News & Updates

Over the past year, we have processed three wrenching national experiences. At IAALS, we have imagined the experiences as tests. Because we aspire to advance the American legal system, we have sought to answer these tests together—and for the sake of our shared mission.

The pandemic’s disruption to the status quo brought with it a critical view of the bar exam, how it is administered, and whether it actually tests what it purports to. The status quo—and tinkering around its edges—is not good enough. It is time we had the courage and will to look beyond the assumptions that underpin the current bar exam and towards outcomes and purpose for a new era.

In a groundbreaking report, IAALS, in partnership with Professor Deborah Merritt at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, has defined the minimum competence that new lawyers need to be qualified to practice law—and provides recommendations for how legal licensing processes like the bar exam must change to be more fair to bar applicants and to better protect the public.

In 2018, the NCBE created its Testing Task Force to conduct a three-year project that, in part, examines whether the bar exam is a valid measure of minimum competence to practice law. Last month, NCBE released a report detailing the findings of Phase 2, a national practice analysis, which will provide a foundation of data for bar exam reform.

On April 7, the ABA Board of Governors approved a resolution urging state licensing authorities to immediately adopt emergency rules that would authorize recent law school graduates to practice law without passing a bar exam, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the launch of our Building a Better Bar project last July, IAALS has made significant headway in empirically defining the minimum competence law school students need to move on to successful practice. As of mid-February, we've held nearly 40 focus group sessions; we will wrap up all focus groups in March, and are preparing for a thorough analysis of the rich qualitative data we have gathered.

As thousands prepare to sit for the bar exam, IAALS is spearheading an empirical effort to define the minimum competence they need to practice law and to ensure the fairness, efficacy, and validity of the bar exam itself.

Kim Kardashian West wears many hats: reality television star, media personality, businesswoman, wife, and mother. But the second eldest Kardashian told Vogue she has plans to add “lawyer” to her list of titles, though she has no plans to take the LSAT or apply to law schools. Instead, she is “reading the law”—an alternate, apprenticeship-based path to becoming a lawyer.