Graduates with a Bachelor of Law will be allowed to practice law in Oregon without taking the bar exam, starting in May of next year.
The Oregon High Court last Tuesday (11/14/23) approved an option allowing the new method. After graduating from law school, graduates have to complete 675 working hours under the management of an accomplished lawyer and submit a work portfolio with 8 projects that bar authorities will grade instead of the customary judicial examination.
The program’s name, Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination, is deemed to be available to both alumni of out-of-state and in-state schools of law— a deviation from the two traditional approval programs in the US.
Wisconsin permits recipients of the Law Degree of the state’s two universities of law to become accredited without the need for results for the lawyer’s legal licensing exam. This is otherwise known as a diploma privilege. New Hampshire allows a little companion of legal understudies who complete a particular educational syllabus to sidestep the bar.
Those looking to become certified in Oregon will in any case have the choice to beat the final law test. The State Bar of California is thinking about a comparative permitting pathway.
The developers of the new approach, the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners, likewise plan to make a subsequent option in legal practice permit in which undergrads at the state’s three judicial schools would spend their final two years of graduate school finishing coursework that is practice-based. Yet, it chose to push ahead with the managed practice choice first. In 2022, 531 people took the bar exam in Oregon.
