LexPostBacc and the Power of Opportunity

AccessLex Institute^® launched LexPostBacc in 2022 as a means of broadening access to legal education and the opportunities it affords. The program targets talented and motivated aspiring law students from underrepresented racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds who are unlikely to gain admission due principally to low LSAT scores. The centerpiece of the LexPostBacc experience is its law school prep curriculum. Participants, called LexPostBacc Scholars, are exposed to foundational law school subjects – Torts, Criminal Law, and Contracts – and foundational law school skills, like legal analysis and writing.

Scholars are referred to the program by participating law schools. Scholars who successfully complete the 10-month curriculum are offered admission and a scholarship from their referring school. AccessLex also provides successful Scholars with a financial stipend during law school and a Helix Bar Review^® course upon graduation. To date, more than 100 Scholars have successfully completed the curriculum and are pursuing their law degrees at schools nationwide.

LexPostBacc has a two-pronged purpose: to be an effective means of 1.) identifying aspiring law students who possess the potential for law school success despite low LSAT scores and other characteristics perceived as deficits, and 2.) preparing Scholars for the academic rigors of law school. To assess the extent of the program’s purpose fulfilment, we track Scholar experiences and outcomes during the program and during law school. Below are trends we have observed among Scholars in the two cohorts that have completed the LexPostBacc cycle and have started law school.

1. Identifying potential for law school success.

The 10-month LexPostBacc curriculum requires Scholars to meet ongoing, progressive, and intensifying engagement and skills proficiency benchmarks. The benchmarks are tied to conceptions of law school readiness. Therefore, Scholars who do not meet all benchmarks face possible dismissal from the program. Schools may opt to end the LexPostBacc experience for these Scholars by rescinding the admission and scholarship offers. Conversely, schools may opt to preserve the offers and allow Scholars to continue in the program, despite their failure to meet the benchmarks.

If the curriculum is an effective tool of identifying potential for law school success, Scholars who met all benchmarks would yield more favorable law school outcomes than Scholars who missed benchmarks. But this is a difficult question to squarely investigate, given that most Scholars who miss benchmarks are dismissed from LexPostBacc and never get the opportunity to enroll in law school. For example, during the first cycle of the program (2022-23), 28 Scholars (out of 79) missed at least one benchmark. All but three were dismissed.

The second cycle of the program (2023-24), however, provided an opportunity for us to conduct a limited but noteworthy comparison of law school performance between the two subgroups of Scholars. Of the 91 Scholars who began the program, 46 missed at least one benchmark during the cycle. Remarkably, 20 of these Scholars were allowed to continue in the program all the way to completion and went on to enroll in law school. Leveraging this trend, we compared the law school outcomes of these Scholars to their counterparts who met all benchmarks and never faced dismissal.

Seventeen of the 20 Scholars who missed benchmarks shared their first semester (fall 2024) grades with us. Seventy-one percent (12/17) were in good academic standing as they began their second semester in spring 2025. Thirty-five of the 39 Scholars who met all benchmarks shared their grades with us. Eighty-nine percent (31/35) were in good academic standing. This is a noticeable difference, which seems even starker when viewed from the opposite perspective. Twenty-nine percent of Scholars who missed benchmarks were not in good academic standing compared to 11% of their counterparts. This means that Scholars who missed benchmarks were almost three times more likely to experience the unfavorable outcome compared to those who met all benchmarks. These results suggest a relationship between the LexPostBacc curriculum (and its embedded benchmarks) and law school performance.

2. Preparing Scholars for the academic rigors of law school.

The encouragement of law school success through exposure to foundational subjects and skills is a core goal of LexPostBacc. If the curriculum is an effective preparatory tool, Scholars who successfully complete the program should meet their school’s academic standards. While a 100% success rate would be ideal, it is unrealistic given all the factors that impact law school performance. But in contextualizing law school outcomes among LexPostBacc Scholars, it is important to remember whom the program serves.

LexPostBacc Scholars come to the program with LSAT scores in the bottom quartile of the national distribution. Some also have undergraduate GPAs below 3.0. Most have applied to law schools in the past and have been turned away. For practically every Scholar, LexPostBacc is their best, if not only, hope for attending law school and one day becoming a lawyer. We take great pride in LexPostBacc’s role as a “last chance” pathway to law school, facilitating opportunity in the most elemental and impactful way.

Academic performance in the first two semesters of law school provides significant insights into longer-term academic outcomes and even bar exam performance. For the 2022-23 cohort of Scholars, we collected grades for their first two semesters, accounting for their first year. Seventy-six percent of the cohort (35/46) completed their first year in good academic standing. For the 2023-24 cohort, we have collected their first semester grades and will be collecting the second semester this summer. Eighty-three percent of Scholars who shared their grades (43/52) were in good standing at the end of their first semester. And as discussed earlier, the figure was 89% among Scholars who met all benchmarks during the LexPostBacc cycle. These results suggest that the LexPostBacc curriculum is preparing Scholars ably for the academic rigors of law school.

The early outcomes for LexPostBacc reflect the power of opportunity. Scholars are given the opportunity to demonstrate law school readiness in the context of the opportunity to gain foundational knowledge and skills. The dozens of participating law schools deserve much credit for contributing important tangibility to these opportunities with their admission and scholarship offers. AccessLex will continue to evaluate and enhance LexPostBacc to ensure that the opportunities it presents are rooted in both access and success, to the benefit of Scholars, law schools, and the legal profession.