673
JD-Next: A Randomized Experiment
of an Online Scalable Program
to Prepare Diverse Students
for Law School
Katherine C. Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross,
Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li and Christopher Robertson
I. Introduction
Imagine starting a medical degree without having studied science as an
undergraduate. Without having exposure to the basic content, how can potential
students be confident that they are on the right academic path? Without training
in the specific skills needed, how can they succeed on that path?
In the health professions, graduate programs of education have solutions
to these problems. Before matriculating as medical students, applicants are
typically required to take a relevant curriculum, including courses like organic
chemistry and biology, as undergraduates. If they graduate without doing so,
and later choose to go to medical school, they can take a “post-baccalaureate”
program to fill in the gaps and demonstrate their ability to learn such material.
In contrast, for law, the juris doctorate (JD) has no particular curriculum as
a prerequisite and lacks a systematic approach to exposing potential students
to the skills and methods of legal education. Matriculants thus arrive to JD
programs with widely varying preparations, some having studied chemistry as
undergraduates, others having studied economics or literature. Few have learned
the skills of case reading and analysis, which will be needed on the first day of
law school. Of course, some students will have advantages—for example, if they
have attorneys or other highly educated professionals in their families. Some
may even spend money and time to take expensive preparation courses. But
these advantages can just exacerbate disparities. The American JD also lacks a
systematic approach to preparing diverse populations to succeed in the study
of law. Moreover, the field lacks systematic and valid measures of prospective
students’ ability to learn legal skills from cases, as in law school classes.
Katherine C. Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross, Matt Charles,
Cayley Balser, Ran Li, and Christopher Robertson are all affiliated with the University of Arizona.
Corresponding author Robertson is also Professor of Law at Boston University, ctr00@BU.edu.
The research team thanks the AccessLex Institute for support of this project, and the collaborative
support of Marc Miller, Keith Swisher, and Rob Williams. David Klieger of ETS Inc. provided
helpful feedback on preliminary drafts.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 4 (Summer 2022)
,674 Journal of Legal Education
As one of two companion papers, this article explains our efforts to create and
evaluate a program called JD-Next, which exposed students to legal education,
prepared them to succeed, and assessed their ability to do so. JD-Next is a fully
online, noncredit, seven-and-a-half-week course to train potential JD students
in case reading and analysis skills before their first year of law school. This
article focuses on rigorously testing the exposure and preparation functions of
this program in 2019 to determine whether participation in such a course can
improve law school confidence and performance of matriculating students.
In the companion article, we test whether the exam at the end of the JD-Next
course is a valid and reliable predictor of law school performance.
We recruited a national sample of potential JD students, enriched for racial/
ethnic diversity so that less than half of the students identified as White non-
Hispanic, and randomized them to the course or an active placebo control group
(where participants watched legal television shows). We also recruited a sample
of volunteers at one university who self-selected into the course and who were
matched to non-participants, using university archival data.
We found that participating in the JD-Next course is associated with substan-
tial improvement in grades for the targeted 1L course (Contracts) and overall
first semester 1L GPA. We also report substantial student confidence gains and
satisfaction with the course, in qualitative and quantitative terms, based on a
survey at three points in time (pre-course, post-course, and post-semester). In
a companion article, we report on the validity and reliability of the JD-Next
exam for use in law school admissions.1
As background, we first review the literature around underrepresentation in
JD programs and the role of bridge programs to help address the problem. We
then lay out our methods in Part II, including both the program design and
the research approach. We share our results in Part III, identify strengths and
limitations of the study in Part IV, and discuss the implications in Part V. An
appendix provides methodological details.
A. Underrepresentation in JD Programs
The legal profession has a problem of diversity and inclusion—it does not
reflect the population that it serves.2 The problem is not just in law schools
and downstream in law firms, government offices, and courthouses; it is also
upstream.3 Before applying to law school, before even preparing for admissions
1. Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Burross, Katherine C. Cheng, Matt Charles,
Cayley Balser, Ran Li, & Christopher Robertson, JD-Next: A Valid and Reliable Tool to Predict Diverse
Students’ Success in Law School, J. Empirical Legal Stud. 1-32 (2023), doi.org/10.1111/jels.12342.
2. Am. Bar Ass’n, National Lawyer Population Survey: 10-Year Trend in Lawyer Demograph-
ics (2022), https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/market_research/
national-lawyer-population-demographics-2012-2022.pdf (showing that American lawyers
are 38% female, 5% are Black, 5% are Asian, 0% are Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 0% are
Native American, while 81% are white Caucasian).
3. See Sarah E. Redfield, The Educational Pipeline to Law School—Too Broken and Too Narrow to Provide
Diversity, 8. Pierce L. Rev. 347, 347, 350 (2009).
, JD-Next: A Randomized Experiment of an Online Scalable Program... 675
exams, students must become aware that the JD is a real option for themselves,
believe that it would be worthwhile and feasible, and then develop an intention
to pursue it. This self-selection is less likely to happen among students from
underrepresented backgrounds whose parents did not attend college or law
school in particular, which disproportionately is true of Black, Hispanic, and
Native American populations.4 Among undergraduates considering a JD, only
20% are first-generation college students, and half have at least one parent with
an advanced degree.5 Students appear to rely heavily on relatives for advice
about law school (60%), more often than they rely on professors (50%) or
advisors (47%).6 The advantages of attending law school can then accumulate
across generations, following patterns of social privilege.
