Bar in Brief > After the July Bar Exam: What Happened and What We’re Doing About It

COLUMN > A Special Combined Message From the WSBA Executive Director and President

BY TERRA NEVITT AND FRANCIS A. ADEWALE

By the time you’re reading this magazine, everyone who enrolled for the 2026 summer bar exam, just over 700 aspiring lawyers, should have a pathway forward for this particular exam iteration. It was already set to be a historic event—Washington’s first administration of the National Conference of Bar Examiner’s (NBCE’s) new NextGen uniform bar exam (UBE), called the NextGen UBE. But instead of a milestone, it became a failure. The original exam administration was canceled for most applicants due to a technical failure at the venue. It was unprecedented. It was devastating.

We put on the bar exam twice a year and we know how significant it is, not only for the examinees, but as an important step in the pipeline to the profession. We want nothing more than to provide a safe and pleasant experience for test takers (as pleasant as a two-day, high-stakes exam can be). In the aftermath of the exam cancellation, it has been our highest priority to find reasonable solutions for examinees. Now, after wrapping up the September makeup exam,¹1 As of publication date for this magazine, the makeup exam was scheduled for Sept. 1-2, 2026, at the University of Washington Tacoma, with several backup systems in place to safeguard against technology issues. a more foundational priority rises to the top, which is ensuring this type of failure does not happen again.

We want to share details in this column about both priorities. First, however, we must acknowledge examinees’ deeply and rightfully felt levels of stress, distress, anger, uncertainty, and frustration. All of us with a legal license can remember what it was like to prepare and sit for the bar exam. Think of those countless hours studying and the mental, physical, and financial pressure, all building toward the exact date of the exam. To reach that day only to be met with a cancellation—well, we don’t have to tell you how devastating that would feel. “Heartsick” is probably the best word to describe the amalgamation of emotions in the exam room (and still lingering today) from examinees and WSBA staff alike.

We are profoundly sorry for the technical failure and its repercussions, and the most important way we can show that is by supporting the people who were impacted and putting lessons learned into practice for the future.

Here is how we intend to do that.

Supporting July 2026 Bar Examinees

One of our leading commitments has been to ensure that this group of lawyer applicants enters the profession—and begins serving Washingtonians who need legal help—with no delay due to the exam-administration cancellation. The justices on the Washington Supreme Court weighed the same concern carefully. The Supreme Court’s order offered a mix of resolutions, depending on each examinee’s circumstance: A bar exam waiver option, extended licenses for supervised practice (Rule 9), and—through the proposal and orchestration of the WSBA and the NCBE—the option of a special makeup exam option in September. The WSBA was at the ready to implement the order and support candidates moving forward. We offered financial reimbursement for travel, lodging, and childcare costs associated with the July exam cancellation, according to examinees’ selected path forward. We worked closely with the NCBE to recommend and coordinate the September makeup bar exam to ensure those scores would be released at the same time as the national summer bar exam scores. With every option, our goal was to provide each applicant who signed up for the July 2026 exam a viable solution to move forward.

You can learn more about the Supreme Court’s bar exam order and the balance of factors they considered at http://www.courts.wa.gov. As the justices wrote in an accompanying letter, “There is no perfect resolution and certainly none that satisfies everyone, including the members of the Court.”²2 www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Supreme%20Court%20Statement%20080626.pdf. We understand that examinees, potential employers, and members of the legal and nonlegal communities hold strong and differing points of view on the resolutions. Our own WSBA Board of Governors asked the Supreme Court to reconsider a more uniform resolution for all, but the order remained unchanged. In the end, the WSBA was ready to implement the order and was committed to supporting every examinee with as much care as possible.

Putting Lessons Learned into Practice

First things first in triage—supporting the impacted people. But we know what’s also top of mind for you: What happened? There are some preliminary indications, which helped us shape the technology safeguards in place for the September makeup exam in Tacoma. The one thing we can say with certainty right now, however, is that we will pursue a full review of the failure and keep you informed of what we learn.

At a high level, the early indications point to a connectivity problem between examinees’ laptops, the pre-downloaded NCBE exam software, and the venue’s
Wi-Fi, the latter of which was required both at the start of testing and at points throughout to upload answers. We’re still working to confirm exactly what failed and why. We have previously held successful exams at the Yakima Convention & Event Center, but this time Washington state was among a group of 10 jurisdictions nationwide in the first wave to roll out the NCBE’s NextGen UBE. In addition to having different content, for the first time this exam required internet connectivity. The NCBE and its technology provider, the venue and its technology provider, and the WSBA spent a year preparing technology for this shift, including confirming technology requirements and venue specifications.

So, what happened to cause the literal disconnect? We don’t know yet, and that’s exactly what we’re reviewing. Technology can—and frequently does—fail every day, even when expert analysis and a positive track record indicate it should be working just fine. There were similar connectivity issues at several other first-wave NextGen exam sites throughout the nation, and the issue was not isolated to just Washington. While other exam sites experienced delays, Washington was the only site where the connectivity failure prevented the exam from proceeding, and we are working to understand why that occurred.

Overall, the technology requirements behind the NextGen UBE were new to Washington, but our confidence in the exam itself hasn’t changed. We still believe that it’s a better assessment of real-world lawyering skills and competency. The WSBA is doing everything in its power to ensure all future administrations run as expected. Ultimately, we want accountability that serves learning and improvement, because our primary concern is the integrity of, and public confidence in, the profession, starting with our admissions processes.

Preparing for the Next Unprecedented Event

As we await further findings about what occurred, we’re also asking more foundational questions as WSBA leaders: How do we prepare for and respond to events like this one, when unprecedented events are becoming the norm?

“Precedent” is a weighty legal concept, so we do not use the word “unprecedented” lightly—and yet we have found ourselves using that description many times over this past year as we’ve navigated never-before-encountered situations. Often, as with the bar exam failure, it’s a matter of wrestling with opportunities and challenges related to technology (as we all are in our personal and professional lives). We are continually expanding the realm of what’s possible while relying on sophisticated networks and systems.

We must ask ourselves what due diligence looks like now and in the face of ever-changing complexities. Luckily, one of the core, time-honored foundations of legal analysis is a process that serves us as well now as it did a century ago: Look to the past, adapt for new fact patterns, and come away with solutions.

In other words, we are learning how to plan for the unplanned in everything that we do. No organization can prepare for every possibility, and hindsight is always 20/20, but we can lead with humility, stay adaptable, and keep asking what we might be missing. When something unexpected happens, we try to do four things: Support the people affected, understand what happened, take accountability, and make the systemic changes needed so it doesn’t happen again. 

Humans first. Learn. Do better.

That’s our intention with the summer bar exam failure—and with whatever unprecedented moment comes next.

NOTES

1. As of publication date for this magazine, the makeup exam was scheduled for Sept. 1-2, 2026, at the University of Washington Tacoma, with several backup systems in place to safeguard against technology issues.

2. www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Supreme%20Court%20Statement%20080626.pdf.

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