The District of Columbia Court of Appeals is considering a proposal to allow third-year law students to take the bar exam months before they graduate, a policy that only a handful of states have adopted.

If approved, the District's early exam plan—allowing students to take the bar up to 190 days before they graduate—would be the most permissive in the country. Arizona in 2013 began allowing third-year students to take the exam up to 120 days before they graduate if they met certain coursework requirements. Oregon adopted a similar set of rules that take effect this year.

The proposed changes to the D.C. rules don't include coursework requirements, a point of contention among some local law professors. D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Phyllis Thompson, who is spearheading the rules change, said the court wanted to leave it to law schools to determine how to work with early exam takers.

Thompson said the Arizona program piqued the court's interest.

“We got interested because we had heard suggestions from some people that this would give law students some competitive advantage in the ability to find jobs,” Thompson said. “In the current market, we don't want to discourage that.”

Besides Arizona and Oregon, 13 states allow students to take the bar exam before they graduate, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, but only in limited circumstances or if students already completed their graduation requirements.

Last year, New York began allowing third-year students to take the bar exam in their final semester as part of a special program that required the students to work for 500 hours over 12 weeks providing pro bono legal assistance to indigent clients.

The D.C. court received little public comment about the early bar-exam proposal. Thompson said she was surprised at the lack of feedback. She said court officials did not directly solicit input from the District's six law schools, but had expected to hear from them.

The court received four letters, only two of which were from professors at local law schools—one in favor of the change and one against. Alan Morrison, associate dean for public interest and public service law at George Washington University Law School, promoted the early bar exam during the drafting process and wrote a letter in support.

Morrison said, in an interview with The National Law Journal, that allowing students to take the bar exam in their final semester would make them more attractive to law firms, especially smaller firms that lack the resources to support new hires who aren't yet licensed to practice.

“Students are graduating with a lot of debt and they want to start earning money right away,” Morrison said. “If they take the bar exam in July, they can't start working as a lawyer until November at the earliest.”

Debra Cohen, director of academic success and bar programs at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, wrote a letter opposing the proposed amendment. Cohen told the NLJ that she thought the language was too broad. She cited the case of Georgia, which stopped offering the bar exam early after officials concluded that it disrupted students' coursework in their final year because they were focused on studying for the bar.

Cohen said that if students wanted a jump start on their job hunt, working towards early graduation was a better option. If the D.C. court did go ahead with an early bar exam, she said that language modeled on the Arizona rules, with the coursework restrictions, was preferable.

“I would love to see a little bit more structure,” Cohen said.

Morrison and Cohen wrote to the court as individuals and not on behalf of their schools. None of the District's six law schools submitted comments.

Claudio Grossman, dean of American University Washington College of Law, said in a statement to the NLJ that “we would rather have students, during the last year of law school, focus on finishing a well-rounded education, particularly when we face important societal demands for which lawyers should be very well prepared in terms of doctrinal knowledge, writing, and trial strategy.” “We don't see what is to be gained from this proposal in comparison to focusing on the skills mentioned above during the last year, and completing a well-rounded education is to the benefit of the students before turning 100 percent of their attention to the bar,” Grossman said.

Representatives of the other law schools were not immediately reached for comment on Wednesday.

Only a small proportion of D.C. Bar members take the local bar exam. Of the 561 individuals who took the exam in 2014, 40 percent, or 223 passed, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners. But more than twelve times that number, 2,684 lawyers, joined the D.C. Bar by waiving in from other jurisdictions that same year, according to the bar.

Judy Stinson, associate dean for academic affairs at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, said the early bar exam has been a success in that state so far. In 2014, the first year it was offered, all of the 12 students from her school who took the exam passed. By October 2014, when students who took the exam in July were getting their results, all of the early exam takers had full-time jobs, she said.

“For us it made a huge difference,” Stinson said.

In D.C., the next step is for the court's rules committee to make recommendations to the Board of Judges, which is made up of the appeals court's active judges. Thompson said that given the lack of input from local law schools, the committee might consider reopening the public comment period, which closed in December, later this year.

The proposed rules changes also include making the District a Uniform Bar Examination jurisdiction. If approved, students who pass the bar in D.C. could use their score to apply for bar admission in the 18 states that use the standardized exam. Morrison wrote the court in favor of that change, and no one wrote in opposition.