Keeping the Ball Rolling: Enhancing the LRW and Skills Curriculum by Incorporating NextGen Bar Foundational Skills and AI Innovations

Published: December 2025

1. Introduction

As of fall 2025, Legal Research, Writing, and Skills Professors nationwide are at a pivotal moment: determining whether and how to update their course curriculum to incorporate the NextGen Uniform Bar’s (NextGen Bar) Foundational Skills[2] and the latest advancements in AI.  This article discusses how Legal Research, Writing, and Skills Professors might revise their curriculum to incorporate the NextGen Bar’s Foundational Skills and advancements in AI.   

2. Implications of the NextGen Bar 

Starting in July 2026, the NextGen Bar will be administered for the first time in a limited number of jurisdictions.^[3] Therefore, for jurisdictions that have already decided to adopt the NextGen Bar, it is now time to start revising the curriculum to incorporate NextGen Bar topics and skills.^[4]

According to the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), the NextGen Bar is designed to emphasize skills and practice readiness.^[5] In terms of skills, the NextGen Bar will assess seven “Foundational Skills, organized into four broad skills areas: 

(1) Issue spotting and analysis, investigation, and evaluation; 

(2) Client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, client relationship and management; 

(3) Legal research; and 

(4) Legal writing and drafting.”^[6]

As Professor Carolyn V. Williams points out in her article, Bracing for Impact: Revising Legal Writing Assessments Ahead of the Collision of Generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam, (Bracing for Impact), the modifications in the tested skills and exam format indicate that examiners aim to highlight skills gained in legal research and writing, while reducing the focus on rote memorization. 

Further emphasizing the move away from rote memorization is how the skills will be tested on the NextGen Bar. According to the NCBE’s website, the bar will assess the four foundational skills through “Integrated Question Sets” and “Performance Tasks.”^[7] “Performance Tasks” are similar to the current Multistate Performance Test (“MPT”) questions and consist of several questions to be completed in sixty minutes based on a fact pattern contained in the “File,” the sources provided in a “Library,” and will require examinees to demonstrate their ability to use “fundamental lawyering skills in realistic situations” in various doctrinal areas.^[8] “Integrated Question Sets” are a set of questions based on a common fact scenario, which may include legal resources, supplemental documents, and feature a mix of multiple-choice and short-answer questions designed to assess doctrinal law, editing and drafting skills, client counseling, or dispute resolution.^[9] The inclusion of Integrated Question Sets and Performance Tasks supports an observation by Professor Williams in Bracing for Impact that the legal writing tasks that examinees will be asked to perform generally include: 

• Drafting and editing correspondence to a client

• Analyzing a draft complaint or answer and identifying how it should be edited

• Analyzing a draft affidavit and identifying the best individual to serve as an affiant and the best language to include to support a cause of action

• Analyzing a draft of a contract and identifying how it should be edited

•  Using a collection of provided resources to draft an objective memo, persuasive brief, or letter, or another common document such as a mediation brief, opinion letter, or draft proposal for a contract.^[10]

Importantly, Legal Research and Writing (LRW) Professors should note that among all the tasks described above, only one of these tasks requires students to draft a document from scratch.^[11] As a result, LRW Professors would be wise to start incorporating more assignments that involve analyzing and editing pre-existing drafts of documents or portions thereof, rather than drafting from scratch. 

Moreover, the need to revisit the LRW curriculum in light of the NextGen Bar requirements will soon be mandated by the ABA standards. Recognizing the need to adjust the curriculum due to the NextGen Bar, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (“the Council”) approved for Notice and Comment proposed revisions to Standards 303, 304, and 311 related to Increasing the Number of Required Experiential Learning Credits.^[12] The decision to recommend increasing the number of required experiential learning credits was influenced in part by changes to the NextGen Bar.^[13]

3. Impact of the Use of AI in Higher Education

On August 7, 2025, OpenAI announced it was launching ChatGPT-5, available for free to everyone.^[14] Touted as OpenAI’s most advanced, fastest, and most reliable model for coding, writing, learning, and health, ChatGPT-5 has been engineered for improved use across all areas that require deep reasoning, including the law,^[15] and has been purportedly designed to recognize gaps in its knowledge when providing outputs instead of hallucinating.^[16] In addition to ChatGPT, students have access to numerous AI platforms, including Claude, Gemini, Harvey, Lexis+ AI, Lexis Protégé General AI, Westlaw Co-Counsel, and Westlaw AI Deep Research. 

