Players like Barbri and Kaplan have traditionally held a dominate role in legal education, and that may not be changing anytime soon. While there is much disruption across the economy,  it's still unclear whether the emergence of new technologies and evolving learner appetites will open up new opportunities for startups looking to gain a foothold into the legal education market.

Of course, some take issue with the present-day size of companies such as Barbri. Case in point: The exam prep startup LLM Bar Exam filed the latest in a series of antitrust suits against Barbri in 2017, claiming that the company was colluding with law schools to facilitate a monopoly in the marketplace.

Judges from both the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case.

But while Barbri and Kaplan have operated in the market for years, they are being forced to adapt to new demands.  Today, technology has become a crucial component of  legal education, driven in large part by the predilections of modern learners, who are constantly on the move and expect their study materials to be able to do the same.  All this has created an opening for new players.

Ashish Rangnekar, CEO of the online learning platform BenchPrep, attributed the company's success over the last 10 years to being attuned to those perspectives. The platform's content spans industries ranging from legal to hospitality and finance, and breaks down information into digestible chunks that can be accessed via a mobile device. BenchPrep specializes in the delivery and instruction of content rather than accumulation of the content itself.

Rangenekar places a premium on just how critical a user-friendly model for information delivery will be to the future of legal education, which could help to distinguish new entries to the market from their more seasoned competitors.

“As everything moves online and to the mobile platform, these organizations have to be fast at adopting because the learners are moving online very fast,” Rangnekar said.

But players such as Barbri or test prep company Kaplan may have already gotten the memo.

“We're investing constantly in new technology. We're working to stay abreast on the latest in artificial intelligence [and] frankly the latest in K-12 education trends. Those students are going to be our future students,” Barbri president, Mike Sims told Legaltech News.

Barbri, for example, allows students to access lectures on their mobile devices and computers, and individual study is guided by an AI-powered tool called ISAAC (Intelligent Study Assistant And Coach). Kaplan, meanwhile, offers students the use of real-time polling and chats as well as classes that are delivered live online.

It's an investment of time and resources that may be hard to match for a startup.

“We look at ourselves as both an education and a technology company. We spend a significant amount of time and energy and resources just on our platform development work,” said Jeff Thomas,  executive director of admissions programs for Kaplan Test Prep.

Still, while technology is playing a big role, Sims believes that a future challenge for those in the bar exam prep arena is also one of content. The bar exam has been delivered twice a year since 1972 and spans more than 20 different subjects, which in and of themselves contain vast bodies of knowledge.

That knowledge isn't proprietary, and enterprising startups can certainly fortify their own repository of bar exam information. But a long institutional memory could potentially give the market's long-time residents a potential leg up over new entrants.

“For anyone to become an effective provider, they first have to master that wide range of content,” Sims said.

But while going head-to-head with a Kaplan or Barbri might be difficult for a startup straight out of the gate, there's a chance that emerging legal practices like blockchain, which isn't yet on a bar exam, may present virgin territory for startups to build a niche around.

Rangnekar expects to see more companies popping up as new subject matter arises.

“It is extremely difficult to get to the scale that Barbri has gotten to. It's a very fragmented space and it will remain fragmented, and we will see more and more companies pop up that get maybe $5 million to $10 million in revenue,” Rangnekar said.