NextGen Bar Exam Trusts & Estates Practice.

Why this matters

Trusts and estates is the law of what happens to your property when you die, and how property can be held and managed for other people through a trust. On the old bar exam you had to memorize hundreds of these rules. The NextGen exam does something different and, honestly, kinder: it hands you the governing law. Every trusts-and-estates task on the NextGen exam comes packaged with the statutes, rules, or the actual will or trust document you need, and you are graded on whether you can read that law and apply it to a client's real problem. That makes this a skills topic, not a memory topic. Your job is not to recite the rule against perpetuities from memory — it is to find the provided provision, break it into its parts, and use it. This note teaches that method step by step, then gives you a quick map of the wills-and-trusts landscape so you can move through a provided statute quickly and confidently. Treat every rule below as something the exam will put in front of you, not something you must recall cold.

A provided-law module, not a foundational subject

On the NextGen exam, trusts and estates is not one of the 'foundational' subjects you must know cold. Instead it appears as a provided-law module. In the current exam window it shows up in at least one Performance Task on every exam, and it may also appear inside an Integrated Question Set. In both, you are given a set of legal resources — a slice of a probate code, a trust instrument, maybe a short case excerpt — and asked to do something a junior lawyer actually does: advise a client, work out who inherits, spot a problem with a will, or draft a clause. You build your answer from the provided resources, which are written to contain everything you need. Nothing here is tested in a standalone multiple-choice section.

The forms it takes

• Performance Task (present every exam in this window) — you read a File (the facts: letters, memos, transcripts) and a Library (the provided law), then produce a work product such as a memo, a client letter, or a draft document.
• Integrated Question Set (sometimes) — a shared fact scenario with provided materials, followed by several short components: some multiple-choice, some short written answers.
• Counseling tasks — explain a client’s options and their consequences in plain, practical terms.
• Drafting tasks — write or fix a will clause, a trust provision, a disclaimer, or a distribution instruction.