Law firms, schools hope new bar exam stems Virginia talent drain

With eight accredited law schools, Virginia has more law schools than most states, graduating hundreds of future attorneys every spring. But over the last decade, turning Virginia law students into Virginia lawyers has become a challenge, with stakeholders looking into ways to stanch the bleeding.

According to data from the Virginia State Bar‘s Entry, Growth, and Distribution of Virginia Attorneys Study Committee (EGAD VA), the percentage of Virginia law school graduates who took the Virginia Bar Exam dropped from 46% to 28% between 2012 and 2024.

The decline comes as the number of candidates sitting for the bar exam also has declined, from 1,636 in 2012 to 625 in 2024.

While there is a nationwide trend of a decline in bar examinees, the drop in in-state graduates taking the exam has raised alarm bells.

“What we have seen is a big decline in Virginia test takers between 2012 and 2024, with larger declines than are consistent with the declines in enrollment,” says University of Richmond School of Law Dean Wendy Collins Perdue.

One theory for the decline is Virginia’s delay in adopting the Uniform Bar Exam, or UBE, a standardized bar exam coordinated by the National College of Bar Examiners allowing test takers to have a portable score that can be used for admission in any jurisdiction that has adopted the UBE. At present, 39 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C., have adopted the UBE.

Robin Smith, founder of Richmond- based Mid-Atlantic Legal Recruiting, calls the UBE “a game changer.”

“I think Virginia has definitely seen a decline because of the UBE,” Smith says. “I have a lot more candidates that will take the D.C. and Maryland bar.”
That is set to change in 2028, when Virginia will administer the NextGen UBE — the newest version of the exam — for the first time with the summer exam. It will replace the Multistate Bar Examination that Virginia currently administers, which the NCBE will discontinue in 2028.

Richmond attorney Brian K. Jackson, a partner at Hirschler and president of the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners, says adopting the exam will be “a significant step forward in ensuring that our legal profession continues to assess candidates effectively and consistently.”

“The board will revise its rules to allow for the acceptance of passing NextGen UBE scores earned in other jurisdictions and to provide scores that are transferrable to other participating jurisdictions,” Jackson says.

Perdue has been a longtime advocate for moving toward the UBE, joining a letter signed by all eight of Virginia’s law school deans in 2021 that sought to persuade the VBBE to move to the uniform exam.

“From my point of view, that was progress,” Perdue says. “It’s too bad it took as long as it did.”

Talent drain?

At 63%, the University of Richmond had the largest proportion of Virginia Bar Exam takers from the graduating class in 2024 among Virginia law schools.
But that number is down from 79% in 2012, according to the EGAD VA report.

On the other end, the University of Virginia School of Law “generally has the lowest proportion of graduates taking the Virginia Bar Exam,” according to the report, with 6% of 2024 U.Va. graduates taking the Virginia exam. That number is down from 30% in 2012.

Of Virginia’s eight law schools, only the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, the state’s smallest law school, saw an increased proportion of graduates taking the Virginia exam, up to 47% in 2024 from 33% in 2012.

University of Virginia School of Law Dean Leslie Kendrick says the number of U.Va. graduates sitting for the exam dropped significantly between 2016 and 2017 — just after Washington, D.C., adopted the UBE in 2016.
“D.C.’s status as a UBE jurisdiction now makes it an appealing choice for graduates who want to maintain maximum flexibility in their practice options,” Kendrick says. She added that in 2023, 27% of U.Va. graduates took the D.C. bar.

“For our graduates, the decreased popularity of the Virginia Bar Exam coincides with the increased popularity of the D.C. bar exam,” Kendrick says.
Smith says that the pull towards the D.C. region for some young lawyers extends beyond its status as a UBE jurisdiction.

“D.C. is a very competitive market, but there are just a large number of law firms in that region,” Smith says.

The knock-on effects of declined enrollment nationally in law schools have led to a smaller pool of applicants for legal jobs. Smith, who helps place legal talent in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and North Carolina in addition to Virginia, notes that it has been easier to find candidates in neighboring jurisdictions.

“It’s hard to find good talent,” Smith says. “It’s hard to find people in general across the board, but for legal it’s been a little bit harder in the past couple of
years.”

Another element impacting recruitment in Virginia for Smith has been the change in expectations following the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, legal professionals started seeking more flexibility, including in time spent in the office versus working remotely.