Legal and non-legal scholars recognize that AI is advancing faster than scholars can evaluate it and publish their findings.^[17]  Meanwhile, the debate over the value of AI as a teaching and learning tool continues. Regardless of one's stance on using AI in the legal profession, its use has become more widespread. AI has fast become pervasive in big law firms across the country.^[18] Indeed, as of January 2024, approximately 50% of AM100 law firms reported subscribing to some form of AI designed for legal practice.^[19] Based on that trend, law professors—especially those in the fields of LRW and Legal Skills—have a responsibility to incorporate generative AI tools into their curriculum wherever possible. 

4. Proposals for Revising LRW and Skills Curriculum

In light of the major changes to how law graduates will be tested by the NextGen Bar and the widespread use of AI in the legal field, I suggest curriculum changes that could be adopted for use in a 1L Legal Writing class or an upper-level skills class. These suggestions are intended for those who want AI-resistant assignments, as well as for those who embrace AI.

4.1 Legal Writing Assessments

A valid assessment in a legal writing class “need[s] to be designed so that [it] provide[s] an opportunity for students to learn [the material], show what they have learned and demonstrate that they have achieved competency in the knowledge [and] skills . . . [that] the module covers” without the use of AI.^[20] Therefore, LRW professors should strive to include multiple formative and summative assessments^[21] that prohibit students from using AI to simply produce text without understanding the underlying skills that the assessments are designed to evaluate.^[22] In addition, LRW Professors should consider changing the focus of some of their course assessments to focus on the process of Legal Writing, as opposed to focusing on the end product.^[23] By creating assignments that assess student performance at the various stages of legal writing, LRW Professors may be in a better position to emphasize the various skills that are used throughout each phase of legal writing, the need to develop those skills without the use of GenAI, and to measure student success at each step along the way.^[24]  Assessments that focus on pre-writing skills, such as worksheets, case charts, or outlines not only allow LRW professors to assess their students’ organizational and analytical skills before they even start drafting, but are also difficult to complete using AI.^[25]

4.2 Multiple-Choice Questions

Regardless of whether LRW Professors are resistant to introducing AI in the classroom or embrace it, because the NextGen Bar will be testing foundational skills through the use of multiple-choice questions, LRW Professors should incorporate multiple-choice questions or quizzes into their curriculum.^[26] Not only will exposing students to multiple choice questions in the NextGen Bar format allow them to practice test-taking skills needed to succeed on the NextGen Bar,^[27] but because some students may experience more difficulty showing their understanding of legal writing skills through the production of a final written document, the use of multiple choice questions may allow professors to measure students’ knowledge in a way that is more accurate and more fairly balanced than simply relying on a final written product.^[28] For example, a LRW Professor could use a multiple-choice question, or a series of questions, to examine students’ knowledge about a particular case or cases that the students might use as case illustrations for a legal memo, or to select facts that might be relevant to the statement of facts, case illustrations, and application sections in a legal memo. And to really emphasize the multiple-choice format of the NextGen Bar, LRW Professors should consider drafting at least some questions that require students to pick two out of six possible answers rather than the traditional one out of four.^[29] 

Multiple-choice questions can also be used to examine students’ knowledge of how to revise text. Drafting questions that require students to compare passages, identify issues with a draft, or analyze a passage by answering several multiple-choice questions about the passage will allow LRW Professors to isolate a student’s ability to employ the cognitive skills students should use when they revise text on their own.^[30]   

