(03-09-2026, 05:26 PM)Sagan Wrote: Do you want a legal education? A legal education and a JD? A legal education, JD, and a law license? A legal education, a JD, a law license, and a job with a law firrm?

The answers to those questions will drive your choicce of school: unaccredited, Cal Bar-accredited, or ABA accredited. It will also inform your choice of learning methodoogy.

Let's take, for example, Northwestern California University School of Law. Cal Bar-accredited distance learning school. Very inexpensive. High Bar passing rates. It would meet the first three of my four criteria, all but the last.

If you want to meet all four, there ar a handful of ABA-accredited schools offering the JD by DL. But they can get pretty expensive.

(03-09-2026, 10:23 PM)freeloader Wrote: If you want to eventually return to Illinois or a neighboring state, a unaccredited or Cal Bar accredited law school wouldn’t seem to make much sense for you. It likely wouldn’t allow you to practice in Illinois or a neighboring state (outside of federal court, which isn’t appropriate for most trust, estate, and contract work).

If I were in your shoes, I would try to decide between two paths:
1. Try to go to the best law school possible, cheapest law school possible (I.e., best scholarship package), or best “value”. Stop working for 3 years, do the conventional law school “thing”. Work as a summer associate. Try to go into trusts and estate, private wealth, or securities law after graduating.

2. Continue working as an adviser and go to law school via distance or part time. Illinois-Chicago, Loyola-Chicago, IIT-Kent Cook, and DePaul all have part time programs with courses taught evenings and/or weekends. Try to crush the LSAT, apply to the four of them, and attend the best/cheapest/best value.

At this point, do you want to be a financial adviser who does law-related work, an attorney who does work in or adjacent to financial planning, or are you still figuring that out?  What market do you want to serve?  If your goal is to work with ultra high net worth individuals where the financial plan can cost six figures to put together, where various foreign and domestic trusts and entities are required to be formed, etc, then trying to go to top tier law school would be helpful if not necessary. If your goal is to be have your own state-registered IA or small SEC IA, then any ABA law degree would probably be fine.

I am big on networking. If you go to a place like UIC or Loyola-Chicago, you are going to meet 1) lots of potential clients for your planning services in your classes and 2) lots of future lawyers working in other practice areas who will serve as potential sources of referrals.

• My near wife and I have plenty of family in California and more importantly want to be in California long term. 
  
• My goal is to have my own RIA (Investment Advisory firm), which is easy to open, but hard to get clients. 
  
• I want to be more than just your typical financial advisor, I want to have something more marketable than just a CFP and offer different services. CPA was something I considered, but I feel like that's just not something I'm all that interested in and passionate about. Which is what leads me to estate planning. I'm passionate about it and find it interesting and essential. 
  
• As I am figuring out a bunch of stuff out being a near 26 year old, the idea and market in mind is that I am attracting and serving high net worth clients, helping them in a comprehensive wealth strategy, and it being a "1 stop shop" so to speak. I don't want to outsource that and would love to be able to build a full comprehensive plan for clients.
  
  

(03-10-2026, 01:36 AM)CFPhopeful Wrote: I also would like to add that I transferred a bunch of ACE credits for my UMPI degree. Not sure about the impacts of that.