Nearly all those who await results have followed the traditional route to lawyerdom: They’ve toiled through three years of rigorous study at an American Bar Association-approved law school. They’ve taken $5,000+ bar exam prep courses. They’ve spent summers fetching coffee for district attorneys and corporate lawyers.
A select few, however, have completely bypassed these steps. Several U.S. states offer a little-known alternative path to the bar exam room: “reading the law” — or serving as an apprentice in the office of a practicing attorney or judge.
Last year, out of 83,963 bar exam takers, only 60 were apprentices. A mere 17 succeeded in passing the bar exam and becoming eligible to practice law. It is a long, difficult road, requiring four years of mentorship and thousands of hours of self-led work, but when completed, it can save a prospective lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars in law school debt.