NextGen Bar Exam Skills & Ethics.
The 7 foundational skills, the 12 tested MRPC rules, and strategy for integrated sets and performance tasks.
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From the Skills & Ethics notes: The 7 Foundational Skills
The first topic of every subject is free with an account, notes included. Here is how the notes read.
Why this matters
The old bar exam mostly asked one question wearing a hundred different outfits: do you remember the rule? You could pass largely by memorizing black-letter law and recognizing it on cue. The NextGen exam keeps the law but changes the demand. It asks what a lawyer actually does with the law once a real client walks in the door: spot the issue, sort the facts, size up each side, ask what you still need to find out, counsel the client toward their goal, research inside a closed set of sources, and put it all in writing. Those doing-verbs are the seven Foundational Skills, and they are the spine of the entire exam. Here is the mental shift that unlocks this whole topic: the skills are not a separate subject you study on a Tuesday. They are a lens bolted onto every question. A Contracts question no longer just asks whether there was a breach — it asks you to spot the controlling issue, name the fact that decides it, weigh your client's position, or draft the demand letter. The doctrine (Contracts, Torts, Evidence, and the rest) is the noun; the skill is the verb; every question pairs one of each. Learn the verbs and you stop studying eight separate subjects and start studying one exam.
The big picture: 7 skills, 4 groups, 28 tasks
NCBE organizes the seven skills into four broad skills groups (labeled A through D), and each group is measured through a set of concrete, defined tasks — 28 of them in all. You do not need to memorize the numbering, and this topic is not starred, so no one will ask you to recite the list back. What you need is to recognize, when a question's call lands in front of you, which skill it is demanding, because that tells you what kind of answer wins. Two more orientation points. First, the skills are always tested in the context of law — either a doctrinal subject you know cold or a resource the exam hands you — never in the abstract. Second, they show up through three question formats: standalone multiple-choice questions, integrated question sets, and performance tasks. Think of the four groups as four verbs of lawyering: analyze (A), advise (B), research (C), and write (D).
What Group A asks of you
Group A is the analytical engine of the exam and the skill you will use most. Its job is to test whether you can take fundamental legal principles and legal reasoning and apply them to a given fact pattern — the classic law-school move of turning a messy story into a legal answer. It splits into two closely related skills. Issue spotting and analysis is seeing which legal questions the facts raise and reasoning them to a result. Investigation and evaluation is the step just before that: recognizing what you still do not know, deciding which facts need to be run down, and weighing how strong each side really is once you have them. On a NextGen question this looks like naming the dispositive fact, picking the correct standard, or predicting how a motion comes out.
All 6 topics in Skills & Ethics
Scope-alignedmarks the 1 topic NCBE flags at memorize level — know these cold; the rest lean on provided materials and reasoning.
- 01Free
The 7 Foundational Skills
The seven Foundational Skills tested across the exam — issue spotting and analysis, investigation and evaluation, client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, client relationship and management, legal research, and legal writing and drafting — and the defined tasks that measure them.
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MRPC: The 12 Tested Rules★
The twelve Model Rules of Professional Conduct tested within integrated question sets — Rules 1.0, 1.1, 1.2(a) and (d), 1.3, 1.4, 1.6(a) and (c), 1.7, 3.1, 3.3(a)(1)–(2), 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 — applied from recalled knowledge without provided resources.
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NCBE Key Words & Phrases
The NCBE key words and phrases that appear in exam prompts — argument and legal argument, dispositive fact, explain, factor, implication, issue, reason, specific, and support — and what each directs the examinee to do.
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IQS Strategy
Strategy for integrated question sets: working through the shared factual scenario and provided resources, allocating time across the components, and approaching the mix of multiple-choice and short-answer items.
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Performance Task Method
A method for the performance task: reading the File and Library efficiently, organizing a response to the assigned lawyering task, and writing to the format and audience the task specifies.
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Legal Research Method
A method for research-based tasks: identifying the research questions to be answered, evaluating the roles and authoritative weight of provided sources, and reaching closure on a research question.
No MCQ bank here — by design
Skills & Ethicsis where the exam’s 7 foundational skills and the tested rules of professional conduct live. The exam grades these through integrated question sets and performance tasks, so that is exactly how you practice them here — playable, timed, self-graded against rubrics.
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