Posted by Sterling Hospedales on September 30, 2023

Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles is launching the nation’s first fully online, full-time J.D. program accredited by the American Bar Association.

The ABA approved the program in August and Southwestern said this week that it will begin accepting applications in October for the program’s start in the fall of 2024. The classes will be entirely online and asynchronous, meaning students can complete them whenever is convenient for them, though professors will offer optional real-time sessions on Zoom, said Amy McLellan, Southwestern’s associate dean of online education.

McLellan said that a fully online format removes barriers for people who don’t live near a law school or have work or other commitments that make traditional J.D. programs unworkable.

The school expects to enroll between 70 and 80 students next year. The online program will cost the same as Southwestern’s residential program — $58,392 a year for full-time students and $38,944 for part-time students.

The program can be completed in as few as three years for full-time students and four or more for part-time students, and graduates are eligible to sit for the bar in nearly every state. New York is a notable exception, as the courts have adopted caps on the number of distance education courses law graduates may take.

Online and hybrid J.D. programs — which combine online classes with limited on-site coursework — have proliferated since 2015, when Mitchell Hamline School of Law became the first to offer an ABA-approved hybrid program.

The ABA has since approved 18 hybrid or online programs, while even more law schools now offer hybrid programs that don’t require approval because they work within the ABA’s existing limits on distance education credits. Legal education as a whole has grown more accepting of online education after the COVID-19 pandemic forced classes to temporarily go remote.

Only St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio currently offers a fully online J.D. program, which started in 2022 but it is limited to part-time students. Suffolk University has a hybrid J.D. program for full-time students, but participants must spend their first year taking in-person classes in Boston.

Full-time students in Southwestern’s new program will spend between 40 and 50 hours a week on coursework, McLellan said, and they will be able to participate in clinics, externships, and other school programs without having to come to campus.