This process of self-selection into law school produces a pattern of false
negatives—students who could someday be excellent legal professionals never
seriously consider the pathway or develop confidence that it may be a worthwhile
path for them. The lack of pre-JD exposure to legal study may also lead to false
positives, as some students choose to go to law school without really knowing
whether the legal profession is a good fit for their skills and interests. Such
mismatches also waste time and resources, as students potentially accumulate
tens of thousands of dollars of student debt only to find that the law is not for
them.7 The failure in law school may also undermine self-confidence for the
student’s next endeavor.
In studies of higher education, a consensus is forming that “[w]e can no
longer assume that the organizational structures of our current institutions will
adequately meet the needs of underrepresented students. Instead, we must find
ways to serve them through curricula and programs that place their needs at
the center.”8 Once students matriculate, advising and mentoring are critical to
success of underrepresented students in discipline-specific academics.9 But, for
4. See Khanh Van T. Bui, First-Generation College Students at a Four-Year University: Background Characteristics,
Reasons for Pursuing Higher Education, and First Year Experiences, 36 Coll. Student J. 3 (2002).
5. Ass’n of Am. Law Schs. & Gallup, Highlights from Before the JD: Undergraduate Views
on Law School 2 (2018), https://www.aals.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/BJDReportsH-
ghlights.pdf.
6. Id. at 4.
7. See, e.g., Andrew S. Belasco, Michael J. Trivette & Karen L. Webber, Advanced Degrees of Debt:
Analyzing the Patterns and Determinants of Graduate Student Borrowing, 37 Rev. Higher Educ. 469,
489–90 (2014) (citations omitted) (“In the past decade, several studies have highlighted the
lack of knowledge that prospective graduate students exhibit regarding the costs and career
outcomes of graduate education. Other journalistic reports describe bankrupt dropouts or
broke graduates hampered by inutile and/or inappropriate degrees”).
8. Gina A. Garcia & Otgonjargal Okhidoi, Culturally Relevant Practices that “Serve” Students at a Hispanic
Serving Institution, 40 Innovative Higher Educ. 345, 355 (2016).
9. See Russell A. McClain, Bottled at the Source: Recapturing the Essence of Academic Support as a Primary
Tool of Education Equity for Minority Law Students, 18 Univ. Md. L.J. Race Religion Gender &
Class 139, 143 (2018); Guadalupe Lozano et al., Transforming STEM Education in
Hispanic Serving Institutions in the United States: A Consensus Report 5–6 (2018),
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238702.
, 676 Journal of Legal Education
the reasons just noted, by then it may be too late, since some may not matriculate
at all, and others may be unprepared or poorly matched. When JD classes start
on day one, some students are already ahead and some are already behind in
their ability to read a case, find a rule, and apply it to new facts.
B. Bridge Programs for JD Education
“Bridge” (or “pipeline”) programs consist of courses that do not count
toward a degree but prepare and/or qualify the student for a degree program.
Our review of websites and directories found thirty-three active prelaw prepa-
ratory programs in the United States (some that focus more on successfully
applying to law school, and others that focus more on success in law school),
and we summarize a selection of thirteen of these programs in Table 1. These
programs range widely in cost, scope, intensity, class size, and eligibility. We will
highlight several that are in some ways comparable to JD-Next without provid-
ing a comprehensive discussion of all known prep programs.10 The empirical
evidence demonstrating the efficacy of prelaw preparatory programs has been
limited but promising. In addition to searching key databases, with the help of
a law librarian, we reached out to program leaders to find unpublished studies.
Fifteen of the extant bridge programs have a primary focus on the law school
application process rather than preparation for law school itself. One example is
the Lex Scholars program by Access Lex, which in 2021 offered 250 applicants a
Kaplan Online Law School Admission Test (LSAT) course, and fifty applicants
admission counseling and financial education.11 As something of a hybrid, the
Trials program offered by Advantage Testing Foundation describes its program
as including two forms of LSAT prep, but says that “[s]tudents will also attend
lectures on diverse aspects of the legal education and profession…”12 Educational
Testing Services (ETS) and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) also
offer free test prep materials or programs for their exams (the GRE-General
and the LSAT).13
Of the eighteen remaining programs, four are offered in connection with the
LSAC Prelaw Undergraduate Scholars (PLUS) Program, and eight partner
10. See Marisa Manzi & Nina Totenberg, ‘Already Behind’: Diversifying the Legal Profession Starts Before
the LSAT, Nat’l Pub. Radio (Dec. 22, 2020), https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/944434661/
already-behind-diversifying-the-legal-profession-starts-before-the-lsat (describing programs
other than JD-Next, including the Legal Education Access Pipeline); AccessLex Diversity Pipeline
Program Directory, AccessLex Inst., https://www.accesslex.org/accesslex-diversity-pipeline-
program-directory (last updated Jan. 27, 2022).
11. See LexScholars, AccessLex Inst., https://web.archive.org/web/20210119150545/https://www.
accesslex.org/tools-and-resources/lexscholars-accesslex (last visited Jan. 19, 2021).
12. Frequently Asked Questions, Advantage Testing Found. Trials (2022), https://trials.atfoundation.
org/faq (last visited Jan. 9, 2021).
13. The GRE General Test, Educ. Testing Serv. Graduate Rec. Examination (2022), https://www.
ets.org/gre/test-takers/general-test/prepare.html (last visited Jan. 9, 2021); Prepare for the LSAT,
L. Sch. Admission Council (2022), https://www.lsac.org/lsat/prepare.
