Finding Outside Scholarships to Law School
By Alice Foley, Director of Pre-Law Programming
Law school is expensive — there’s no questioning that. And while a lot of institutional scholarship opportunities rely on factors like your LSAT score or your financial health, outside scholarships are a great opportunity to help pay for law school.
The first step in understanding how much you’re on the hook for to go to law school is looking at the financial aid award that comes with or after the acceptance letter. Lots of schools are going to give you merit-based aid, which means it’s almost exclusively tied to your GPA and your LSAT score. Fewer law schools also offer need-based aid, which use your demonstrated financial need.
There is a lot more to you than those qualities, and that’s where outside scholarships come in.
Outside scholarships is a catch-all term for any kind of free money that you get that doesn’t come from your law school. This can be in the form of a check, fellowship program, money for your textbooks, and so on.
What it comes down to is that you are getting money that you typically don’t have to pay back, which is going to make it less expensive. That is what we are always after. We always want less expenses for law school.
In this blog post, I’m going to discuss all of the places where you can look for outside scholarships, including some that aren’t as well-publicized.
Looking Back at Connections
First things first, take some inventory. What makes you you? What have you been involved in? I want you to think about your heritage, your ethnicity, the extracurriculars you’ve been involved in, any volunteering work, etc.
Make a list if you want to. Take a peek through your resume. Think big and think back through all of the things you’ve done. That list will do some of the guidance for you. Once you’ve got all of that gathered up, you start building a list of places to go look.
The first thing to do is look backward. Every organization that you’ve ever been involved with — sororities, the Rotary, whatever it is, even all the way back to elementary school — may have some type of foundation or scholarship fund. Unfortunately, they aren’t always super well-publicized.
If you were or are a member of a major commitment volunteer organization — AmeriCore, PeaceCore, Teach for America, etc — you are giving up a fair amount of your life for the organization. One of the benefits is that they have educational awards. At the successful completion of whatever you’re doing with them, they will give funds to whatever educational institution you are attached to.
If you’re in college and you’re lucky enough to be in a school that has a pre-law organization like Phi Alpha Delta, if you have a pre-professional office, or something similar, go talk to them. I don’t care if you have not talked to them yet. They may not have anything specific for law school, but it cannot hurt. Our goal is to not pay for law school, so if a walk across your campus nets you a list of scholarships that you would be eligible for, that can pay off so well.
For those of you in the working world, see if there’s a professional development office, committee, or chair at where you work. They may know. Depending on the organization that you work for, they may be able to help you fund your education. Whether that comes with a part-time opportunity or that they’ll have a job waiting afterward, that is going to be very helpful. Many places have something like that set up, it’s just not always advertised. All of it is based on the connections that you have made up to now.
Looking Forward
Start thinking about what it is you want to do after law school. Who do you want to work for and what kind of organizations do you want to be a part of?
Some firms and many legal aid organizations that you are looking forward to being a part of are willing to help you get to membership with them.
State bar organizations are invested in filling the public interest sector in their jurisdiction. It is pretty well known at this point that when an attorney chooses to work in public interest, the likelihood of them making a very lucrative salary is not super high. Places like the state bar step in to help. The easiest way and earliest way for them to start helping is to help you pay for law school.
For public interest scholarships, there is usually a condition that for every year of law school that is funded you agree to work for a legal aid organization for the state. They also sometimes help you find a place where you can get a job. If you choose by the time you’re a third year student to completely change your plan, it means that your scholarship becomes a loan.
If you’re not interested in public interest, you should still be looking at law firms in your area of interest and seeing if bar organizations have support for you. These organizations want to see you succeed and join them, so they are often willing to help fund students on their journey.
Organizational Resources
The last place to look are organizations that are dedicated in some kind of way to the financial health of law school students or graduate professional school students.
One of the easiest pieces for an organization like that is to provide resources like scholarships that lessen the debt load that you have to take off. At our company, our whole goal is to increase access to higher education. Financial health is not our top priority, but we have a running database of scholarships and fellowships. It is by no means complete, but it is always growing.
Here are a few of our resources:
Scholarships, Fellowships, & Pipeline Programs for Black Law School Students
Scholarships, Fellowships, & Pipeline Programs for First-Generation Law School Students
Another organization worth looking into is AccessLex. They have been working very hard for the past several years to ensure that they are the people for law school financial health and literacy. They do things in addition to just listing out scholarships, but that is a key piece of what they are doing.
This can also be as easy as a quick Google search to find more scholarships or find scholarships tailored to you. (For example, “law school scholarships West Virginia” may have been a good Google search for me.)
Final Thoughts
Law school is expensive, but it doesn’t always have to be. There are plenty of places ready to help you with the cost of your education. Most of the time, they don’t even look at your GPA and your LSAT.
As you are starting to look for outside scholarships:
Take inventory of past connections
Look forwards to what you want to do
Use organizations and search engines for research
Cost is one of the biggest barriers to entry for folks looking to go to higher education. One of the easier ways for us to help is to help you understand the things that are out there to make sure you don’t have to pay full price. There is money in so many different places, and if you have a connection you may be eligible to have some of it.
As always, we’re here to help if you need it! You can take a look at our consulting services with sliding scale pricing here or email any of your questions to hello@smontgomeryconsulting.com.