NextGen UBE: Foundational Skills (Legal Research)

There are four categories of "foundational skills" that the NextGen UBE aims to test:

Group A: Issue Spotting and Analysis, Investigation, and Evaluation

Group B: Client Counseling and Advising, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution, Client Relationship and Management

Group C: Legal Research

Group D: Legal Writing and drafting 

This post will focus on Group C: According to the NCBE, the purpose of Group C is to assess the extent to which an examinee can identify and implement legal research strategies, including preliminary issue-spotting, working with provided resources, developing and refining a theory of the case, and reaching closure on research questions. The specific tasks that will be tested to measure this purpose are as follows: 

~In a matter that requires legal research, identify the research questions that need to be answered. 

~Identify ambiguities in the language, standards, elements, or factors of a provided resource.

~Identify efficient legal research strategies, methods, or tools (including appropriate search terms) that are likely to uncover other legal sources or documents that are likely to assist in the interpretation of a provided resource to advance your understanding of a client's position.

~Given a collection of legal sources, identify the roles and characteristics of the sources, including their authoritative weight.

~Given one or more judicial opinions, identify the facts in a matter that are analogous to and/or distinct from the dispositive facts in the opinions.

~Given a collection of legal sources, identify other sources, search terms, or research strategies that might be used to update sources or find additional sources. 

~Given a collection of legal sources, identify which sources are relevant to or dispositive of a legal issue in the matter. 

~Given a collection of legal sources, identify whether the sources are sufficient to complete an assigned research task or other lawyering task.