This article originally appeared in The Bar Examiner print edition, Fall 2024 (Vol. 93, No. 3), pp. 1-2.
By Darin B. ScheerGreetings, friends and colleagues in the bar admissions community. For those whom I haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet, please allow me to introduce myself. In my day job, I serve as Senior Counsel at Crowley Fleck PLLP, a regional firm in the mountain west with offices in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. I consider myself an energy lawyer, having spent the bulk of my career handling transactional and litigation matters related to large-scale oil and gas, wind, solar, green hydrogen, and power plant conversion projects. I work remotely from a small town in Wyoming, where I’ve been fortunate enough to give my two children the experience of being raised on a family cattle ranch.
The other component of my professional career—and the aspect of which I am most proud—has been the opportunity to serve in various volunteer capacities. I have been a member of the Wyoming Board of Law Examiners since 2014, serving as chair in 2017. I also spent nine years as the Wyoming State Bar Delegate to the ABA House of Delegates and am a Life Fellow of the Fellows of the American Bar. Most recently, after serving on several NCBE policy committees over the years, I became a member of the NCBE Board of Trustees in 2017. It is an understatement to say that I have received far more from these volunteer roles than they have received from me. They have been some of the most rewarding experiences of my career. As I contemplate the coming year as chair of the NCBE Board, I am both humbled by the opportunity and incredibly excited about this dynamic period in the bar admissions community and the legal profession.
For those who have interacted with NCBE, whether in your day-to-day role in bar admissions, by serving on national policy committees, or by attending NCBE’s Annual Bar Admissions Conference, I don’t need to describe the competence, professionalism, and dedication of the NCBE staff. They are second to none. For those who have served on NCBE committees, I hope your experiences have been as richly rewarding as mine. NCBE would not, and could not, be the organization it is without the hard work of dedicated volunteers from across the country.
NCBE’s animating principle—serving jurisdictions by providing a valid, fair, and reliable bar exam—might appear, at first glance, to be relatively straightforward. After gaining a deeper understanding of the thoughtfulness and effort that go into every NCBE product, however, I know that achieving and maintaining NCBE’s high standard is anything but simple. This is true even when speaking only of NCBE’s traditional offerings—the UBE, the MBE, the MPRE, character and fitness investigations and support, and a variety of other important services to the jurisdictions. NCBE brings decades of experience to each of these efforts, and yet it remains a constant (and important) challenge to meet the high standards the organization has set for itself. This is even more true with regard to the NextGen bar exam, which grew out of NCBE’s commitment to ensuring that the bar exam continues to (1) properly reflect and respond to the needs of an evolving profession, and (2) protect the public by providing jurisdictions with a valid, fair, and reliable test to determine minimum competence. From the very beginning of this ambitious initiative, which will span eight years from the origination of the Testing Task Force in 2018 to first administration of the NextGen exam in July of 2026, NCBE has been committed to doing the right things for the right reasons. After watching NCBE’s extensive outreach with each jurisdiction, and now seeing the widespread adoption of the NextGen exam by many of those same jurisdictions, I am confident that you will be impressed with the fruits of these labors.
President John F. Kennedy once said we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. NCBE chose the current path not because it was easy, and not even because it was hard (although we didn’t let that stop us). We chose to research, develop, and implement the NextGen exam because it was the right thing to do for the right reasons.
This a dynamic time in the legal profession. As the world grows smaller in many ways, multijurisdictional practice becomes ever more common, and rapidly evolving technology shapes our views of the future, the questions and challenges facing the bar admissions community haven’t gotten any easier, nor any less important. Jurisdictions are wrestling with difficult questions regarding equity in admissions, access to justice, legal deserts, potential alternate pathways to admission, and a variety of other issues that affect the lives of lawyers and the public they serve. My goal as chair is to encourage continuing the thoughtful discussion of efforts to address these issues within the bar admissions community writ large. Courts, the academy, and the bar admissions community bring a variety of perspectives to the table, but we share common objectives. Collectively, we—and the public and the legal profession—will benefit from our mutual efforts. I look forward to these discussions and to working in concert with you to continue doing the right things for the right reasons.
Kindest regards,
Darin B. Scheer
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