McGeorge Rising is more than just the mantra that University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law has adopted in 2021. It is a statement backed by an ongoing stream of successes.

For the fourth consecutive year, the median LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs of our incoming class were stronger than the class before them. McGeorge is one of only five schools in the nation, and two in California to sustain this kind of continued improvement over the same time period.

Our graduates earned the highest bar passage rate in recent history on the October 2020 bar. Our February 2021 bar takers earned the second highest passage rate, with 100% of students in McGeorge’s inaugural Accelerated Honors Program cohort passing the bar exam on their first attempt.

Employment rates for our graduates have also continued to rise. Members of the McGeorge Class of 2020 had the highest rate of employment, besting the previous top class of graduates, the Class of 2019, and our 2020 graduates did that during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. McGeorge excelled at improving employment outcomes for students, with a final employment rate – by U.S. News metrics, 36 percentage points higher than the employment rate at graduation. That improvement ranks among the top 25% of law schools nationally, and the top 10 for law schools in state capital cities.

These successes are possible because of the sincere effort our faculty and staff put in to preparing our students for practice. That effort has not gone unnoticed either. Our Trial Advocacy program rose to 8^th in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report. In those same rankings our legal writing program rose 11 places and into the top 25 nationally and dispute resolution rose 8 spots into the nation’s top 50. Additionally, our environmental law program moved up 16 places in the U.S. News rankings and constitutional law earned a similarly sized 15 spot rise.

Beyond U.S. News rankings, McGeorge’s government law programs moved up from 11^th to 3^rd in the nation, as ranked by preLaw Magazine. For two straight years, McGeorge has been among the top 10 schools, according to Pepperdine School of Law Dean Paul Caruso’s analysis, whose aggregate U.S. News specialty rankings outperform the overall U.S. News ranking.

And thanks to the historic generosity of Robert Eglet, ’88, and his law partner and wife Tracy Eglet, our already strong trial advocacy and dispute resolution programs will also continue to rise. Their $25 million gift to the law school includes $5 million in support of the school’s newly renamed Eglet Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution. Not only will their recent transformational gift to McGeorge bolster these programs, but it will also allow first-generation students and students of marginalized communities realize their dreams of becoming lawyers by reducing the financial burdens of a legal education.