Bar foundation announces new scholarship support

Two law firms will make multi-year gifts to the California Bar Foundation to support a program designed to offer bar exam-related support to prospective public interest lawyers. The foundation announced last month that Reed Smith LLP and Sidley Austin LLP together committed $30,000 to the program over three years and have established scholarships named for the firms.

Law school students often graduate with six figures in debt, and students who intend to pursue public interest law careers can also face the cost of a bar review course, the exam fee and living expenses, adding thousands more to their debt burden.

The foundation’s Rosenthal Bar Exam Scholarship program, with support from Reed Smith and Sidley, this year is distributing $1,000 scholarships to 17 students from nine California law schools to help defray the cost of the bar exam. The top five recipients also received California BAR/BRI law review courses valued at more than $3,000 each.

Since 1997, the foundation has awarded more than $70,000 in cash awards and bar review courses to more than 200 graduates of 21 California law schools. A recent survey indicated that more than two-thirds of those tracked continue to practice public interest law.

This year’s Rosenthal scholarship recipients and their law schools are:

Joshua Adams, Renee DeLellis and Jessica DeWitt, Loyola; Karma M. Quick, New College of California; Nicole Clemens, Santa Clara; Brian Bilford, Nancy Caroline Glass, Alexis Rickher and Michael Roney, Stanford; Meghan Angela Corman (Reed Smith Scholar) and Angela Hollowell-Fuentes (Boalt); Nicholas W. Vidargas (Davis); Claudia L. Pena (Sidley Austin Scholar) and Fabian Renteria (UCLA); Fernanda Busta-mante (USF); and Jean Marie Doherty and Lindsay Toczylowski (USC).