The Long and Winding Road:
LSAT Accommodations and Fee Waivers
LSAC offers many services for both physically and financially disadvantaged applicants. Unfortunately, they take a lot of time and paperwork. If you want accommodations for a learning disability, you'll need time, paperwork, and money. All the documentation for learning disabilities must be done within three years of your LSAT date, so any tests done when you began college won't count.
| Being approved for accommodations can take so long that you would be best served by beginning the process six months to a year before registering for the LSAT. |
Requesting accommodation is such a complicated process that LSAC has written a whole section and produced a video demo. You can find them here.
Accommodation for both physical and cognitive disabilities is very difficult to get.
- Begin early.
- Follow instructions to the letter.
- Expect a long and challenging battle.
Fee Waivers
Law Services links its discussion of fee waivers to the LSAT, the point at which most applicants start spending money. You can find that page here. It outlines three different ways to get a fee waiver:
- By completing an online application under the "LSAT" tab on the "My Home" page;
- By downloading a bunch of pdf forms and sending them in by snail mail;
- Or by completing those same forms and asking any law school's admissions officer to approve a fee waiver for you.
The online application is linked under "My Account -- Fee Waivers."
- First you have to eligible -- a citizen or permanent resident, independent of your parents (or else you have to report their income).
- Once you click that blue "submit" button at the bottom of the form, you get taken to the page where you put in all the financial info.
- If your income and assets are low enough, you'll get provisional approval, which is good for 45 days. If you don't send them supporting tax information via sanil-mail by then, you lose your fee waiver.
- While you're waiting for the final approval, you can't send any apps. You CAN send recommendations, transcripts, etc., but they'll only be stored for you, not sent to any schools.
The snail mail form looks like this:
Notice that any time you have to send a snail mail form to LSAC, you must have a bar-coded printout of some sort to go with it; if you don't, your paperwork won't get processed.
| If you live in an expensive part of the country, you might have your best luck by going the third route, since LSAC tends to use Federal Poverty Guidelines, which are not adjusted for regional differences. |
If you are requesting a fee waiver from LSAC, you can register online, but if you're requesting it from a law school admissions officer, you cannot. You must download paper forms from Law Services, complete them, then send them with the fee waiver request. After it is approved, you can complete other info online. But make sure to add two extra weeks for snail mail processing.
I'm Not Eligible for an LSAC Fee Waiver
Sadly, a large number of economically disadvantaged applicants aren't poor enough for an LSAC fee waiver. I can't get LSAC to use more liberal fee waiver guidelines, so I did the next-best thing: I found law schools that let at least some people apply for free without an LSAC fee waiver. Click here for a list of schools where you might negotiate a free application.