Alternative Pathways

The Minnesota Supreme Court has joined other states in appointing an Alternative Pathways Implementation Committee to develop methods to measure attorney competence in the licensure process. This decision follows a two-year study by the Minnesota Board of Law (Board), culminating in a report filed with the Court in June 2023. The Board’s report described what new lawyers must be able to do in practice, analyzed how well existing testing formats measure those abilities, and recommended both adopting NextGen and pursuing alternative, competency-based pathways for licensure. In its March 2024 Order, the Court accepted the Board’s recommendations and asked the Implementation Committee to design a curricular pathway (with a report due July 1, 2026) and to further explore and make recommendations about a supervised-practice pathway (due July 1, 2027).

View Additional Information on the Background of this Process.

Core Competencies

The first task of the Implementation Committee was to articulate the set of competencies to be assessed—the knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary to fulfill the role of a practicing lawyer. Drawing on a variety of sources, the Implementation Committee identified the following competencies to be assessed through alternative pathways:

The ability to conduct research in case law and statutory, constitutional, administrative, and secondary authority.
The ability to reason and to integrate factual information with legal doctrine.
An understanding of threshold concepts in key subjects.
The ability to communicate effectively with clients, lawyers, courts, and others.
The ability to plan work activities and to act diligently and reliably in fulfilling one’s obligations to clients, lawyers, courts, and others.
The ability to pursue self-directed learning, to employ self-reflection, and to learn from feedback.
The ability to identify professional ethics responsibilities and conduct applied ethical reasoning, drawing on the requirements of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The Implementation Committee is using this Competency Framework as a guide as it designs the proposal for attorney pathways.

Curricular Pathway

The Curricular Pathway is designed to be a rigorous, structured law-school-based route to licensing. Students who elect to follow the curricular pathway must (1) successfully complete a prescribed set of law school courses covering foundational areas of law; (2) engage in required supervised practice coursework in law school clinics, simulation courses, and credit-bearing field placements, (3) successfully perform two client interactions in their supervised practice work, which will be documented in their portfolio by written reflections and supervisor attestations of these tasks; (4) submit a portfolio of written work to demonstrate competence in research, analysis, and reasoning, which will be independently assessed by the examiners; and (5) submit journal entries analyzing the application of the rules of professional responsibility to situations observed in practice.

In its initial phase, the Curricular Pathway will be available to a limited number of students to allow the Board to manage the new program effectively and to permit adjustments based on program evaluation before offering the Pathway more broadly. After an initial trial period, it is anticipated that the Curricular Pathway will be available more broadly, subject to administrative capacity.

The Implementation Committee developed a proposed plan that was put out for public comment. Based on additional work and comment, the Implementation Committee has refined its proposal.

On January 27, 2026, the Implementation Committee published the revised Alternative Curricular Pathway Proposal, along with a draft of the tentative Rule changes to implement the pathway, and a draft outline of the potential provisions that would implement the curricular pathway process in greater detail.

Comments may be submitted to ble@mbcle.state.mn.us or Tom Boyd, Alternative Pathways Implementation Committee Chair, c/o Minnesota Board of Law Examiners, 25 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Suite 110, St. Paul, MN 55155.

The Supervised Practice Pathway

A supervised-practice pathway offers a route to licensing based on lawyering work done after graduation from law school. A supervised-practice pathway will require significant commitment from members of the legal community to be successful. The Implementation Committee is tasked with assessing the resources necessary to establish such a pathway and making recommendations on whether and how to move forward on creating it.

The Implementation Committee will engage with the Minnesota bench and bar to explore the feasibility of and develop proposed requirements for this pathway.

The Implementation Committee will be sharing its recommendations for a Supervised-Practice Pathway for public comment and will submit a final report to the Supreme Court in June 2027.

Community Conversation

Join the Implementation Committee members by Zoom on Thursday, February 5 at 12 PM for a community conversation designed to share details about the proposed pathways, answer questions, and gather feedback from the community.

Topic: Community Conversation
Time: Feb 5, 2026, 12:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Join ZoomGov Meeting
https://courts-state-mn-us.zoomgov.com/j/1617727024?pwd=G3oZ44VtcsQ4zCl9zOajD5VWrJeIbs.1
Meeting ID: 161 772 7024
Passcode: 783183

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