At this year’s excellent AALS ADR Section Works-in-Progress conference, I invited people to share their perspectives about how we can take advantage of the NextGen bar exam to stimulate changes in legal education.

This short article suggests how reformers can do this, and it includes colleagues’ ideas from the conference.

Starting in July 2026, the bar exam will include questions about client relationships and management, client counseling, negotiation, and dispute resolution.  For simplicity, the article refers to these topics as interviewing, counseling, and negotiation – ICN.

The NextGen bar should stimulate law schools to modify their curricula to maximize their students’ bar passage rates.  But reforming law school curricula is very hard, and there is likely to be only a short window of time when schools will make changes related to the bar.

To gain maximum advantage from this opportunity, reformers should develop a rigorous theory of change.  The article sketches ideas for developing a theory of change to maximize effective ICN instruction.

The theory-of-change process involves six steps in identifying necessary conditions to produce specified long-term outcomes.  Reformers use “backwards mapping” from long-term goals to identify intermediate and then early-term changes needed to accomplish the goals.

Too often, reformers focus only identifying possible interventions, skipping all the other steps in the process.  An assumption that “if we build it, they will come” is likely to be a recipe for failure.

Reformers should develop and implement theories of change both for law schools generally and for individual law schools.  Law schools have different cultures, resources, and constraints, so faculty should develop theories of change tailored to the situations at their particular schools.

Take a look.

PS.  Don’t forget to email Carrie Kaas to collect your bingo winnings.