Utah announces skills-based path to law licensure
Utah is now the latest state to offer a skills-based alternative pathway to licensure.
Last week, the Utah Supreme Court approved a new process that requires candidates to perform 240 hours of post-graduation supervised practice, complete specific skills-based coursework, and pass a new one-day written test similar to the Multistate Performance Test and administered by the Utah State Bar, according to the Utah Bar’s website. Applications will open Jan. 1.
“There’s a lot to unpack here,” says Greg Bordelon, assistant professor of legal studies at Suffolk University. ”You’ve got some level of mandated curriculum, a shorter performance test, and then you’ve got supervised practice. That sounds like all the pieces that could work.”
Utah has two ABA-accredited law schools: Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School and University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. In July, 316 candidates took the bar exam in the state, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
Unlike the alternative program in South Dakota, which is designed exclusively for graduates from that state’s law school, any graduate of an ABA-accredited U.S. law school can apply for Utah’s pathway—provided their school’s curriculum meets the state’s requirements.
Like Nevada’s new three-pronged bar exam and Minnesota’s current proposal on a curricular pathway put out for public comment in September, these alternative initiatives are asking more of law schools, 2025 Legal Rebel Joan Howarth, the author of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, tells the ABA Journal.
“Great things happen when legal educators, bar examiners and courts all work together to better protect the public,” she writes, “and each of these initiatives is grounded in contemporary research about minimum competence to practice law. We are entering a new era of research-based attorney licensing.”
Utah built its plan is based on the 2020 report Building a Better Bar’s research, which offers 12 building blocks of minimum competence, says Catherine Bramble, a member of the Utah Supreme Court Working Group on Attorney Licensure.
“We literally considered every single building block and how to best be assessed or evaluated,” adds Bramble, an associate professor at BYU Law. “Then it was kind of like backward course design.”
Candidates must find experienced licensed attorneys who practice in Utah to serve as supervisors, Bramble says.
For the new test, the Utah bar admissions office is working with “a professional testing company,” on the new exam, and ideally it will be ready by the summer of 2026, Bramble says. “It’s not California, where a month before, people used AI to write the test,” she adds.
Along with offering a skills-based licensure path, the new pathway aims to ease financial burdens for bar candidates, who often must take out additional loans to pay for bar prep courses and living expenses after graduation, Bramble adds.
Utah will continue to administer the Uniform Bar Exam until it sunsets, and then it will move to the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination in 2028, allowing candidates to pick the best pathway for them, according to the Utah Bar’s website.
Like other states’ alternative pathways, the Utah license under the new program would not be portable.
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