Spellbook Legal Fellowship

For law students who want to build the future

Legal education makes you exceptional at working within the system. The Spellbook Fellowship is built for students who also want to redesign how it operates.

$1M Fellowship Fund

$25,000 awarded to each recipient in 2026.

Open to law students

Applicants must be attending law school

Apply by July 15, 2026

Early applications encouraged and reviewed on a rolling basis.

Apply Now

How the fellowship works

Each semester, we will select at least two fellows to focus on a broken legal process they care about. That might be anything from a contract review process that lacks consistency or a negotiation workflow that creates unnecessary friction.

The work is intentionally scoped with the goal of developing a practical response to a specific legal workflow problem. That might take the form of a playbook, design brief, prototype concept, workflow memo, a startup, or another concrete final deliverable.

The goal is to support fellows financially, give them direct exposure to how modern legal technology is built, and connect them to a team & product that is already reshaping legal work.

Selection Criteria

Applications close July 15 for the Fall 2026 semester.

Curiosity about systems

Law school is built to train excellent rule-learners. It teaches students to make the argument, file the motion and close the deal.

But there's a certain kind of student who cares not just about the rules, but the day-to-day processes that surround them. The workflows, the handoffs, the templates, the entrenched old habits. The person who feels, at some low-level hum, that legal practice could be designed better than it currently is and has already started forming a point of view about how to get there.

These are the students we want to help.

You do not need to know how to code

But strong candidates will have had some exposure to technology: building something, working at a startup, or thinking seriously about technology policy and implementation.

A clear articulation of what is broken

The best applicants will point to something specific. A workflow that is inefficient. An intake process that creates unnecessary friction. An experience with a legal system that felt confusing, inaccessible, or poorly designed.

We care less about general interest in legal tech than about whether you can identify a concrete problem with precision and want to be part of the solution.

Willingness to move toward discomfort

Legaltech is not the default path in law.

The people who do important work here are often the only lawyer in the room or non-engineer on the team. They’ve learned to operate without a playbook and find that energizing not unsettling. If that describes you, then we want to hear from you.

Apply Now