If I have an attorney job that’s full time on site five days a week, versus one that can be three days in office and two days at home, I’m going to get twice as many people for the hybrid role,” Smith says. “It’s just what it is after COVID.”

Smith adds that flexibility “is No. 1 with everybody that I work with” in recruiting.

Jackson says one way to keep graduates in Virginia is to give financial incentives for young attorneys to start their legal careers in the commonwealth.
“Recent graduates and attorneys with job and employment opportunities in Virginia take the Virginia Bar Exam,” Jackson says. “One key to attracting more of them, from Virginia or any other jurisdiction, is financial incentives.”

Perdue notes that the desire to work in higher-paying markets can be tied to graduates looking to pay off student debt accumulated in law school.

“A big challenge is debt,” Perdue says. “More rural areas could have a lower cost of living, which can be great, but they have lower salaries, and your debt isn’t a function of the salary — it’s a function of how much you borrowed.”

Uniform Bar Exam

According to Jackson, the 2028 NextGen UBE in Virginia will be a nine-hour exam administered over two days.

Virginia will maintain a state-specific component on the afternoon of day two, like the Virginia essay portion already in place. “I hope the portability of NextGen results, along with continuation of a half-day Virginia portion, will be a good thing for both law graduates and the commonwealth,” Kendrick says.
Perdue says the exam “is a good improvement” on what is currently being tested.

“It more closely resembles the kinds of issues and questions that a practicing lawyer would have,” Perdue says.

The board first announced its decision to adopt the NextGen UBE in December 2024. Jackson says the advance notice — nearly four years before the first administration of the new exam — was to “provide law students, law schools and other stakeholders ample time to adjust curricula and make informed decisions.”

With the first NextGen exams being administered in other jurisdictions this year, Perdue says there are currently availability issues on study materials to help prepare students.

“The challenge at the moment is there is not much material out about sample questions,” Perdue says. “There’s descriptions of what the types of questions will be, but there’s not yet much in the way of practice examples, so people taking the NextGen this summer are going to be shooting in the dark, to some extent.”

Ultimately, Smith says, the perception that the Virginia Bar Exam is more difficult than the one in sister states is a current hindrance to candidates, and one that adopting the UBE could aim to address.

“I think it’s a little bit of both,” Smith says. “The fact that it is one of the harder bar exams, and your scores aren’t transferrable to any other state.”
Perdue acknowledges that the state has “been affected by a perception that the Virginia exam is harder right now.”

“Over the last few years, Virginia has been reducing the subjects tested on, and I think that has made it somewhat less unattractive for test takers, but that has impacted the perceptions that the Virginia exam is harder and it is not portable,” Perdue says.

Looking ahead

Looking to the future of law practice in Virginia, there are signs that point to optimism in maintaining a pool of young attorneys within the commonwealth.
Jackson highlights a 2022 change to Va. Code § 54.1-3926, which allows third-year law students to take the bar exam. He notes that the amended statute reverts to the pre-1980 rules before the provision was removed.

“This allows these students to begin practicing sooner and should make them more marketable,” Jackson says.

And although the number of graduates taking the Virginia Bar Exam has been in decline, Kendrick theorizes that that number “is often used as a proxy for how many graduates are working in Virginia.”

“Our data shows that the two are not as closely related as one might assume,” Kendrick says. “Our percentage of Virginia bar takers has declined, while the percentage of graduates working in Virginia 10 months after graduation has remained stable.”

Kendrick adds that even that data is not a reliable indicator of how many graduates ultimately make Virginia their professional home.

“We have many graduates who work outside of Virginia for some time but return after and spend the bulk of their careers here,” Kendrick says.
Notable examples who are graduates of U.Va. that Kendrick cites include 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Toby Heytens, Court of Appeals of Virginia Judge Lisa Lorish and U.S. District Judge Jasmine H. Yoon.

“In this regard, all the commonwealth’s law schools can be importers of talent in ways not captured by [American Bar Association] data,” Kendrick says.
But ultimately, the declining trend in bar examinees is real, and one that stakeholders hope can be addressed and reversed in the near future.

“I think for a long time, the questions of how lawyers get licensed and whether we’re doing it in the best way possible were the province of the Board of Bar Examiners, appropriately, but nobody else was paying a lot of attention,” Perdue says. “That gives me hope that we’ll start to come up with interesting solutions in a way that might not have been possible [before].”