About
About the New Attorney Pipeline
A single place to find out how to start a legal aid career in California, arranged by when the ways in actually open and close.
Why it exists
California's civil legal aid organizations need attorneys, and law students who want that work have to assemble the route from a dozen separate websites, each with its own calendar. Most of the ways in are funded, dated, and easy to miss by a few weeks.
Getting a job in legal aid shouldn’t be hard to figure out. We hope these resources will help you, whether you are a current law student, attorney in another practice, or an advocate interested in using your skills in a civil legal aid organization to help your community.
Where everything here comes from
Every organization, date and fellow named here was published by the organization it belongs to, and each page links to its source. Where this site draws its own conclusion from those facts, it says so on the page and shows the published dates the reading came from. Subject areas are the one thing derived rather than quoted: they come from matching each organization's own description of its work, so they are as complete as that description is.
- Organizations you could work for. 144 come from the Legal Aid Association of California's member directory, listed there as legal services providers or LAAC members; 28 are named only in LAAC's published fellowship rosters and have no directory entry. Descriptions are theirs, unedited.
- Public Interest Bar Fellowship host organizations, from LAAC's published list of past hosts and the organizations hosting the 2026 cohort.
- Dan Bradley Fellows since 2015. LAAC has published the roster every year since 1991; the names here are the ones on its current announcements.
- 2026 Public Interest Bar Fellows from LAAC's published cohort sheet, with their law school and host organization as LAAC lists them.
About the dates
Two of the four programs have announced a cycle you can act on. The other two show the dates of the cycle they last published, marked as closed, because the shape of the year repeats even when the year does not. A closed date never counts down and never appears in what is open now. Where LAAC published a month without a day, so does this site.
Dates on this site are counted from today. If you are reading a printed copy, check the program's own page before you plan against it.
Something wrong?
If your organization's page is out of date, or a date has moved, write to info@laaconline.org.
What LAAC is
The organization behind this
LAAC is the statewide membership organization for legal aid nonprofits that provide free legal services to low-income people, seniors, and people with disabilities.
We believe that the legal system is a powerful tool for alleviating poverty, empowering communities, and effecting change.
