For almost everyone, becoming a lawyer means working through the same ordered sequence: finish a bachelor's degree, take a law school admission test, earn a JD, pass the MPRE (required in every U.S. jurisdiction except Wisconsin and Puerto Rico), pass the bar exam where you plan to practice, clear a character and fitness review, and get hired.
A small set of documented state programs lets supervised law office study stand in for the law school years — the section below names them and their limits.
The BLS lists the typical entry-level education for lawyers as a doctoral or professional degree — the law degree at the center of it all.
What are the steps to become a lawyer, in order?
The sequence is long, but it is ordered — each gate sits in front of the next one.
The BLS puts the spine of it plainly: lawyers typically need a law degree and a state license, and licensure usually requires passing a bar examination.
Layered around that degree-and-license core are the admission test, the MPRE and a character and fitness review.
- Finish a bachelor's degree. In the U.S., admission to a JD program requires one — it is the platform the JD step stands on.
- Take a law school admission test. The LSAT is one option; a set of schools also accepts the GRE, and a smaller set accepts JD-Next. The section near the end of this page compares all three.
- Earn a JD. Three years full-time at most schools, about four part-time. Our guide to what a JD degree is covers the degree itself.
- Pass the MPRE. Required for bar admission in every U.S. jurisdiction except Wisconsin and Puerto Rico; Connecticut and New Jersey accept a law-school professional responsibility course instead.
- Pass the bar exam in the jurisdiction where you plan to practice — the UBE is one format, but states differ.
- Clear character and fitness. A background review is part of the admission process in every jurisdiction.
- Get hired. The BLS notes a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation.
Where you practice decides the details — which exams count, which scores pass, which courses are required.
That is why the caveat below matters more than any single step on the list.
Admission is set jurisdiction by jurisdiction
What undergraduate degree do you need?
Law school comes after a bachelor's degree, not instead of one: in the U.S., admission to a JD program requires a bachelor's degree.
The BLS's own entry for lawyers lists the typical entry-level education as a doctoral or professional degree — the JD — which places the bachelor's underneath it as the assumed starting line.
LSAC, the Law School Admission Council, calls the JD the "first degree" in law, needed in almost all cases to practice in the United States.
The section below on college majors covers the one practice area where a specific background is documented.
Do you have to go to law school?
For almost everyone, yes.
LSAC calls the JD the degree needed in almost all cases to practice in the United States, and at least one state closes the door outright: Alabama has no law-office-study route at all — exam applicants must have graduated from a law school.
The exception is the apprenticeship route — law office study.
The programs our research documented are each tied to a single state's bar: California's Law Office Study Program, Vermont's Law Office Study Program, Virginia's Law Reader Program and Washington's APR 6 Law Clerk Program, plus Alaska's hybrid law clerk route, which still requires at least an academic year at an accredited law school.
None of them skips the exam — law office study is an education route to sitting for the bar, not a substitute for licensure.
Two limits keep this route in perspective.
Each program qualifies you for that state's bar only, other states may refuse graduates who trained this way, and other states with reading-the-law routes were not researched for this page.
And each program's terms are specific — supervision, hours, entry requirements — so read the admitting authority's own rules before betting years on this path.
What exams do you have to pass?
Three exam layers sit on the path, plus a review that is not an exam at all.
Before law school: the admission test.
The LSAT is one option; a set of schools also accept the GRE, and a smaller set accept JD-Next.
The comparison near the end of this page covers all three.
In or after law school: the MPRE.
The MPRE — a two-hour, 60-question multiple-choice exam offered three times a year — is required for bar admission in every U.S. jurisdiction except Wisconsin and Puerto Rico; Connecticut and New Jersey accept a law-school professional responsibility course instead.
Each jurisdiction sets its own passing score.
For licensure: the bar exam.
Which exam you sit is set by the jurisdiction where you plan to practice — states differ on format, and NCBE has most jurisdictions moving from the MBE, MEE and MPT to the NextGen UBE between July 2026 and July 2028.
Our guide to the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) covers the components and which states use it.
The review that follows: character and fitness.
Background investigations are part of the admission process in every jurisdiction.
NCBE runs investigations and hosts applications for many jurisdictions but makes no decisions — each jurisdiction decides who is fit to practice.
Even a transferred UBE score does not skip the review.
How do you get your first attorney job after the bar?
Recruiting runs through law school before it runs through the license: the BLS notes a successful summer job or internship during law school may result in an employment offer after graduation.
A judicial clerkship is another structured first stop — typically a one- or two-year term some graduates take before working as a lawyer.
The outcomes are measurable.
NALP measured the Class of 2025 about ten months after graduation, covering more than 97% of graduates of ABA-accredited schools: 92.8% were employed, and 84.6% took jobs requiring or anticipating bar admission — the highest share since NALP's current job classifications began in 2001.
Private practice took 60.9% of employed graduates.
Where those jobs sat: firms of more than 500 lawyers were the single largest employer of new law graduates, taking more than one in five employed Class of 2025 graduates — and adding 251–500-lawyer firms, about one in four started in BigLaw.
