A law school built for the courtroom.
Our mission is to educate, train, and develop extraordinary legal advocates. Everything below follows from that one sentence.
The mission, in the school’s own words
Our mission at California Desert Trial Academy College of Law is to educate, train, and develop extraordinary legal advocates. Your legal education will be comprised of bar-tested academic subjects, skills training, and values reinforcement. Upon completion of your four-year course of study you will be fully qualified to take and pass the California Bar Examination. Upon admission to the Bar you will be fully educated, trained and coached to represent your clients on your first day of practice with skills far beyond your contemporaries from other law schools.
Why the school exists
CDTA grew out of conversations that John Patrick Dolan and Irene Garcia Dolan had with the trial attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Gerry Spence, and out of an observation neither of them could unsee: law schools were producing graduates who understood doctrine and had never stood up and argued anything.
They founded a school where trial advocacy is not an elective in the third year. It is the organizing principle. CDTA describes itself as the only law school in the country dedicated to trial advocacy, and it is the only law school of any kind in the Coachella Valley.
How that changes the teaching
Every California State Bar tested course is taught in a real courtroom environment. Most classes are led by two instructors rather than one, and those instructors are practicing attorneys and sitting and retired judges.
The campus has three courtrooms: a fully functioning California trial courtroom, a California appellate courtroom, and a federal courtroom. Students argue in all three. See the campus.
Who the school admits
CDTA welcomes students holding a four-year degree, students holding a two-year degree, and students with at least 60 transferable college credits. Applicants must be at least eighteen and achieve an appropriate LSAT score.
Classes meet Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Saturday classes run 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. That schedule exists so that people with jobs, families and existing careers can do this without abandoning any of it. Students living fifty miles or more from the Indio campus may complete most of their studies through the Distance Learning Option.
What the school publishes about results
Over 60% of CDTA students passed the First-Year Law Students’ Examination. The school states that its success rate is above the overall average for all registered, unaccredited fixed-facility law schools in California.
That figure concerns the First-Year Law Students’ Examination, which is not the California Bar Examination. CDTA does not publish a General Bar Examination passage rate, and nothing on this site should be read as promising one. No law school can guarantee an examination outcome.
Study at, or graduation from, this law school may not qualify a student to take the bar examination or to satisfy the requirements for admission to practice in jurisdictions other than California.
CDTA College of Law is a law school registered with the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California. It is not accredited by the American Bar Association or by the Committee of Bar Examiners. Read the full required disclosure before you apply.
What is included, and what that means.
The list the school has always published, without the brochure language. Every item here is covered by tuition rather than billed separately.
- ( 01 )
Your textbooks are included
Every textbook for the full course of study is covered by tuition. No separate book bill each term.
- ( 02 )
LexisNexis is included
A research license from day one, so you learn to find and apply case authority the way practicing lawyers do.
- ( 03 )
ExamSoft is included
Every practice, midterm and final exam is taken on the same software used in the First-Year Law Students’ Examination and the General Bar Examination.
- ( 04 )
AdaptiBar is included in first-year tuition
Thousands of real bar examination questions, available while you are still in your first year.
- ( 05 )
The Distance Learning Option
Students living 50 miles or more from campus can complete most of their studies from home and still earn the J.D.
- ( 06 )
Internal FYLSX reviews are included
Substantive video reviews for the First-Year Law Students’ Examination, built into tuition rather than sold as an add-on.
- ( 07 )
The Saturday Enrichment Program
Direct and cross examination, opening and closing, motions and objections, practiced in the courtrooms on campus.
- ( 08 )
Student support that is real
Students and alumni share study strategies and advice on balancing school, work and home. Together they manage what would be impossible alone.
- ( 09 )
Weekly Barrister luncheons
Every Saturday, students, attorneys and judicial officers eat together, swap experience, and build the network you will practice inside.
- ( 10 )
A commitment to keeping you in school
Law school is partly an exercise in attrition. CDTA is built around helping students get past the obstacles rather than filtering them out.
Not a lecture hall with a gavel.
A California Trial Courtroom
A fully functioning authentic California trial courtroom. It is where most instruction happens, so the room you learn in is the room you will one day work in.
A California Appellate Courtroom
A realistic appellate courtroom for argument practice, where the questions come from the bench and there is no jury to persuade.
A Federal Courtroom
An operational federal courtroom on the same campus, so federal practice is not an abstraction.
The courtroom is waiting.
Join the only law school in the Coachella Valley, in a program built around trial advocacy from the first term.
Or call the Academy, (760) 342-0900
45-290 Fargo Street, Indio, CA 92201