4.3 Collaborative Assignments

Another AI-resistant tool that LRW Professors may consider incorporating into their curriculum is a collaborative assignment. Use of the collaborative process will allow students to see how their colleagues analyze and use legal authorities to support their legal conclusions, how they approach the writing process, and to view writing as a social process rather than a solitary cognitive activity.^[31]  Research shows that students who participate in collaborative work experience multiple learning benefits. They may achieve higher test scores, acquire a deeper learning of the material, achieve better results than if they worked on their own, and may benefit from hearing the material presented by their peers in different ways and by having to explain it to their peers.^[32]

While LRW professors might incorporate a single collaborative memo into their curriculum, a Pre-Trial Practice class is ideal for collaboration throughout the semester. Professors can divide the class into law firms to represent an assigned party, and then further divide the class into teams that litigate a case against each other. The textbook titled Civil Litigation, Pretrial Case Development and Discovery^[33]contains several civil litigation problems that can be chosen by the professor for use during the semester. Allowing students to collaborate with their law firm teammates as they litigate the case against their opponents will naturally present students with multiple opportunities to further develop many of the skills to be tested on the NextGen Bar, including include legal research, legal writing, issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, and client relationship and management.^[34] 

4.5. Original Drafting and Editing

Because the NextGen Bar will require examinees to draft some original passages from scratch, LRW Professors need to keep some original drafting assignments in their curriculum.^[35] However, because the NextGen Bar will focus more on editing, LRW Professors should consider ways to incorporate assignments that either require students to (i) revise their own writing based on feedback provided by their Professor, or (ii) revise a document that may have been drafted by an AI platform or a colleague in the first instance.^[36]

An upper-level skills class such as Pre-Trial Practice provides Professors with many opportunities to incorporate assignments that emphasize editing over original drafting. For example, Professors could provide students with templates or previously drafted documents such as complaints, answers, discovery requests, motions to compel, and responses in opposition to such motions, and require students to edit those documents.

4.6. The Final Project

With regard to the Legal Writing final project, LRW Professors should consider switching to an in-person final project that must be completed under proctored conditions in a short period, such as three hours. Not only will an in-person final project be AI-resistant, but having students take an exam that mimics the NextGen Bar will allow students to learn how to take the test, “can enhance retention [of material] by triggering elaborate retrieval processes,” can reduce test-taking anxiety, and can increase test takers’ mental stamina.^[37] Moreover, if LRW Professors create a final project that is comprised of a series of multiple choice and short answers and one longer written answer, such as in the MPT format, Professors will be able to assess students’ knowledge in a way that is more fairly balanced, as discussed above. 

4.7 Assignments for LRW Professors Who Embrace AI

Finally, for those who embrace AI in the classroom, LRW and Skills Professors should design exercises that will emphasize the need to use AI responsibly.^[38] If LRW Professors incorporate one or more assignments that involve the use of AI and editing, students will also benefit from improving their editing skills, which will be needed for success on the NextGen Bar.^[39] These AI editing exercises could be as simple as (i) using AI to draft a client letter, followed by the editing of that letter; (ii) editing an AI-generated document and completing a reflection assignment explaining the reasons for their edits; or (iii) uploading a judicial opinion to an AI platform, prompting AI to draft a legal citation for the case, reviewing the citation for accuracy and editing the citation, and then completing a reflection assignment describing the reasons for the edits. LRW and Skills Professors who embrace AI should also discuss recent cases in the news where lawyers and judges have filed documents or opinions containing AI hallucinations.

5. Conclusion

Changes to the bar exam are imminent in many states, with AI advancements accelerating rapidly since the introduction of AI a few years ago. The ABA's proposal to increase experiential credits by 2030 could elevate the importance of Legal Skills classes like Legal Writing and Pre-Trial Practice. Therefore, Legal Research, Writing, and Skills professors should revise curricula to prepare students for the NextGen Bar and to perform a broad range of entry-level tasks as new attorneys.