Bracing for Impact: Revising Legal Writing Assessments Ahead of the Collision of Generative AI and the NextGen Bar Exam

Abstract

Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT generate human-like text to interact with users in a conversational way. Most significantly for legal education, users can prompt it to draft legal documents, and AI detectors struggle to detect AI-generated content. GenAI products that have been trained on legal databases are not far behind and will not fabricate legal sources, will be able to draw from more current and relevant legal information, and will provide citations to relevant legal sources. Concurrently, the NextGen bar exam, which will be administered beginning in July 2026, will explicitly test legal writing and require students to both draft original legal documents and revise others.

Legal writing professors should choose a mix of assessments to help prepare students for the NextGen bar exam while simultaneously reducing the odds that students are relying too heavily on GenAI to produce a written product without using critical reading, critical thinking, and legal analysis. This article explores how GenAI works, its strengths and weaknesses, its use among students, its ability to produce legal documents, the shortcomings of GenAI detectors, and the skills students need to pass the NextGen bar. It discourages assessment of document drafts as the sole assessment method in legal writing courses, and instead explores a wide range of assessments and adaptations that legal writing professors can use to properly measure student learning in light of GenAI and the skills needed to pass the NextGen bar exam.

Keywords: ChatGPT, GenAI, generative AI, generative artificial intelligence, AI detector, legal writing, legal education, NextGen, NextGen bar exam, NCBE, National Conference of Bar Examiners, foundational skills,