Maryland Family Law Maryland family law opinions and commentary
Beginning in July 2026, applicants seeking admission to the Maryland bar will take a new exam that will include an added focus on family law, the Maryland Supreme Court announced in an administrative order filed today.
Maryland, alongside four other jurisdictions, is adopting the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ NextGen bar exam. The new exam will replace the Uniform Bar Exam as the basis for score portability between participating jurisdictions.
Unlike the UBE, the NextGen bar exam divides the testing into three sessions of three hours each administered over one and a half days, with six hours of testing time on the first day and three hours on day two. The UBE is currently administered in 12 hours over two full days.
Sophie Martin, director of communications for NCBE, said each three-hour session on the NextGen bar exam includes multiple choice questions, two integrated question sets that feature a mixture of short-answer and multiple-choice questions, and one performance test, although not necessarily in that order. Martin said NextGen bar exam test-takers can choose how much time they spend in each area within the session.
The NextGen bar exam will abandon the UBE’s format of dividing the test into the Multistate Bar Exam, Multistate Essay Exam and Multistate Performance Test. The new exam’s MPT-equivalent will now have three 60-minute performance tests instead of two 90-minute prompts, Martin said.
The NextGen bar exam also adds the subjects of business associations and family law as areas of legal doctrine that will be consistently tested. Additionally, the new exam will feature a new type of question that requires examinees to select two correct answers.
Jeffrey Shipley, director of the Maryland State Board of Law Examiners, said Maryland is adopting the NextGen bar exam “because it’s going to be the new UBE.”
“(The Maryland State Board of Law Examiners) only went through the process of adopting the UBE in 2019, and to not adopt the NextGen bar exam would be to abandon the UBE,” Shipley said.
Shipley said the board expects the new exam materials to be of the same high-quality materials that Maryland currently receives from NCBE.
“There shouldn’t be a change,” Shipley said of the adoption of the new exam. “It’s going to continue to ensure that the board and the court can be confident that applicants who passed the exam meet the requirements that the court sets for admission.”
The NextGen bar exam is the culmination of a three-year study by the NCBE to ensure the bar exam assesses the minimum competencies required of newly licensed lawyers and to determine how those competencies should be assessed, Martin said.
Martin said the NextGen bar exam will assess knowledge and skills holistically and use scenarios representative of real-world legal problems that newly licensed lawyers encounter in practice.
“We are most excited about the integration of robust skills testing with the testing of foundational legal knowledge that will be made possible by the new exam,” Martin said. “The NextGen exam is designed to balance the skills and knowledge needed in litigation and transactional legal practice and will reflect many of the key changes that law schools are making today.”
According to the NCBE, during the transitional period between the current UBE and the NextGen bar exam, UBE jurisdictions will accept both the current UBE and NextGen scores for portability purposes, with current UBE scores remaining valid until the time limit set by each participating jurisdiction.
Jurisdictions that do not elect to participate in score portability may administer the NextGen bar exam without accepting scores for transfer.
The transition to the new exam will be complete after the February 2028 bar exam, which will be the last administration for the NCBE’s MBE, MEE and MPT bar exam components.
Currently, 41 jurisdictions administer the UBE, and Martin said the NCBE has received positive feedback from jurisdictions across the country about the NextGen exam.
“We will continue to be in conversation with jurisdictions and their high courts as they make plans for 2026 and beyond, recognizing that each jurisdiction has its own planning and rulemaking timeline,” Martin said.
