The comeback of the law office apprentice 

As hundreds of applicants sat for California's grueling bar exam this week, at least a few are likely never to have gone to law school. Instead, they followed the venerable tradition of "reading the law" at a law firm or in a judge's chambers.

Six states currently allow candidates to take their bar exams without attending law school, each with its own set of rules. The California State Bar says that 295 students are currently in what is known as the Law Office Study Program. Twenty years ago, only a few dozen signed on annually.

One of them, a few years back, was Micah J. Clatterbaugh. He was working as a non-attorney legal advocate for migrant day laborers at a nonprofit in a dusty, makeshift office in Hayward. Wage theft was a common complaint among his clients. Clatterbaugh recalls how success with one foot-dragging boss whom he persuaded to write a check on the spot was a transformative experience that kickstarted his aspiration to become a lawyer.

But money was tight, and Clatterbaugh found a path less taken: he got his JD by apprenticing himself to a lawyer the way countless members of the profession did in bygone times, before the invention of law schools.

California continues to resist a strict law school monopoly on legal education. Today, the California Supreme Court oversees the rules governing the State Bar's Law Office Study Program. Studying in an attorney's shop or a judge's chambers requires candidates to log at least four years of recognized study of at least 18 hours per week before they're eligible to sit for the California Bar Exam.

The Supreme Court's Rule 4.29 preserves a heritage route to a bar card, one with deep historical ties to the lawyers who entered the profession via apprenticeship.

A well-known example of an unschooled lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. He did it without a mentor. In 1860 he wrote to an enquiring correspondent:

"Yours of the 24th. asking 'the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law' is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleadings, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing. Yours very truly A. Lincoln."

Lincoln never attended a university--though after walking through a college building on the way to a debate with Stephen Douglas, he allegedly joked, "At last I've gone through college."

Elsewhere he wrote that he "studied with nobody."

These days, the "Like Lincoln" blog, a project of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, details the experiences of apprentices and mentors in the Law Office Study Program. Co-founder and executive director Janelle Orsi--who got her own JD at UC Berkeley School of Law and runs her own law and mediation office--has mentored five apprentices.

"Law school costs too much money, it is highly stressful, it doesn't suit many learning styles, and most law schools don't equip people with practical skills and hands-on experience," Orsi emailed. "Altogether, law school just isn't a viable path for many people who could otherwise be of great service to our community as lawyers."

She called mentoring "a delightful experience," adding, "It has meant that practicing law and teaching law have always come hand in hand for me, and I think that's made me a much better lawyer. I know there are a lot of wonderful people out there who wish to become lawyers in this way, but they can't find lawyers to mentor them. My wish is for more lawyers to consider mentoring apprentices."

Clatterbaugh, now nine years into his career, is practicing plaintiff-side employment law as a senior associate at Hunter Pyle Law PC in Oakland. After investigating, he decided the Law Office Study Program was for him. "Definitely, cost was a major factor." He apprenticed with the late civil rights attorney Dan Siegel. "I pretty much winged it, wrote my own curricula and learned from my mistakes," Clatterbaugh said.

It took him five years. "I took the bar exam twice," he said. "The first time, the cut score was 1440 and I got 1439. Infuriating, but it let me know I could do it."

Clatterbaugh is a leading advocate for the Law Office Study Program. Last December, he published an authoritative 248-page practical guide to the process, titled "DIY Law School: How to Become A California Lawyer Without the Debt."

About six months after he began the program, Clatterbaugh got in touch with Gary L. Blasi, a UCLA professor of law and a high-achieving example of the law office apprentice route.

"We talked for an hour, and that was a major milestone for me," Clatterbaugh said. "He gave me a lot of great advice. It's not law school, that you're doing, he said. Don't try to make it emulate law school. Think of it as four-and-a-half years of bar exam prep."

Now a professor of law emeritus, Blasi remains active in public interest advocacy. He's been a lawyer for almost 50 years. After attaining an MA in political science at Harvard as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he worked nights in a Los Angeles orange juice factory and began an apprenticeship at a storefront community law office in Echo Park. He passed the California bar exam in 1976.

Blasi said the program's principles are important for civil rights law. "For example, the United Farm Workers Union legal office always had a hard time recruiting lawyers to represent farmworkers and the union out of their offices in the Central Valley. They found that it was easier to recruit and train extremely bright children of farmworkers who want to help people like their parents."

When Clatterbaugh finished his book, Blasi contributed a foreword. "Over the years, I have talked to dozens of people who contacted me for advice about becoming a lawyer via apprenticeship," he noted. "From now on, my advice will be: read this book."

Along with avoiding an average of $150,000 in law school debt, many apprentices will have earned a living while working in the law office in which they studied. And they will likely have learned a lot about the practical aspects of lawyering.

Still, Blasi warned, "Neither law school nor an apprenticeship will prepare you to be a good lawyer. That comes only with experience and more study."

One of the United Farm Workers Union legal proteges that Blasi mentioned, Marcos R. Camacho, now wears a robe. Governor Jerry Brown placed Camacho on the Kern County Superior Court bench in 2015. Raised in a farmworker family, Camacho labored in the fields but benefitted from his parents' emphasis on education and insistence he attend school.

"These were all things that worked for me. I was very self-motivated in terms of wanting to be a lawyer," he told a local reporter in a 2014 interview.

After his apprenticeship and successful bar exam passage on his first try in 1986, Camacho worked with Cesar Chavez to establish the UFW's apprenticeship program and became its general counsel. He was later in private practice in Fresno before he got the call from the governor. He could not be reached for comment this week.

A boldface name, entertainer Kim Kardashian, famously joined the Law Office Study Program and completed her apprenticeship in 2025. She passed the "Baby Bar" exam for first-year students on her fourth try in 2021 but has yet to pass the full bar exam. The daughter of the late attorney and businessman Robert G. Kardashian, she has been active in criminal justice reform causes and plays a high-power divorce lawyer on the legal drama series All's Fair.

The California Supreme Court and the State Bar not only support and regulate the Law Office Study Program, they've recently strengthened it. The process began in 2023 when the high court rejected a State Bar proposal over ethical concerns. Request that the Supreme Court of California Review and Approve Proposed Amendments to California Rules of Court, rule 9.42, and State Bar Rules 3.2-3.11, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, 4.29, 4.40-4.51, S281003 (Ca. S. Ct., op. filed Sept. 20, 2023).

The State Bar proposed that Law Office Study participants should also be allowed into the Practical Training of Law Students program, but the justices were concerned a student involved in both--and under the supervision of a judge--could represent clients or the local district attorney before the same judge or others on the same bench as part of practical training.

In March 2026, the Supreme Court gave the green light to a revised rule that allowed participation in both programs as long as supervisors eliminated any potential conflicts or ethical concerns that might arise from a student's dual role.

During its early days in the 19th Century, the California Supreme Court's pioneer justices were rarely law school graduates--because law schools were rare in the U.S. and nonexistent in California. The high court's first Chief Justice, Serranus C. Hastings, studied law privately in Indiana and was admitted there in 1836 before moving to California.

The last Supreme Court justice to have no law school degree was William P. Clark, a 1973 Ronald Reagan appointee. Clark studied at Loyola Law School but did not graduate. He passed the California bar exam anyway.