of Columbia.
Connecticut, Guam, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Virgin Islands, and Washington will administer the NextGen exam beginning in July 2026, the first possible administration date.
States were given the option of using the NextGen exam or developing their own exam or method of measuring competence for licensure after the UBE’s expiration.
Earlier this month, the California Supreme Court ordered the State Bar of California to return to the NCBE’s Multistate Bar Examination for multiple-choice questions in its July 2025 bar exam, after the problematic administration of its self-developed exam in February 2025.
California opted against using the NextGen exam and instead contracted with Kaplan to develop a state-specific test.
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