The long tail is real, though: firms of more than 500 lawyers accounted for 33.2% of law firm jobs, while firms of 1–10 lawyers accounted for 26.4%.
Public service took 31.0% of jobs — government 12.0%, public interest 9.0%, judicial clerkships 10.0%.
One corner shrank: new graduates hired by the federal government (excluding judicial clerkships) fell 37.0%, from nearly 1,100 (Class of 2024) to about 690 (Class of 2025).
Pay is the catch.
NALP put the Class of 2025 national median starting salary at a record $100,000, up from $95,000 — but it describes new-lawyer salaries as bimodal: for the Class of 2024, 53.0% of reported salaries fell between $55,000 and $100,000, with a second peak at the prevailing BigLaw salary.
The median describes the market; it does not describe your offer.
What does it cost to become a lawyer?
Tuition is the big line.
In the ABA's 2025 data, median full-time resident tuition at ABA law schools was about $49,910 per year, with schools ranging from about $11,338 to $85,368; median full-time nonresident tuition was about $53,640.
Most programs run three years full-time, so the annual figure repeats.
Grants of full tuition or more are uncommon: in 2025, 8,098 JD students — 7.0% — received them, and 51.9% of grant recipients received less than half tuition.
The exam layer adds its own line items: the MPRE costs $185 for all 2026 and 2027 administrations, and examinees in NextGen UBE jurisdictions pay a $149 exam software/technology fee on top of the jurisdiction's application fee.
Each jurisdiction also charges its own bar application fee, and those vary — check your jurisdiction's admitting authority for its current fee schedule.
Our research holds no verified debt figures or living-cost totals, so we will not invent one.
The honest cost picture is tuition plus exam fees plus the years of income you do not earn while in school.
Where can you find attorney jobs?
Legal services is the center of gravity: per the BLS, 52% of lawyers worked in legal services in 2025, with self-employed lawyers at 11%, local government 8%, state government 7% and federal government 5%.
The BLS projects lawyer employment to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035, with about 28,700 openings a year on average — many from replacing workers who retire or change occupations.
Geography is strategy: 65.6% of employed Class of 2025 graduates worked in the same state where they attended law school.
The school you choose seeds the market you will interview in.
When you are ready to search, browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires — the board is built only for legal jobs and the staff who run them.
For the longer arc — practice settings, the partner track, lateral moves — the attorney careers guide covers the roles and the paths between them.
What are the steps to become a lawyer? A quick recap
Condensed, the path reads:
- Bachelor's degree — required for JD admission.
- Admission test — the LSAT, or the GRE or JD-Next where a school accepts them.
- JD — three years full-time at most schools.
- MPRE — required in every U.S. jurisdiction except Wisconsin and Puerto Rico (Connecticut and New Jersey accept a law-school course instead).
- Bar exam — in the state where you will practice.
- Character and fitness review — every jurisdiction.
- First legal job.
One fact anchors the whole list: the details are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction — which admission test a school accepts, which bar exam a state uses, which course substitutes where.
If a plan skips one of the seven steps, check it against the admitting authority's rules before you trust it.
Do you need a specific college major?
The verified requirements speak to degrees, not majors: a bachelor's degree for JD admission, with the professional degree on top of it.
The sources we read name no required pre-law field — check each school's admission requirements as you build your list.
The one documented exception runs through patent law.
The BLS notes patent lawyers typically need a science or engineering background and must pass a USPTO-administered exam.
If patent work is the goal, the undergraduate transcript starts doing real work years before the bar does.
Which admission test: LSAT, GRE or JD-Next?
The LSAT.
Four 35-minute multiple-choice sections plus an unscored writing sample; scores run 120 to 180.
In the ABA's fall 2025 data, school median LSAT scores ranged from 139 to 175.
Since the August 2026 administration, LSAC requires in-person testing at Prometric test centers, with remote testing reserved for limited medical and disability accommodations and for test takers living more than 180 miles or three hours from a test center.
The 2026–2027 LSAT is offered in August, September, October, November, January, February, April and June, and a score stays reportable for five testing years.
The GRE.
ETS says more than 130 ABA-approved law schools accept the GRE, including every T14 school, and that the ABA formally recognized the GRE as a valid admissions test in 2021.
Uptake is real but small: in the ABA's fall 2025 data, 92 of 196 reporting law schools enrolled at least one first-year student admitted with a GRE score — about 530 students out of 42,812 first-year enrollees.
Unlike the LSAT, the GRE can be taken at home or at a test center year-round, per ETS.
JD-Next.
The newest option: JD-Next's variance list shows 68 ABA-accredited law schools approved by the ABA to use it as an alternative admission test, with approval dates from 2023 to 2026.
In fall 2025, 30 law schools reported first-year students admitted with JD-Next — about 127 students in total.
Which test is right is a per-school question: each school's admission policy decides what it accepts, and the numbers above show how uneven current uptake is.
Check your target schools' requirements before you pick a test date.
Career information, not legal advice. Admission requirements are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction and change — confirm the current steps with the bar admission authority in your state before you act on anything here.