This study explores the practical feasibility of Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ) as a summative assessment method in legal education, focusing on a Property and Intellectual Property Law course at a Norwegian university. Eight examiners assessed 300 student responses using ACJ within traditional time constraints, performing pairwise comparisons to rank submissions by quality. Findings reveal that examiners completed fewer comparisons than required for reliable rankings, primarily due to time management issues and workload variability. The study highlights differences in assessment strategies based on examiner experience, with less experienced examiners focusing on structural elements, such as organization and readability, and experienced examiners prioritizing legal reasoning and argument development. We critically examine the challenges inherent in translating ACJ rankings into grades and providing legally compliant justifications, given ACJ’s dependence on relative comparisons, raising important concerns about transparency, fairness, and consistency in high-stakes assessments.