How To

Articles on different aspects of how to become a legal apprentice.

8 Tips for Taking on the Baby Bar (Like a Grownup)

Last month, I promised I’d be back with tips for the June First Year Law Students Exam. Here are some of the strategies I found useful when I was preparing back in 2014. Having just taken the July 2017 California bar exam, I can say most of these tips also apply to bar exam prep. Passing the First Year Law Students Exam, or “baby bar,” on schedule will allow you to continue accruing credit [...]

National Lawyers Guild is Now Accepting Applicants for Tuition Free Law Study and Mentorship in the San Francisco Bay Area

By Steven DeCaprio, Association of Legal Apprentices // The National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF) has expanded their mentorship program to include opportunities for marginalized people to study law under the Law Office Study Program (LOSP), a tuition free alternative to law school. If you are located in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in studying law under [...]

Becoming an Attorney Without Law School with the National Lawyers Guild

By Steven DeCaprio, Association of Legal Apprentices The Association of Legal Apprentices (ALA) has been working to create a Legal Apprentice Committee within the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (NLGSF). This year I was granted the Haywood Burns Memorial Fellowship by the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) in order to focus on this work. Since we first approached the NLGSF about [...]

How to Pass the Bar by Steven DeCaprio

The following is a guest post by Steven DeCaprio, CEO and Founder of Land Action, who recently passed the California Bar Exam after completing the Law Office Study Program. The views and opinions are his and do no necessarily reflect the opinions of other contributors to this site. I thought I would share some of my realizations as I studied for the bar. Since I failed the Baby Bar and the State [...]

5 Ways to Make Learning a Festive Affair

One of the things I love about having apprentices is that it encourages us to cultivate a lively learning environment in everything we do. We’ve made short videos about a couple of the fun + educational things we do at the Sustainable Economies Law Center. One of those is our monthly Research Explosion Day (RED), when SELC staff and volunteers divvy up a list of bite-size research questions on [...]

How to Find a Mentor and Make the Pitch

By Omonigho Oiyemhonlan and Yassi Eskandari-Qajar About three years into SELC’s legal apprenticeship experiment, we’ve heard from dozens of local and online followers that the one thing standing in the way of their apprenticeship is finding a mentoring attorney. We hear you. The seven legal apprentices in our cohort have navigated similar difficulties, and we can all agree that it’s all [...]

The Joys and Benefits of Mentoring Apprentices, Part 1

I am collecting a list of reasons that mentoring apprentices can be a wonderful thing for an attorney to do. The reasons reveal themselves to me over time, so I’m guessing that this will be the first post of many. Here are some of the joys and benefits: Being Part of a Community: Attorneys who mentor apprentices become part of a growing community of supervising attorneys and apprentices [...]

Read this: How to Become a Lawyer Without Going to Law School

A new Shareable article by Cat Johnson does a great job explaining how and why to become a legal apprentice. My favorite quote (from our very own Chris Tittle) alludes to the powerful impact legal apprenticeships can have on our legal system: “Laws protect those who write and defend them. So, in a country where over 88 percent of lawyers are white, 70 percent are men, and 75 percent are [...]

Your Questions and Answers About Legal Apprenticeships

At SELC’s first Legal Apprenticeship Teach-In, over thirty participants discussed how legal apprenticeships will change legal education and the legal profession. Law students, law school graduates, attorneys, and prospective legal apprentices asked the SELC apprentices and company about the nitty gritty details, and made for an enriching conversation. In fact, soon after this discussion, one [...]

Mix and Match Your Custom Legal Education

With apprentices, learning about fracking and air pollution in CA’s Central Valley. Today, President Obama made the bold suggestion that, in order to make legal education more affordable, law school could be reduced to two years, possibly followed by a year of apprenticeship or internship.  If they haven’t started discussing the idea already, I imagine that every state bar association [...]

Where am I? How I decided Legal Apprenticeship was the right path for me.

I woke up particularly early this morning, and I was surprisingly reflective (given how very early it was). “It’s sunny,” I thought. “I’m back in the East Bay,” I thought. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” I thought. But to be honest, working full time for a nonprofit law center and reading the law outside of law school was not what I [...]
AFFPAY AFFPAY Signup AFFPAY Loginp AFFPAY Affiliates Terms AFFPAY Advertisers Terms AFFPAY Privacy Policy AFFPAY FAQ AFFPAY Contact us